{"id":15493,"date":"2009-11-11T10:04:08","date_gmt":"2009-11-11T15:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=15493"},"modified":"2012-09-18T23:53:18","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T04:53:18","slug":"best-buy-assumes-all-customers-are-male","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/11\/11\/best-buy-assumes-all-customers-are-male\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Buy Assumes All Customers Are Male"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Mary K.’s birthday she received the following birthday-related promotion from Best Buy.\u00a0 Notice that the promotion is personalized: it says “Happy Birthday, Mary” in the upper right corner.\u00a0 Nonetheless, the promotion features a tie as an example of a bad gift and a camera as an example of something that Mary might really want.<\/p>\n

\"bestbuyemail\"<\/p>\n

Given how carefully ads are now targeted to internet users (based both on the demographics it can gather about you [e.g., when you’re on Facebook] and the content of the text you’re reading [e.g., alongside email exchanges]), it’s kind of fascinating that Best Buy is apparently NOT paying attention to Mary’s sex.\u00a0 This, of course, might be heartily welcomed by many of you.<\/p>\n

But, if Best Buy is going to put together a non-sex-specific promotion, it sure seems like it would be a good idea to make it non-sex-specific<\/em> (featuring, as a bad gift, something non-gendered like an electric toothbrush or something).\u00a0 For whatever reason, Best Buy went with “we’re going to assume that all our customers are dudes.”<\/p>\n

For more instances of male as the default human, see these posts: one<\/a>, two<\/a>, three<\/a>, and four<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Mary K.’s birthday she received the following birthday-related promotion from Best Buy.\u00a0 Notice that the promotion is personalized: it says “Happy Birthday, Mary” in the upper right corner.\u00a0 Nonetheless, the promotion features a tie as an example of a bad gift and a camera as an example of something that Mary might really want. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2087,23703,140],"class_list":["post-15493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-marketing","tag-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15493"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15502,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15493\/revisions\/15502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}