This turned out to be a pretty bog-standard novelty-gadget grown-up-toy type of shop. the assumption being, presumably, that it's men who like to buy and play with gadgets etc.
I went and had a look around the stor to see if there was anything fun enough and cheap enough to entice me. There wasn't (I came close to buyign a stylophone, but thought better of it when i saw the price tag).
What there was, however, was a set of customers that was just about evenly split 50-50 male and female.
So the fun thought as I left the shop was "marketers' sexist assumptions proved wrong, and ignored by the shoppers!"
Next up was slightly more disturbing, a ready-meal at the supermarket apparently being marketed to young children (there seems to be some tie-in with a digitally-animated movie being released around now):
Did nobody at the company making this product (or, I suppose, making the movie) stop to google the word "Gor" before they started branding this product? Or did they just do so with safesearch turned on?
For those who don't know, the "Gor" novels by John Norman are a sort of maledom BDSM-by-numbers fantasy/sci-fi series that has spawned a wole culture of followers who buy into the BDSM slave society and its rules and try to live by them as closely as possible in the real world. There are whole online communities dedicated to the "Gorean lifestyle". Because it is explicitly male-dominated, and all women are defined as subordinate (even "free women" seem to be defined as subordinate to men, and in the novels at least are always under threat of being sold into slavery), it is unavoidably pretty misogynist in its outlook on gender relations.
The novels (and fan fiction) are also fairly sexually explicit.
Definitely not the sort of thing that one would expect to find linked in any way, shape or form with a children's media product! (In fact, to save some old ladies' blushes, I once bought a Gor novel from a charity shop because they'd looked at the cartoon-y cover and decided it was a children's book - I wasn't happy to leave it where it was, and didn't fancy trying to explain why it wasn't appropriate where they'd put it.)
Another day, another dose of fail.
well, I feel like the Gor one is reaching a bit since the movie is about igor, and igor as a character existed before the Gor novels and independent of them.
ReplyDeleteshould have added, I'm actually really disappointed in the "heh, heh Gor novels" thing. I usually find your commentary awesome. but not that.
ReplyDeletekb:
ReplyDeleteActually, now I look again I can see the "I" from "Igor", but I promise you, when I was in the shop I did not see it - I thought it was just "Gor". Had that original perception been good, and someone had called the movie "Gor", then I think my concern about the conflict would be valid.
I accept that my perception (possibly due to having a permanently filthy mind) was flawed, and it's a fair point that my concerns were in fact unmerited.