You’ve probably eaten, or at least seen, those little heart-shaped Dove chocolates that live in people’s candy bowls and in the bottom of your grandmother’s purse.
Not to be confused with the Dove soap brand, these chocolates are not particularly extraordinary, but they do have those inspirational messages printed on the inside of the tinfoil wrapped around each candy. You know, like: “True love lasts forever,” “Count your blessings,” “Hold onto your dreams.”
Those little phrases, as perhaps trite and clichéd as they are, never bothered me until recently. A friend of mine opened up a Dove chocolate with a wrapper that read “You go, girl! You deserve it!” Hmm.
Don’t get it? Consider this one: my boyfriend opened up a chocolate that said, “Never leave home without your female intuition.”
Anything wrong with this picture?
I know that there is sort of a stereotype of chocolate being, well, primarily a woman thing.
But I didn’t realize that Dove—a company that was originally started by a man—was catering only to female customers.
It’s shocking that Dove would allow its creative team to go ahead with these obviously gender-biased messages. Did it never occur to a single one of them that a man might eat their chocolates, too?
Granted, some years ago I opened a Chinese fortune cookie that read, “You and your wife will be very happy together.” Ha, ha, ha. Not quite the same deal, though.
If you’re familiar with my columns, you’re probably also familiar with the feminist theme running through a lot of my work. I call it “feminist” because that’s the term that will ring a bell with most of you, although it’s actually not the term I prefer.
But that’s a different story. The point is, I care about equality between men and women, and that not only means bringing women to a level equal with men, but bringing men to a level equal with women.
Sexism against woman obviously still exists in some really horrible ways: unequal pay is a big one in this country; genital mutilation and the abandonment of baby girls are still big issues in parts of Africa and India.
But we’ve worked hard to get past a lot of it: to win the right to vote, to make it okay for us to wear pants and have careers, and regardless of interactions with the occasional misogynist, we ladies are, generally, doing pretty well.
But no one ever talks about reverse sexism.
Yes, it exists, and yes, it causes some major problems for the upstanding, hard-working men in the world, who love and respect women and wish that sometimes they’d receive equal treatment.
“You go, girl!” was big in the ‘90s, but you never heard anything similar for the men, presumably because the men didn’t need it.
As necessary and successful as it’s been, I hate how divisive the feminist movement has made many people. It has pitted women against men, men against women, and embedded this idea in both sexes that “we don’t need them.”
John Gray’s 1992 book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” may have provided some excellent relationship advice, but it also propelled the notion that men and women are so foreign to one another that complete understanding between them is nearly hopeless.
I’m not suggesting we all write angry letters to the Dove company (though if you feel inspired, be my guest), but just that this provides something to think about.
There is more to male/female equality than insisting on gender-neutral career terms such as “waitperson” or insisting that girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls if they want.
There’s an entire mindset shift that needs to take place, in which the difference between men and women is nothing more than a passing triviality. Perhaps then, real progress can be made.
3 comments
I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed and frustrated with this type of behavior.