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It’s a crazy world we live in; there are no two ways about that.

We live in an age of confusing political correctness where most people are afraid to say anything that might be construed as offensive to anyone else.  It’s a sticky subject, for sure.

Wikipedia defines political correctness as:

“behavior seen as seeking to minimize social offense in gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, handicap, and age-related contexts.”

Some things to make clear: 

• My intention is not to bang the drum about white men feeling the brunt of political correctness.  Honestly.
• I’m not going to bang on about “political correctness gone mad.”  (I am not the Daily Mail.)
• I’m only discussing the ideology of political correctness to make this look like a well-reasoned argument, as opposed to going straight into a rant about TV adverts that are clearly sexist against men.

I don’t necessarily think political correctness has gone mad, or too far, or actively discriminates against white men.  I do get annoyed, however, when men are portrayed as stupid, lazy and annoying in adverts, when we’ve spent the past century rightly moving away from adverts that portray women as inferior to men.  Take a look at the following, all genuine adverts and one from as recently as 1970 (from a Daily Mail rant about women or feminism or something or other)

I think we can all agree that these adverts are clearly no longer appropriate.  They should never have been considered appropriate.  They are sexist, promote domestic violence (and even murder!) and portray women as inferior creatures to men.  They may purport to be tongue-in-cheek, but equally they can be inferred as serious.  They are certainly not politically correct.  They would never see the light of day in the twenty-first century.

Let’s take a minute to consider the final picture above, a ketchup adverts from 1953 which proudly boasts that A WOMAN can open the bottle.  Then, tell me how exactly this is different to the advert for Oven Pride oven cleaning bags, with its shit advert and slogan: “So easy, EVEN A MAN can do it.”

In May 2009 the Advertising Standards Agency declared this advert “not sexist,” “light-hearted,” and “tongue-in-cheek.”  What utter, utter BULLSHIT.

Another advert, for a product the name of which escapes me for now, shows a man and a woman sitting on a sofa.  The man fidgets in his seat, to the clear irritation of the woman who pulls a lever on the side of the sofa catapulting the man through an open window and into the distance.  The woman allows herself a self-satisfied grin as the advert ends with a slogan akin to “If only all pains were as easy to get rid of.”  Replay that advert in your head with the roles reversed and it is undoubtedly SEXIST.

While these small-time Charlies might dabble in sexual inequality to sell their products, we should be able to rely on a global giant like Tesco to avoid making such gaffes.  Or can we?  Well, clearly not as I’ve seen fit to mention it AND write the following letter to their Customer Services office in Dundee.  I’ll let you know if I get a reply.

Dear Tesco

Firstly, I would consider myself a regular and dare I say valued Tesco customer, shopping in your magnificent Toton store at least weekly.  Secondly, this is the first time I’ve ever felt compelled to write a letter of complaint to anyone, let alone my preferred choice of supermarket.

Picture the scene: it’s a Saturday afternoon and I am in your Toton (Nottinghamshire) store.  My girlfriend and I have invited friends over for dinner, and I’ve agreed to do the cooking.  Bereft of ideas I decided to buy a cookery magazine; BBC’s Good Food Magazine seemed a good choice.

Imagine my disgust when I located the aforementioned magazine in a section of the magazine display clearly labelled WOMEN’S INTERESTS. 

Why don’t we extrapolate this product categorisation throughout the entire store?  In fact why not just split the whole damn store into MEN’S and WOMEN’S sections?

All of the cleaning products, household items and of course anything to do with cooking should be located in the WOMEN’S STUFF section of the store, while all of the home entertainment, crisps and DIY goods should be in an area of the store clearly defined as MEN’S THINGS.  The alcohol aisle should be split into beer, cider, red wine and whiskies (MALE DRINKS), while white wine, champagne and Bacardi all sit under FEMALE DRINKS.

In this era of political correctness and sexual equality, how can a massive international retailer like Tesco still consider cooking as a solely female interest?  Likewise there are car, sport and music magazines under MEN’S INTERESTS.  Newsflash, Tesco: some women also like sport, music and cars.  Some women I know even DRIVE.  Yes, that’s right!  WOMEN!  DRIVING! 

I’m sorry to destroy your 1930’s view of the world but it’s simply no longer acceptable to label products MEN’S or WOMEN’S (with the fairly obvious exception of sanitary towels and, you know, that type of thing).  If Gordon Ramsey walked into one of your many stores and for some mad reason decided to buy a cookery magazine I’m sure he’d use an f-word or two when he found a magazine about his chosen career in the WOMEN’S INTEREST section.

Please Tesco do something about this clearly outdated method of categorising magazines in your stores.  We all know certain types of products are aimed at different sub-sections of the population, but to have cookery magazines in the WOMEN’S INTERESTS section of your display is clearly not appropriate.  At best this is lazy retailing; at worst it strengthens outdated sexual stereotypes.

I hope you will take my comments on board.

Yours faithfully

Gareth Goodall