Starbucks ad

[LayAllYourLoveOnMe]

I thought there was a thread on this - maybe it's been taken down?

anyway, Starbucks has an ad showing a girl who is plucking up the courage to change her name to a boy's name and only in Starbucks can she easily do this.

If you look at this in terms of the history of young women reaching adolescence and thinking "no, that's not for me" it's not that bad I think. Just the usual capitalist idea that you can substitute being a consumer for other things (but every ad is like that).

It's mercifully free of some of the more obnoxious content highlighted here on this board (dodgy statistics, demonising of parents etc).

[bellinisurge]

I regularly use my dh's name at lovely old Starbucks because it is "gender neutral" and I have a distinctive name which I don't want yelled out. No one, quite rightly , gives a shit one way or the other but I kind of got into the habit.
Can I have a special biscuit?

[Hulo]

Apparently some TRAs are complaining about the deadnaming and misgendering in the advert, completely missing the point I think.

Are they never happy?

[LayAllYourLoveOnMe]

Asking to be called James not Gemma is fine with me. I'm really hoping it's not part of a more extreme series of ads and that a decision has been made to dial down the rhetoric/advocacy

young women have a long long history of adopting male names to express (whether effectively or not) resistance to the roles that, upon reaching adolecence, we realise are being forced upon us. Also a long history of playing with different identities.

In some ways that's what we need to get back to -recognising playing with identities as something creative (much more creative than ideas of living in the wrong body).

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Does the and signpost to Mermaids?

[LayAllYourLoveOnMe]

... not that I saw. might do on social media of course.

[AskingQuestionsAllTheTime]

At fourteen I changed my name from a very distinctive and feminine one to a shorter, ambisexual one, because I saw no reason to be readily identifiable as female if I wrote a letter to an organisation. As a Quaker, I saw not the least need for honorific titles anyway.

I did not feel the slightest desire to change my sex; I was simply fed up with the casual sexism I was constantly encountering during the 1960s.

There are lots of names which are used by both sexes, as witness the husband and wife both called Evelyn (Waugh) and known as he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn by their friends. Pat, Mel, Jan, Robin, Hil(l)ary, Al/Ali, Sam, Jo/Joe, Vivian/Vyvian/Vivien, Shirley, Chris, Gus, Gerry/Jerry, Lesley/Lesley, Kim.... The list is really quite long.