Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of January 6, 2019
You don’t need balloons or cupcakes to be excited about learning your baby’s sex. And yes, it’s a sex. It’s never gender. Gender is a social construct, and for even the most pro-life pro-lifers out there, an unborn child/fetus/uterine turd cannot, by the laws of science, be socialized. Talk to it, play music for it, fine. You can’t make it like pink or blue in the womb. If you need to be surprised about your baby’s sex, listen to what your OB or midwife tells you during pregnancy, or at the time of birth. Getting all geared up over the sex of a child is exactly why we have sexism. So, please, for the sake of our future, knock it the fuck off.
Dove Needs to Clean Up Its Act if it Hopes to Survive the Identity War
The idiom, “You can’t please everyone all the time” no longer holds water. Today, when it comes to product marketing, if you don’t please everyone all the time, you’re going to upset enough people so much that their digital pitchforks and torches can destroy your brand in an afternoon.
What’s the solution? The death of targeted marketing, maybe. If I were the director of copy, I’d suggest the following: “You know that bath time is precious.” Don’t specifically identify anyone other than the buyer, whomever and whatever that may be. It’s just as accurate.
Anxiety is the thing that’s ripped our country apart. It has divided us, caused us to fear and hate those who think and live differently than us, and even caused us to hate those who only slightly disagree with us. It has led to panic and overreaction. And I worry that American Anxiety is only going to exacerbate the social and political divide in this country to the point that there is no coming back.