Technology Diary 1

My initial idea for this week’s blogpost was to choose a household appliance after reading Freeman’s observation that “housework can actually expand with new appliances,” and that time studies show that women with “‘labor-saving’ appliances” more or less spent the same amount of time doing housework as women without this technology (2002, p. 132). However, after receiving this week’s round up email, I was fixated on a phrase in the description for technology diary posts: “think of technology broadly- pens, pencils…” With the readings in mind, I could not stop thinking about BIC “For Her” pens and the subsequent internet outlash on them. In a nutshell, the pen maker, BIC, began selling/ marketing pens under the moniker, “For Her,” in 2010 and in 2012 or so, sarcastic and humorous Amazon “reviews” of these products became viral (just google “bic for her” for examples of the media coverage) along with a skit/ monologue on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Full disclaimer: I don’t actually use BIC For Her pens, which does not really fit the criteria that this specific piece of technology is part of my daily life (I guess I have been using “man pens”).

However, the official description/ presentation of the product and the reactions of the internet to it encompass many of the concepts of this week’s readings especially Sue V. Rosser’s “Using the Lenses of Feminist Theories to Focus on Women and Technology.” A huge part of the critique of BIC’s For Her pens can be summed up as the conflation of sex/ biology and gender/ a highly specific kind of femininity. The “BIC Cristal For Her Ball Pen” is marketed as having a “thin barrel to fit a woman’s hand.”  This is directly references to the fact/ belief that “biological” women are smaller in size to “biological” men or that female bodies are inherently different from male ones (essentialist). The appearance and discourse surrounding these pens also reference to a highly specific form of constructed femininity. Words like “elegant,” “beautifully smooth,” “style,” and “soft” are used in the product descriptions. Visual markers such as certain colors or as Ellen notes, “lady colors,” are used for the actual product and packaging along with “jeweled accents” and floral designs.  All of these markers socially and culturally imply a highly specific form of femininity (that is arguably subordinate to men), which many of the Amazon reviewers have detected and ran with it (with descriptions of using it draw “hearts and ponies” or using the product at their jobs as secretaries or for writing recipes or at worst, that women can’t read or write).

A related main theme of the critique of these pens is the idea of actually labeling the pens “for her”/ “just for her.” As many of the authors of the readings note, the act of categorizing and labeling something can construct it into reality. The act of labeling these pens “for her” / “just for her” simultaneously imply all other unmarked (to throw in a term I learned from linguistic anthropology) pens are the male (norm) and that the specific feminine connotations described above are intrinsically tied to being a woman. These ideas are specifically combined with technology as a general theme in Rosser’s piece is a “gender polarization of technology” in which “men design technology and women use it” and in an extreme case, women are excluded “as users of technology” (2006, p. 25-26). The critics of the BIC pens touch upon these themes. The top Amazon “reviewer” of this product succinctly declares that “those smart men in marketing have come up with a pen that my lady parts can identify with.” Ellen also snidely remarks, “Companies have spent millions of dollars making pills that grow men’s hair and fix men’s sex lives, and now ladies have a pen.” These comments bring up many feminist concerns about technology as in who is actually inventing it (which is tied with the means to do so), who is actually creating it (the manual labor), who are the intended users, and whose and what needs are they really fulfilling, which can backfire as the “labor-saving” household appliances (men) invented did not really lessen the domestic work of women as described by Freeman. The socialist feminism framework is also salient in this commentary as capitalism/ corporations are a driving force in the creation and marketing of this product.

There are other things of interest in this BIC For Her fiasco (?) including how some Amazon reviewers implicitly or explicitly reference this female technology to other exclusive female technology such as tampons and sex toys. There are also “reviews”/ jokes of men who used these pens and obtaining feminine bodily characteristics, which reminds me of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s argument of the interdependent and tautological relationship between biological processes (nature) and constructionist culture and environment (nurture). Then, there is probably a whole conversation about the technology of Amazon product reviews and how it can serve as a forum and medium beyond mere product reviews, but this blogpost is getting incredibly long…