Paperchase's --Sexist-- 'Ironic' Back to School Stationary

[EgyptVanGogh]

...and Marketing Director Robert Warden's stupid rude response.

I think Paperchase deserves to find out how rather sharklike a group of angry feminist mothers can be...

Right. Feminism is only about paid work then. Got it.

Of course you can get bloody plain colour lunch boxes and plain lego, but how many do you see IRL, at Sainsbury's, at Tescos, at any major retailer? At Toys R Us for example? And you DO have to search long and hard for plain Lego, plain Playmobil, etc. The plain sets are not readily available at major bricks and mortar retailers, you do usually have to order them online. Why is this? Retailers both create and respond to demand. Someone has to throw a wrench into the gears but if people are mocked as trivializing feminism if they complain, what hope is there?

I think this 'Getting into petty fights about silly things like this makes it difficult to fight for actual equality when it really matters' thing that people trot out (and no-one ever gives any evidence for) is a fallacy.
Quite apart from the fact that issues around cultural sexism aren't petty or silly, I don't believe it makes people any less willing to listen - in fact if anything it has the useful effect of strengthening your feminist networks so when you come to deal with more urgent issues you have a headstart with the organising. For instance, the MN feminists' part of the campaign against the changes to rape anonymity law built on contacts that had been made and strengthened through more general discussion about sexism in the earlier days of the board, while OBJECT (which is a group formed to protest about the objectification of women) used their Facebook group to help share the rape petition.
It doesn't mean all feminists have to campaign on all types of issue - everyone has their pet issues and there's nothing wrong with that, and some people are more suited to the legal sort of campaigning where others are good at cultural analysis, polemical writing or simply plugging away with complaints until companies are forced to back down (eg with the Danny Dyer lads' mag thing.)

I like this article on the subject.

"Feminism seeks to address all manner of issues, big and small. That women can (and do) utilize the tenets of feminism in every aspect of their lives does not undermine the history of the feminist movement, but instead does it a great honor. Feminism was never meant to be restricted to suffrage and equal pay, held in reserve like a finite quantity that could run out if it's used for "the little things." Feminism is a renewable resource.

The idea that feminism should be kept under glass, broken only in case of a "real" and "serious" emergency, is predicated on the erroneous assumption that "the little things" happen in a void, as do, presumably, the "real" and "serious" things, when, in reality, they are interwoven strands of the same rope. And as soon as one begins to judge the worthiness of feminists' attention on a sliding scale, even generally-regarded "serious issues" like equal pay are dwarfed by global concerns like sex trafficking or government-sanctioned use of rape as a tool of war. It doesn't have to be one or the other? feminists can multi-task.

And, in a very real way, ignoring "the little things" in favor of "the big stuff" makes the big stuff that much harder to eradicate, because it is the pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable little things that create the foundation of a sexist culture on which the big stuff is dependent for its survival. It's the little things, the constant drumbeat of inequality and objectification, that inure us to increasingly horrible acts and attitudes toward women."

yes, that's an excellent link E&M.

(I've posted on the UKFeminista thread btw.)

I have to say I was surprised by the window display. However, when my dds saw it they cracked up laughing went inside and bought the shark range. They obviously got the joke so I decided I must be a grumpy old woman.

your DDs sound great HFD, and very confident :)

That is funny your DD's got it HFD, and went the other way. What sort of age are they, out of interest?

I know my 4 year old would definitely NOT have seen any irony - she is attracted like a wasp to a pint of lager to anything pink and cake-related. I'm trying hard to (subtly) steer her away from the deluge of pink girliness that is relentlessly marketed at her, but it's a totally losing battle at the moment.

I think Paperchase have made a mistake by marketing it as a 'back to school' range. I love a bit of 50's irony but this isn't appropriate imo.

That is a great quote E&M.

I like the Cloud 9 stuff in the bottom right of the poster. Seems fairly non-gendered.

I think age makes a difference they are 7, 10 and nearly 15. They do irony and surly very well

I just asked my oldest what she thought it was about.

She says she thought it was meant for goths and EMOs and it is part of the whole kawaii blythe doll thing.

She says Cloud nine is meant for the younger kids.

I have no idea what that is all about am off to google it.

Egypt, I feel you're being deliberately difficult, so I'll reply to your last point, and then leave it.

No, for me, of course it's not just about paid work. I care greatly about equality in work, yes, but also in relationships, in politics, in free choice and the right to say no if you don't want something. I believe in having a say about what you want to do in life, and the right not to be exploited (I feel very strongly against strip clubs etc, although I realise there is a strong voice for that being their choice too) etc. I just don't believe getting upset about - granted, what I feel is - small things necessarily the best way ahead.

Good links above, and if I'm wrong, then fair enough. I don't have any research to back up my theory that people stop listening if you go on too much about the smaller things, no, but in real life, I have often heard people disregard someone that might actually have a point with "ah, she's always hysterical about something". Crying wolf and all that. It's wrong, of course, but it does happen.

Ha - there is hope yet then HFD, maybe DD will discover her inner Germaine at a later age

Oh yes there is always hope. You would never know they used to float about dressed as Disney princesses. If I was suggest they baked a cupcake this afternoon I probably wouldn't survive.

Thankyou egypt: my free reign works fine: I have kids of different sexes and ages and they have never really bothered with thinking that 'pirates are aimed at girls' or indeed boys! It depends on a lot of things I would think, including how they perceive all this marketing shite and how you 'help' them see it: ie; explaining stuff.

Over the years, they have worked it out anyway..

Playmobil also do tons of gender neutral sets: zoo, vets, farm, circus to name a few. I thought it was gender neutral you were on about, not 'girl pirates'??! (We have a ton of playmobil pirates, probably as many are female as male).

How about this: we go and comment on that blog, mentioning Robert Warden's name as much as possible so as to make it more google-able when anyone searches his name. Would that work, technology-wise? Even the whole feminist part aside, it makes me really annoyed to see such absolute unprofessional rudeness towards a customer, especially when so many are out of a job at the moment.

sounds good, but would it work?

I'm not sure it would be that effective any more - latest SEO tweaks by Google mean that far more weight is put on subject headings, the first paragraph of the post and image labels. Many bloggers have no follow rules on links in comments (to combat spammers sending masses of links to viagra sites through their blogs) and it wouldn't surprise me at all if Google ranks keywords in comments very very low indeed.

you're clever RubberDuck

What then? MN thread with name in title - it's very searchable?

Ah, OK. I htought it might be something like that.

Ooh, just googled him now, though, and nothing comes up for just 'robert warden', but if you google 'robert warden paperchase' the 3rd result is this very thread, and the 2nd, 7th and 8th results are about this too. So are some of the hits on the 2nd page. That's good enough for me

*thought

The way that always used to be used for Google bombs, was to get as many people as possible to link to the blog in question using whatever key phrase you want to show up in Google.

I believe that hoaxers managed to get the words "miserable failure" to be associated with George W Bush using this method. However, I'm fairly certain Google got wise to that and changed their algorithms so I don't think we could get away with that any more.

I think the most effective would be to make sure that the link gets circulated around as many facebook and twitter pages as possible in the hope that it goes viral naturally, without trying to "trick" search engines.

We have a very large collection of Playmobil pirates. There is one girl pirate. We also have a very large collection of Playmobil knights and there are two princesses although I have a feeling that they might have come with the palace set (we have a lot of Playmobil). I really like Playmobil, but it is sad that the "boys" and "girls" toys are so segregated (and that the girl figures are so totally restricted by their dresses - no riding for them). When my dd was younger I thought that it was cool that she could be both strong and confident and like "girly" things (I was brought up with fairly strongly "non-gendered" toys) but as she has got older I've felt more and more that the relentless marketing of pink and pretty as opposed to functional and enabling really does have a significant downside.

That letter was bizarrely rude. I wonder how it even got to the Marketing Director, don't they have a complaints department like most normal companies?I used to really enjoy visiting the Paperchase company in town, lovely paper and art stock upstairs, and great Christmas decorations, but their mainstream stuff is very tatty I think.

I think she's a twat and the Marketing director is right

it's a retro ad

and it doesn't say girls aren't allowed to buy the sharks

and one should know how to spell stationery when bothering to complain to a stationery seller

Why? When I worked for the NHS we had complaints all the time (as you might imagine) we never ever ever were rude to people because they couldn't spell, and we weren't even trying to sell anything. Some of them were very rude too. We were never rude in return. How grown up is that? What happened to "the customer is always right"