I need to buy a new camera, and I had one all picked out, but I just learned that Canon doesn’t make a tiny, bedazzled, cute pink version with widely-spaced buttons for my long fingernails and detailed pictures to help me figure out how to use it (reading the instruction manual is hard). Now I just don’t know what to do.
Thanks to Matt, the author of this lovely take-down, for writing this and for sending it on.
What tweaks me is why they always link “smaller” with “easier to use.”
Smaller could be a GOOD thing–my hands are much larger than most womens’ hands. But what the fuck does hand size have to do with competence?
One company who gets it right: Felco. They make pruners for big, medium, and small hands–and they’re all excellent, just sized differently. Of course, that’s probably a bit easier than doing it with cameras, but it’s so unusual it’s worth judos anyway.
oops “kudos” not “judos”
If you wanted to do a few really good judo moves in celebration of a company with sense, I’m sure that’d be ok too.
So they can do that, but they can’t make an inexpensive camera with the shutter button on the left side for southpaws (a pet peeve).
Astonishing.
Indeed.
Also, I’m one of those people who like big, bulky SLR cameras (even if most of the buttons are on the right side). If I bought a rinkydink little Matchbox camera with “impossible to confuse” buttons, it wouldn’t be “to keep memories”. It would be because I want to be a spy. And why not? it’s much too easy to lose anything smaller than a deck of cards, anyway.
I believe Felco makes both right- and left-handed pruners, too. Obviously Felco should make cameras.
The best part about the link is the accompanying picture – a woman wearing a sexy bra using a pink laptop. I know when I surf the internet, I stand around shirtless holding my computer. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. Way to be johnny-on-the-spot, NY Times.
Thank you, Polaroid, for giving me another reason to be happy that all the digital cameras I use are Nikons. Nikon, if you ever pull something like this, I will come and kick your ass.
I noticed this odd aimed-at-soccer-moms vibe from the kodak easyshare camera range when I was shopping for a new digital camera. So many statements along the lines of “easy-to-use” “busy family life” “customized for YOUR needs”, but every person I know who’s bought one of those cameras, from tech savvy to tech-phobic, has HATED them.
I kind of want the hello pink kitty kid’s digital camera, but I’d hesitate before buying it for a little girl, the last thing my 4 year old niece needs is more messages that pink and bubbly is for her, and blue and straightforward is for her brother.
I wonder if part of what’s going on here is that men don’t dare admit that they need a device to be easier. Or that marketers think men don’t dare admit it.
I see a lot of this in tech — people (in tech, it’s both women and men, but since men in tech vastly outnumber women I think the culture is very masculine) oohing and aahing over the fact that the thing has a bazillion features, none of which are easy to use because they are crowded out from each other. And then here comes the woman who is not a techie who is willing to admit, “I just want it to do X. Can it easily do X?” Because I think non-techie men are more likely than non-techie women to be similar to techs in this way, that they have to have all the cool features even if it means the device is unusable.
So we get these devices that trumpet how usable they are. But they only come in pink. Men never need easy or usable or compact, for the same reason men never eat salad. It’s unmanly to admit that you can’t figure out your digital camera.
I personally have never, as a woman, felt insulted by the existence of pink things for women that are easier than the “normal” things. I think the normal set includes men and women, and then the women’s set excludes men, and if I were a man I might somewhat resent that I don’t get easy-to-use doodads unless I fight uphill against gender stereotypes.
Mind you, I have no idea if these simplified devices actually *are* easy to use, because I’m a techie, see. My doodads are all so complex, I can’t figure them out and I can’t admit it. :-)
car: bad news; I think the d40 may be in that category. At least it’s being marketed as such… (I’m not giving up my d200 though)
To be fair to the Times, I snagged that picture from an earlier Gizmodo post—I had to somehow trick our mostly 20-to-30-something male audience into reading the rest of the post.
And to be fair to them, the comments were actually more enlightened than I had anticipated, though I’m not exactly sure what that’s saying.
Another snarktastic take on the NYT article
Nooooo!!!! …
At least the little colored bit on the D40 isn’t pink. More manly red. Um, right? Easier handgrip and simpler menus are ok, girlyness not so much.
well, EVERYONE knows that women are smaller and need big scary things like cameras simplified, right? i mean, a woman could NEVER figure out how to use a big, giant camera with buttons thisclose together on her own, not with her long manicured fingernails!
ew.
oh, and right on, lindsay (post 7)! who in hell took a pic of some chick in her bra holding a pink laptop anyway? i wonder how complicated THAT camera was, and to whom it was marketed…
I’ve just decided to buy my first digital camera, and I’d love to have a lovely metallic pink super-flat point and shoot. But the lovely pink one doesn’t do what I want, so I’m buying what looks like a miniature ‘proper’ camera (the lens actually sticks out). So their efforts at feminization failed, since the girly one doesn’t have the features I want. Also, I checked out the pink polaroids-stupidly expensive for cameras with extremely low to average pixel counts. I love things pink, I love things miniature, but when the cute and miniature does half of what I want ans costs twice as much, I’m gonna have to say no.
And when I got my new laptop, I was able to feminize it as much as I needed to, by simply adding a skin in a bright pink magnolia pattern.
I found the battery charger thing interesting-for once a product designed for women did all the things the boy one did, and cost less!