Since when is snot gender specific?

Marketing. Advertising. Publicity. Packaging. Copy. All of these things are designed to entice us to buy a product. People get paid by a company to tell them how to do all the above to achieve the highest possible sales.

Mmmm hmm. Ok. And?

Sometimes it’s a fascinating mixture of psychology, stereotyping, manipulation and media saturation (check out a show called The Gruen Transfer if you’re in Oz, if it still runs) but other times I’m left to simply scratch my head and ask “Really people?Really?”

As I was doing my online order yesterday, I searched under tissues. And this is what I saw.

Can you actually read that? Look underneath Kleenex. See it? “Mansize”.

Hazzakazzawaaa? Why? Since when did it become so unmanly to blow your nose that marketing groups needed to find a way to make it acceptable? Are men being ridiculed for pulling out a tissue? Should they be doing the old sports trick of closing one nostril at a time and blowing hard so their mucous flies out onto the playing field, or a strategically placed bin if they have some manners?

Is it perhaps the old case of bigger is always better wherever anything masculine is concerned? Was there a real consumer need for this? Were men writing to the tissue companies complaining about how they had to swap to a second tissue mid-blow because, being manly, they have so much more mucus than a woman? Or, and maybe this is a bit too abstract, were men equating buying tissues with the horror of having to buy menstrual items for their girlfriends? Surely if the word “man” is on the packet, nobody would be able to peer into their basket and mistake it for some Carefree with Wings.

While we’re on the  topic of gender marketing, if that’s what it’s called, they were out of the razor blade I usually get so I thought stuff it, I’ll get the male one. Have a look.

The Women’s

The Men’s

Look similar? Yah, aha. Exactly the same product, different colour. Hmmphh.

But whatever, what I really want to know is, why do the man-size, enormous tissues cost the same as the regular women and small children ones? Don’t things normally get priced by volume in this world, except serving sizes at posh restaurants I mean?

Well, there was only one thing for it. I bought myself some man-size, chopped em in half and got two for the price of one. I also happen to quite like my black razor, so I’m going to keep buying it. Hah! That’ll show em. Won’t it?