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Monday, March 14, 2011

Pink and blue

I was in Target this evening, and found myself in the pharmacy section, looking at earplugs. (I don't need earplugs, so why this happened isn't clear.) These two packages were on the shelf:

I saw the bright pink package and asked myself, "What makes a set of earplugs specific to women?"

"Probably the fact that they're pink," answered a cynical part of my brain. And then I noticed the package to the right, which looks pretty much identical, but they offer "XTREME" protection and have a somewhat macho name. And they're blue.

A glance at the back of the package makes it clear that they're made by the same company, and are almost certainly the exact same product in different colors. The kicker, of course, is that the women's version is $4.19, while the male version is $3.79.

(This isn't quite as egregious as another pair of gender-specific Target products that I noted on Facebook a while back, the boy and girl cookie molds seen below. Note that where the boy has a "#1" trophy, the girl has a handbag. Sigh.)

1 comment:

hannah said...

The pink and blue business drives me CRAZY. I bought a bottle of a women's specific multivitamins at Target about a year ago. I opened the bottle and discovered, much to my horror, that the actual vitamins were pink. Who needs pink vitamins? Why do I want Red Dye #40 added to my vitamin because of someone's inane notion of gender? I returned them.

Also, I think you're leaving a big question unanswered here: what on earth is a "cavity girl" or a "cavity boy?"