Yes, the ePad Femme Is Vile, but We Should Make More Products for Women

[MadrasT]

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, it’s awful. Horrible. Patronizing. Could be mistaken for an Onion farce. And like its sisters Bic “For Her” Pens and Japan’s Honda for women, the ePad Femme deserves every last sigh of disgust. But tailoring products for women shouldn’t 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 want—including adapting certain gender-neutral goods that aren’t really gender-neutral for women.

Let’s 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 harm’s 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 September—after a decade at war—the 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 wasn’t available to them thanks to a mix of tradition, shifting gender roles, and a market slow to react.

(snip)

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 women’s actual needs, women will vote with their dollars. And, please, let’s lay off the pink.

More here: Slate.com

[seabeyond]

1. gender neutral is fine, but, they deign to male as the default gender. "normal" = male

then they identify female products as we saw in a thread recently.

so when they say they are gender neutral, that is not defaulting to men as the neutral, .....

[ismnotwasm]

2. Climbing gear

I have a friend who who says there is no easy way for a women to pee in climbing gear. We spent a hilarious few minutes thinking of solutions--some weren't so kind to those below