This is how you sell detergent...
Oct. 19th, 2013 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertI promised I was going to rant about this, so here goes:
As someone who spends a good bit of time doing athletic stuff while wearing colorful lycra clothing, I also spend a good bit of time washing colorful lycra clothing. It turns out, yes, there is special detergent sold to this market. I just bought a different brand (it was what the running store happened to have) and I noticed something similar in both: Both labels feature a photo of a woman running, apparently on a warm summer day judged by what she's wearing (photo below the cut). Now, sure, I'm a straight dude—as I guess the label designers seem to be—I get it, I like looking at women (I could look at a woman's body all day! Ask my girlfriend!) but it's not obviously sensible to sell laundry detergent by showing a skinny woman displaying the highest possible ratio of uncovered skin to actual clothing that might need detergent. Penguin brand has their logo over her bellybutton, 2Toms goes for a bigger photo and the full 'her bellybutton, let us shows it to you' look.
It seems like when you see a generic-athlete photo of a women, she's usually a runner. A man, he usually looks like some sort of bodybuilder. Because runners tend toward the teensy-weensy, which I guess is officially what women are supposed to look like. Men, apparently, are supposed to be incredibly skinny too, but also super-muscular. You only see teensy-weensy marathon-running men when they are selling running-specific stuff. If you put me in charge of selling sport-detergent, I'd probably suggest you need photos of speed skaters in our full-body-coverage skin suits. Now, there's a bunch of fabric that needs detergent!
As someone who spends a good bit of time doing athletic stuff while wearing colorful lycra clothing, I also spend a good bit of time washing colorful lycra clothing. It turns out, yes, there is special detergent sold to this market. I just bought a different brand (it was what the running store happened to have) and I noticed something similar in both: Both labels feature a photo of a woman running, apparently on a warm summer day judged by what she's wearing (photo below the cut). Now, sure, I'm a straight dude—as I guess the label designers seem to be—I get it, I like looking at women (I could look at a woman's body all day! Ask my girlfriend!) but it's not obviously sensible to sell laundry detergent by showing a skinny woman displaying the highest possible ratio of uncovered skin to actual clothing that might need detergent. Penguin brand has their logo over her bellybutton, 2Toms goes for a bigger photo and the full 'her bellybutton, let us shows it to you' look.
It seems like when you see a generic-athlete photo of a women, she's usually a runner. A man, he usually looks like some sort of bodybuilder. Because runners tend toward the teensy-weensy, which I guess is officially what women are supposed to look like. Men, apparently, are supposed to be incredibly skinny too, but also super-muscular. You only see teensy-weensy marathon-running men when they are selling running-specific stuff. If you put me in charge of selling sport-detergent, I'd probably suggest you need photos of speed skaters in our full-body-coverage skin suits. Now, there's a bunch of fabric that needs detergent!
