About a month ago I emailed both Sainsburys and Tesco, following it up with tweets, about the gendering of magazines. It seemed wrong that New Scientist, Photography, NME, The Economist and Private Eye sat in ‘Men’s Interests’ sections while women had the 3,738 fashion and beauty mags as well as knitting and cooking mags.

Tesco were the first to respond, telling me via tweet that they were passing this up to central management:

It took a while for anything else to happen, but a week later I got an email from Sainsburys saying that where they were refurbishing or creating a new store, they would cease to gender their magazines.

Fabulous. I mean, I would prefer it if they spent the small amount of money printing new labels for the plastic holders on their magazine racks and replaced them all NOW, but that’s because they have a lot of stores, and seeing this every day still makes my head hurt and fear for young girls who go in and subconsciously learn that science and politics are not for them and that they should concentrate on being pretty while cooking.¹

But Tesco still haven’t replied properly. Nothing more except another tweet to BadRep saying management are looking at it. And now, the Everyday Sexism Project (@EverydaySexism on Twitter, and you can also check out the hashtag #everydaysexism) is really helping out – drawing attention to the gendered labels in a local store and retweeting those pressuring @UKTesco to take some form of action.

What would be even better would be for more of us to email them. And while you’re at it, email Sainsburys too and ask them to put their hand in their pocket to start making the changes now, so we don’t have to look at this sexism everyday. It’s just not good enough.

• To contact Tesco, go here. For Sainsburys, here.

1. Ed’s tiny note: Or indeed the boys who learn to compartmentalise “knitting”, for example, as “for girls” – certainly some proud male knitters have commented on this site in the past!

And if you have a guest post brewing in your brain, you know what to do: pitch us at [email protected].

Image: Flickr user Toban Black (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/)

The Problem

Dear Tesco and Sainsburys,

Can you please cease categorising The Economist, New Scientist, Private Eye, and the Spectator as ‘Men’s Interest’ magazines? I think you’ll find all genders are interested in politics and business. You are perpetuating the myth that women only care about (because they are valued for) their beauty.

While I accept (but hate) that a large proportion of women read Cosmo and Marie Claire and Good Housekeeping, I think that a large proportion also watch the news, vote, work, and may be interested in reading The Economist from time to time. You don’t segregate papers (although papers themselves, with their Femail sections, and Style sections, also start pushing my buttons). Why the shit have you determined that certain topics are not for the eyes of women?

Women still suffer unequal pay way before they think about maternity leave, and this is part of the same problem – you are saying that business and politics (something we are all involved in, one way or another) is purely the domain of men.

Sort this out immediately, please. It’s patronising and misogynistic. Actually, can you please also remove film, photography, game, cars, nature and music mags from the same category while you are at it, as that’s also inaccurate as well? Unless you think women can’t like music, cars, photography, video games, nature and film? I mean, it’s not as if you really think only men are interested in those topics, right? You have to admit that, say, there have been some female musicians, and some women actually enjoy going to the cinema and hey, Diane Arbus existed, and gosh, there are female commuters on the roads.

I’d stick with just Men’s Health if I were you, and even that’s shaky.

Thanks,

Women in the UK

What to do?

To complain to Tesco, please go here. For Sainsburys, here. If we get enough people complaining, maybe they’ll actually listen and change their stores. I mean, if a little girl can get the name of a loaf of bread changed at Sainsbury’s, surely they’re amenable to listening to vindicated complaints by women who are tired of being told to not use our brains and instead just look pretty. I mean, bread name change by photogenic small child must have meant something rather than being innocuous PR in a time of recession, right?

Boom! Progress from Sainsburys!

From: Sainsburys
To: Lizzie

Dear Lizzie

Thank you for your email and suggestion that we reconsider the signage used to categorise magazines in our stores. I understand you feel our current method is dated and we certainly do not want to imply the magazines are gender specific.

Up until now we have used information from publishers, who identify the target demographic for their magazines. We have organised the magazines on our shelves accordingly. We appreciate the points you have made, and have undertaken a review of the signage we use in store.

I am pleased to say that going forward, our magazines will be shown by genre and they will not have a gender prefix. There will not be an immediate change to the magazine sections in all our stores as this will be a gradual roll out replacing the existing signage. This should also address the grammar issues that you kindly brought to our attention.

We appreciate you taking the time to contact us, giving us the opportunity to look into your concerns. We look forward to seeing you in store again soon.

So that just leaves Tesco, from whom, as we go to press, Lizzie is still waiting to hear. Bad form, guys. (Although what Sainsburys mean by “grammar issues” is eluding us slightly here at BR Towers. This is a SEXISM ISSUE.)

Time to get on it, readers! To the Tesco feedback page, one and all.

• Thanks to Lizzie for making a noise and sending us her progress. Have you had a Customer Service Breakthrough or Problem lately? Get in touch and tell us all about it!

tags: not just for titles and authors!

Clicky here to see the explosive tag cloud on Amazon for a pseudo-science book about “the private activities of millions of men and women around the world”.¹

I like that a selection of predominantly internet-based feminist thought (can haz meme plz?) is being used to kick up a righteous fuss over what is by all accounts a pile of terrible tosh not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a great example of theory-into-action: the fact that tagging is used on Amazon to  organise and categorise books means that these tags help users identify and avoid anti-feminist writing.

My personal favourites in the tag cloud include mansplaining, gender essentialism, and transphobia.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

1. *One of many exciting non-facts on the back cover alone. Rather than data gathered from actual people, they used “a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads”. By the same “methodology” I would have concluded that planet earth was dominated by cats with funny captions and spambots for viagra.