I bought it! Yeah baby I bought it!
Well, we finally have the pen no one asked for. A pen for ladies.
And I am the proud owner of TWO. A pink AND a purple, which covers all the girl colors except for teal and coral. Red isn’t necessarily a girl color, but coral? C’mon.
Over the next couple weeks, I’m putting these bad boys…uh, girls, through their paces. What makes them girly pens? How do they compare to others? Will I begin menstruating by using these, and how will that menstruation manifest, and if it means I pee blood, will I be able to tell the blood I NORMALLY pee from the menstrual blood. If I become lost on the alien planet from Pitch Black, will my menstrual blood be more or less effective at attracting predators than Jack’s was?
These are the questions. These and more. Or maybe less. I don’t think I’ll be able to test the Pitch Black one. Mostly because that movie is fiction. Although Vin Diesel’s guns are real. Too real to handle at time.
Test One: The Pink Tax
The Pink Tax was a new concept for me, introduced to me by my office mate. The basic idea is that things are branded as girly, a few extra bucks get slapped on the price tag, and there you have it.
The overall premise, dumbed down, it’s expensive to be a woman.
When I heard this concept, it did make a certain amount of sense to me. Take a walk through the soap aisle. Not only are girly soaps more expensive than your more generic soap, but there are products that seem to have almost no purpose. To me, the idea of washing my face with a separate material than I use to wash my balls is insane. I sort of understand the concept of “Your face is more delicate than your forearm,” but I can’t say I would put something on my balls that I wouldn’t put on my face. Insert oral sex joke here, if you’d like. But make it a good one. EARN IT.
Here’s what I’m getting at: I think we all know about the idea of the pink tax even if we haven’t heard the term, necessarily. If you’ve purchased soap for yourself, a razor, anything that goes on your lips (more oral sex jokes? Okay, but let’s start being a little more choosy), you’ve seen that there’s stuff marketed towards women, and that stuff comes in a larger variety, poses the theory that about 5 products can be used to do the job of one, and often cost more.
When it comes to Bic For Her pens, I decided to look and see if the pink tax was in effect.
Results: No. Not so much.
Similar pens cost the same amount when I searched on Amazon. In fact, similar, not specifically “for her” pens are a little more expensive.
Which could be because this whole Bic for Her concept was dumb and now they’re offloading them, but it seems they’re still being manufactured, so I’m not sure if that theory holds water.
Dare I say that Bic is recognizing the wage gap and offering a slightly cheaper alternative to ladies?
No, I don’t think that’s the case either. Because that’s stupid and me really reaching to explain something that doesn’t have a reasonable explanation.
But I think the lack of Pink Tax in this case does help me point to an answer to the question: Why? Why make pens for women? That’s the whole point here.
It’s not like women have been clambering for different pens. “Oh, these male-centric pens are sooooo heavy!” “Oh, these standard pens are a little too thick for my dainty hands!” I don’t think most people have a lot of gender-based complaints about your standard Bic pens. I didn’t see any women’s march signs that specifically mentioned pens. Well, maybe one, but I think it was a sign that said “penis” that was photographed at a bad angle.
If the girly pens are cheaper, then why would they exist? My theory is this: You’ve got a product, and you gotta figure out more ways to sell it.
Which is very common in most industries.
Let’s face it, is the yearly iPhone that different? Fuck no. Is the 2017 Prius a lot different from the 2016 Prius? Naw. Different shell, same shit.
The challenge is to sell MORE of the same thing to more people. Not to make a thing that’s leaps and bounds better and DEMANDS an audience. That’s up to engineers and designers and other dorks. No, the way business works is to sell the same old shit over and over.
So, you’ve got pens, and you think, “Just over half the world is populated by women. So, what if we made a pen FOR them?”
Honestly, it’s not the worst idea. The idea of targeting about half the population is a good one, when you remove the exactitudes of it. If you could somehow create a pen that was demonstrably better for women in some way, that seems like a good thing?
But when you have to reconcile the limitations of your product with the realities of what you’re being asked to do, it’s a toughie. How do you make a pen for women? I honestly do not know. I guess I would make sure they were made in a factory staffed by women, thereby providing jobs? Or that my company was paying women in the same job the equivalent wage of men? Or “X% of proceeds from these specific pens goes to fund maternity leave for our workers”? Something like that?
The point is, I think there’s a way to do it, and a way to do it without pink and purple crap.
And I will say this. I think there IS a market for these things. For every woman who wants to defy the stereotypes, there’s a woman who likes pink shit. It’s the same thing with men. For every man who loves football, there’s a man who couldn’t give a damn. For every man who wants a car that goes to work and back, there’s a man willing to pay a couple thousand bucks to buy oversized tires to drive on paved roads. It seems like there’s ten of these very stupid men for every one of the regular men, but that’s beside the point.
In the end, I find the marketing for these pens to be misguided, personally. But when you’re talking about Bic pens, it’s not like they’re going a lot of different directions that allow them to repackage the same material. There’s not a ton to work with there. They’re simple, cheap, ballpoint pens. They’re workhorse pens, way better than that OfficeMate bullshit. They’re the king of cheap pens, the reliable pen that you don’t dread the way you do those OfficeMate shitpiles, where I”m pretty sure they are filled with an ink/diarrhea mixture that clogs the opening constantly. I have a vendetta against OfficeMate pens, in case you can’t tell.
So let’s start off right there. My feeling? These pens are kind of a dumb idea, but I’m not particularly offended by them. And some of that is probably because I don’t think they’re worth getting offended over, for me personally. It’s not like these are being handed out to parents who have girl babies in the hospital. I get that the issues we have are made of lots of small bricks that build up a wall, but this brick is pretty easily ignored. It’s pretty easy to not buy these. I had to go online and get them, like they’re a specialty item, because they weren’t in the couple stores I checked. I’d never actually seen one in the wild before.
Plus, there is no Bic for Men. It’s not like someone is going to see you holding a classic Bic pen and say, “Whoa, that’s a very masculine pen you’ve got there.”
I also kind of don’t think that the classic style is now masculine by default, that the invention of this pen means that the classic is now masculinized. The standard Bic is so iconic. As pens go, while not anyone’s favorite, it’s probably the most recognizable, most used pen.
So I don’t think this is a problem of drawing battle lines, setting up one pen as masculine and the other as feminine. The Bic For Her pen is not remotely popular, far as I can tell. It just doesn’t feel, to me, like this has shifted that paradigm.
Why, then? Why do these exist?
I’m not big on guessing motive because it’s easy to get super conspiratorial. Especially when the obvious answer, to me, seems to be that a group came up with a scheme to move some pens, thought it was likely enough, and went for it. The end. I could chase boogeymen and assume Bic is out to keep us in gendered boxes, but I just don’t think that’s true. Which is different than saying it’s NOT true. It’s saying that I don’t think it’s true because the only reason to believe that’s true is because it feeds into the way I see the world, not because of anything inherent to the product.
Regarding the Pink Tax:
Is the pink tax real?
That’s probably a bigger question than I can answer. I bought a couple pens. My authority ends there.
Is there a man tax?
Well…maybe? To an extent? Although it can’t be quite as expensive. As long as women wear multiple undergarments and have entire stores devoted to them, it will probably be more expensive to be a lady. Doing the math, if someone is wearing a bra AND underwear, that’s pricier than me just wearing underwear. I’m no Danica McKellar, but I can do the addition on that one.
All that said, there’s starting to be more bullshit for men to buy too. Man Wipes. In the aisle where you’ve got moistened ass wipes, there are wipes in a gunmetal grey box, and they’re called something like Man Wipes.
Am I to believe that the chemical composition of male shit is so different from female shit that I should really be using a different thing to clean my asshole?
Let’s not get overly sexy. But I’ve been up close and personal with enough assholes in my life to say there doesn’t seem to be a huge, discernible difference. Again, I’m no Danica McKellar (she’s a math whiz, and I don’t know if she knows anything about buttholes, but I always figure it’s best to ask a mathematician).
This is the male version of the pink tax. Shave gel that is made to look like it’s for lumberjacks for men, something with a picture of a peach on it for women. Razor technology bullshit for men, the same thing for women, but in teal. Aggro hair gel for men, soft hair gel for women.
Axe Body Spray. If there’s a pink tax for men, it comes in those bottles, and WE ALL pay the price for that bullshit. All of us who stand within your stink cloud.
How do you interact with the Man Tax?
While I won’t venture to say with Pink Tax, I am pretty comfortable saying that Man Tax is optional. You do not need to buy your shaving shit in a wooden box. You don’t need to buy steel toed boots if you’re not doing actual work. The only thing you should buy with the label “Axe” on it should be for chopping down a tree or murdering someone while dressed as an insane Santa on Christmas Eve.
Having lived the Man Tax, I can say that one is quite avoidable.
Having not lived the Pink Tax, I can’t say. But what I WILL say is that, if you don’t like the Pink Tax, then the best thing I can suggest is figuring out the places where it’s easily avoided. Don’t buy fucking Bic for Her if you hate that shit. Don’t buy anything that says For Her. Period. Because either it’s well known that it’s for her and doesn’t need to specify, or it’s a bunch of marketing bullshit.
Tune in next time. We’ll actually OPEN the pens.