Yes, the ePad Femme Is Vile, but We Should Make More Products for Women [View all]
Ladyblogs have been understandablely hostile to the ePad Femme, a touch-screen tablet created exclusively for women by the Middle East-based Eurostar Group. The tablet, which sells for $190 and runs the Android OS, comes preloaded with a (surprise!) pink background and apps such as a clothing-size converter, a weight-loss tracker, a shopping-list creator, something about perfumes, and two yoga apps. (Notably absent: a shoe app. How ever will I survive?!)
Yes, its awful. Horrible. Patronizing. Could be mistaken for an Onion farce. And like its sisters Bic For Her Pens and Japans Honda for women, the ePad Femme deserves every last sigh of disgust. But tailoring products for women shouldnt be entirely written off as anti-feminist garbage. Instead, we should continue pushing companies to stop manufacturing lazy, one-dimensional adaptations of perfectly fine gender-neutral goods for women (assuming you classify pink as an adaptation) and start challenging companies to create the products women need and wantincluding adapting certain gender-neutral goods that arent really gender-neutral for women.
Lets take, for instance, the admittedly extreme example of body armor. Until recently, female troops serving in combat zones wore the same body armor as their male counterparts. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more and more female service members found themselves in harms way on the ever-shifting front lines. But for 85 percent of women, even the extra-small armor was too big, leaving them vulnerable to bullets and shrapnel. In Septemberafter a decade at warthe Army finally deployed the first round of body armor designed specifically for women with a female engagement team out of Fort Campbell, Ky. In this instance, women were in desperate need of a product that wasnt available to them thanks to a mix of tradition, shifting gender roles, and a market slow to react.
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Products like the ePad Femme should be laughed off the Internet for their short-sighted conceptualization of what drives female consumers. But when companies tune in and tailor products to womens actual needs, women will vote with their dollars. And, please, lets lay off the pink.
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