An Indonesian company printed some interesting washing instructions on the tag of their shirts.
"Washing instructions: Give this shirt to a woman. It’s her job," Salvo Sports printed on the shirts of Indonesian Super League team Pusamania Borneo.
I understand that bread in Indonesia ought to come in bags with instructions that say, “Give this loaf to a woman. She’ll make you a sandwich.”
But before all you angry feminists start waving torches and pitchforks, the company has apologized. They are deeply, terribly, weepingly sorry for their sexist assumptions.
"The message is simply, instead of washing it in the wrong way, you might as well give it to a lady because they are more capable," Salvo Sports posted on Twitter.
"There is no intention to humiliate women. In contrast [we want to tell the men] learn from women how to take care of clothes," it said.
Because women are accustomed to doing laundry! No, they like doing laundry! They have a laundry-washing gene! Men are just inferior at doing menial jobs like laundry, that’s why we give those jobs to women, because they’re better at simple, degrading tasks for which we will pay them less money!
Yeah, that makes it all better.
I’m not allowed anywhere near the washer. That’s because I don’t care about clothes, & don’t treat them properly. My wife doesn’t want me anywhere near the laundry. But I’m good for cleaning out the cat’s litter tray.
I do my own laundry. It’s why I have pink underwear. First, I sort the laundry. My nose is the principal instrument here.
If I were making washing tags they would say “Ladies, if a man has given you this shirt to wash, please go to our website and we will send you a free packet of itching powder.”
Oh good grief. I heard about this on the news earlier, and it was mentioned that there’d been an apology. ‘Yay,’ I thought. ‘A small win!’ For some reason, they never mentioned that the apology was just a dumbfuck restatement.
Oh god. I would have preferred they just say it was a joke catered to men rather than rationalize some transparent, patronizing “compliment” out of it.
So what they are saying is that men are incapable of doing a simple task like laundry. Maybe they shouldn’t be running a country
Maybe they just got a bad Babelfish translation of “Don’t try to wash this yourself. Give it to someone who is more capable.” Babelfish just assumed that ladies are effectively the referent. The flaw with this hypothesis is that it is still lousy instructions. Essentially: “Instructions: 1) Don’t even try.”
And such a nice Notpology they did: they did not *mean* to humiliate wimminz at all donchano. /snark
“learn from women how to take care of clothes” is just so presumptuous that women are preprogrammed with laundry talent that -<– I can’t…
Thought of something, to fallaciously rebutt: how often are men assumed to know how to: fix cars, computers, or gadgets, etc.? Just inverted the direction of assumptions. awful assumptions, either way. ALWAYS Fallacious to “assume” skill sets based of the person’s gender. Always remember the joke:
break up “a s s u m e” => “ass__u__me”. IE “you’ll make an ass of you and me.”
Well they won a prize for Unctuous Drivelling in the Execution of an Outstandingly Crap Notpology, at least.
I feel kind of sorry for the person who came up with that instruction as they will no doubt be hearing about it for many years to come.
We’re an equal opportunity household when it comes to laundry. He does some, I do some.
chris61 #8:
And so they should. I don’t see why anyone should feel sorry for them, when they’re criticised for expressing abhorrent views which their own words show them to hold.
IOW: You’re supposed to be flattened, ladies!
Message to marketing department: Instead of marketing in the usual way, let the women do your marketing. They may not be better but they could hardly be worse.
@9 Daz
Maybe. Or maybe whoever wrote it is like @1 dick whose wife doesn’t allow them near the washer because they’ve demonstrated incompetence in using it. The view they express with regards to laundry may be a view they’ve learned from their mother and/or their wife.
There was some quote from Douglas Adams about there being perhaps too much comedy in the world at the present time. I was kinda disturbed by that attitude then, but now I understand it. Everybody thinks they’re a damn comedian, and most of them are terrible and should just stick to doing their job.
Women: experts at doing laundry and taking the blame for stupid sexist shit.
If a woman came up with the idea : “Yeah, woman are actually the sexist ones”
If a man came up with the idea: “His mom raised him that way/ His wife doesn’t let him wash his own underpants.”
chris61, put that shovel down. You’ve done enough work today.
chris61 #12:
The extra-specialness of your special pleading is of a highly extra-special quality.
And this makes it better how?
You think their mother and/or hypothetical wife are the only contact they’ve ever had with the whole of human society? I wonder how they managed to get and hold down a job in marketing while living in a desert, with their mother and/or hypothetical wife for sole company.
Understanding where somebody first heard an obnoxious notion from doesn’t make repeating it any less obnoxious.
Sure, one person might have to take the fall for this (if anyone does), but this kind of bullshit isn’t a deed of one person sewing shirts in the garage. It’s a fucking company with marketing departments and people who need to approve things that marketing proposes.
Daz, you’re suppose to feel sorry for the sexist person for saying sexist things. Don’t you know they can’t help it?
Emma Watson does a live conversation as part of the HeForShe campaign, happening live:
here
Chris61:
Oh my. Well, boo fucking hoo for those poor, poor men. There’s a reason most clothing comes with instructions on how to wash and dry it (an why washing instructions come with washing machines!). Everyone has to figure it out at some point, and if someone really doesn’t want to learn how to clean their clothes, well, they can pay a service to have it done. There’s zero excuse for perpetuating the misogynistic line of thought that women are base creatures just suitable enough for servant class.
Sorry, that was supposed to go in the other thread.
@14 @15 @16
I found the washing instructions funny rather than obnoxious probably because I was immediately struck by the creative things that I might do with said shirt were anyone to ever hand me one with instructions to wash it because it was my job. Apparently others aren’t amused so my apologies.
I usually read the tags on my laundry before washing, or I wouldn’t know what settings they need. So the tags are insulting to me, and they don’t tell me how to wash your damn shirts. Good job, company.
This is how I learned to do laundry: reading the instructions in clothing tags. Are they saying men are too stupid to do this? They insulting two genders. Good times.
Almost exactly the same statement was (professionally) printed on a sign in a toolstore next to a stack of washing powder. In the Netherlands. “give this to your woman, it’s her job” I was pretty damn flabbergasted and they lost a customer. Afterwards I heard that one of their stores had the policy that men do not have to wash the toilets used by employees, only women did that.
I learned how to do laundry and ironing before running off to college. Like basic cooking, it’s just one of those things that a person on their own should know how to do. It’s come in handy over the years when the Redhead has been visiting people or going back to college. And it definitely is of use at the moment.
bramhengeveld @ 24:
Wow. Y’know, the misogyny is bad enough, but this sentiment is bad on more than one layer. The implication is clear that every single man must have a woman (’cause who else is going to do all that yucky work?), so I guess men who don’t have a relationship with a woman don’t count as men. And as for men who have husbands or boyfriends? I guess we really don’t want to go there, eh?
@17 the results seem to indicate not, and does not have a normal functioning management structure.
uncle frogy
It’s a sad thought, but they might expect a man with a husband/boyfriend to dump this kind of chore on their mother. For a whole lot more layers of wrong.
Honestly, I doubt men who are in relationships with men ever crossed their mind when they were coming up with such witty ads.
This remeinds me of the Coca cola marketting “mistake”. After years of telling us that Coke is the real thing, they announced that they were changing the formula, introducing the “new Coke”. Everybody went nuts. The company apologized profusely and brought out “Coke Classic”. Tons and tons of publicity, which to a marketting department is the air they breath.
You people all seem to misunderstand marketting, the point of which is not to fit in with your world view but to get the name of the company out there amid a babble of competing voices. The tag in the shirt is simply brilliant. Nobody in the marketting department gives a shit what you think about the sentiment, other than that it will piss you all off and make you talk about it. Done and done. Thanks for your cooperationg and help.
Those shirts are going to be collectors items.
zaledalen,
And plenty of people won’t be buying their shirts because of this.
Really, your comment is as useful as “Don’t feed the trolls”.
Better not point out all the bullshit men’s rights activists are peddling because that will only make them famous! Just keep quiet and hope the popularity of this whole sexism thing dies on its own. It has to, if no one points it our, right?
Bad things go away if you keep quiet about them.
Conversation in the wooznique household:
woozy: “hmm, , there’s a an indonesian shirt company with a tag whose washing instructions read ‘Give this shirt to a woman; it’s her job'”.
woozile:”They should be put out of business.”
woozy: “They issued an apology. It reads ‘The message is simply, in…'”
woozile: “They should be put out of business. It’s the only acceptable outcome.”
woozy; “So is there anything worth discussing about this story?”
woozile: “No. They should be put out of business. It’s the only acceptable outcome.”
In the douchecanoeniverse, yes, zaledalen. In the real universe, there are consequences for stupid publicity errors; there’s a reason for all those PR companies. But you comfort your asshole self with the douchecanoe version.
As to “men are often incompetent at laundry”: BULLSHIT. My kids used to try that faked/deliberate incompetence with me, in the hopes that I would run out of patience with dirtiness of toilets or dishes or rooms, and their “incompetence” would thus get them out of the work.
Eventually they learned that Mama Cait had endless patience to let them spend their time doing it over and over until it was done right. My son became a good cook/laundry/dishwasher, because he valued his time too much to waste it in mucking about pretending to be a fool.
So yeah. Bullshit. If you’re able-bodied and yet not competent, skillwise, to do laundry, then I would doubt your ability to work a toilet roll, let alone hold down an adult job.
zaledalen, #30
Agreed. At the time, unfortunately, the consuming public is comprised of more people like you than us.
But surely you’ve heard of companies putting inappropriate things on their products and then recalling them and apologizing.
Zaledalen @ 30:
No, it isn’t. It’s just the bog standard assertion of age old misogyny, which some people still find to be witty.* It’s insulting, to women and men. A lot of people will read about this, remember the company, and put their business somewhere else.
*See bramhengeveld @ 24
zaledalen #30:
Really? Replace ‘woman’ with ‘negro.’ (Or whatever name was given to the slave-class in your part of the world.) Then stop and think for a while.
Not to mention zaledalen is trotting out the debunked, re-debunked and completely and totally fucking debunked idea that the New Coke fiasco was some super awesome, top secret marketing campaign to take over the soft drink market:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
So on top of being a sexist douche, they’re an IGNORANT sexist douche. Redundant, I know…
zaldalen@30:
I can only speak for myself, but I totally get the fact the world is populated with people like you who are quick to excuse brutally obvious sexism as a cute marketing campaign. “Oh you WHINERS just don’t get that godaddy.com is just tryin’ to get people talkin’ ’bout their product! DON’T YOU KNOW HOW MARKETING WORKS!!!!” You’re the same geniuses who come up with stupid ideas like bikini baristas and what seems like 90 percent* of the ads right here at FTB. As long as you can separate sexist a-holes from their money, it’s all totes OK.
*figure possibly exaggerated
Zaledalen:
This isn’t true, either. Marketing and Ad departments give a very serious shit about what people think of their strategies, because profits live and die according to those receptions.
@zaladeen #30
Even if New/Classic Coke was a deliberate marketing ploy, this is different in that it insults half of the world’s population and the portion of the other half that cares about such things. I suspect that the vast majority of women and a good chunk of men would never buy this product. An actual apology might have helped.
Yeah, I’m sure there will be sexist assholes who rush out and buy it but I’m totally ok with them advertising their sexism. I’d be delighted if all assholes wore clothing which allowed me to identify them without having to talk to them.
There IS actually such a thing as bad publicity. Godaddy was mentioned above (nich #39). As a nerd*, people often ask me about setting up websites and I actively recommend away from godaddy. I usually recommend SquareSpace, initially just because they advertised on Star Talk Radio (Neil DeGrasse Tyson) but I now know people who have used it and are happy.
* I’ve never actually done more than play around with web development software.
Recent conversation in the Giliell household:
Little one: You’re the best daddy in the world because you always do our laundry!
Oh, and yes, he learned to do the laundry when he was almost 40. Because yes, his mother hadn’t thought it was necessary to teach her sons how to use a washing machine.
Funny enough, nobody ever taught me how to use a washing machine either. I simply grew up knowing that one day I’d have to do my laundry so I paid attention. And when I moved out, I just did it. End of story.
When I taught my husband how to do the laundry he needed all sorts of things explained like different colours and temperatures and stuff. Yes, as a man he’d been able to live for almost 40 years without picking up the basics of laundry. Amazing shit.
Things people of any and all genders should be able to do before leaving home (or Heck, even if they stay home, barring some disability that prevents it),
Sew something
Wash dishes
Clean a bathroom
Unplug a sink of toilet
Change a tire (or at least have a working knowledge of how it’s done)
Buy properly sized clothing for yourself
Buy groceries
Cook a meal for yourself (and at least one other person. True, fast food exists, but there’s a possibility you may find yourself somewhere where there is no take-out)
Balance a budget (of some kind)
Wash your clothes
I don’t get it? I do my own fucking laundry. My wife does her own fucking laundry. Simple, no?
My wife, as a favor does mine if I am busy at work. I only her her mom-delicates and not often.
My view since college: all clothes mixed togehter on cold. She seems to have a more refined method.
It works but I guess we are not in a traditional marriage
About the “Ha, ha, I’m so incompetent at laundry” joke: I’m not buying it. I will accept that it frequently happens that one family member (usually due to sexist upbringing) has a more critical sense of household chores so I will accept “By the time I start becoming aware that the toilet is getting dirty, my wife has already become disgusted and cleaned it two days earlier”. Except… that *isn’t* a joke and it isn’t funny; it’s a serious issue that causes serious imbalanced and should be dealt with. (Scheduled cleaning is the best bet.) However laundry is *not* an ongoing cleanliness issue. Laundry, like cooking, gassing up the car, doing dishes, shopping and daily showering etc. (and unlike vacuuming, toilet cleaning, gardening etc.) is a specific task oriented chore. Laundary piles up and it needs to be done and you *do* it. And I *don’t* accept that one party just doesn’t get it.
Now, I haven’t mentioned anything about being *good* at housework. I don’t buy that at all. Housework is a skill and there are tricks but it’s not brain surgery. The only way to be *bad* at housework is to not care about it. And if a person lives in a house a person is not allowed to not care. Perhaps one party cares more than the other but that’s not a “ha ha; i’m such a slob” joke. It’s a serious issue.
I wonder how much this message is a seeking of approval of their local religious leaders. Threat of censure is a powerful tool in a country full of mysogynistic religion. Local power politics.
Some decades ago a nationally known college choir in my area had a practice while on tour of assigning to each female singer in the choir a male singer for the purpose of making his shirts presentable for concerts.
Haven’t any of these guys ever been single? If I didn’t know how to wash clothes, I’d be walking around wearing a shit shirt and putrid pants. How hard is it to push a fucking button?
Oh, that’s right. It’s not about how difficult it is. It’s all about a cultural prejudice assigning certain tasks to specific genders.
When people tell me that a certain thing is innate to one gender, my skeptical hackles immediately go up… and shit like this is why: My experience tells me that it’s bullshit.
Plenty of us do fine without driving.
robinjohnson @ 49:
It’s still a good idea to know how to change a tire. Never know when you might need that skill – you don’t need to be driving for it to come in handy.
http://www.engrish.com/2014/07/please-check-pockets-for-children/
Caine@50: In fact, the last time I had to change a tire, it took three of us to do it, and I was the only one who knew how to drive.
@44 Donnie
So the question, to my mind is, who does the sheets and dish towels (i.e. what one might consider shared laundry)?
To be fair… that just sounds like a company trying (very hamfistedly) to say “but in our society a lot more women do laundry and men tend not to know anything about it!”
Nah, I don’t have to be fair: with modern washing machines, washing clothes is one of the simpler household tasks, and with a little trial and error one can deduce the basic principles:
1) Remove contents of pockets and belts, turn most clothing inside out.
2) Coloured clothing can stain light clothing (especially new/at high temperatures).
3) Use the appropriate washing powder/liquid/caps for colour/white/black/mixed, follow the instructions on the box/bag.
4) Wools or other sensitive materials can be ruined by high temps.
5) Use a bit of conditioner if you want soft/nice-smelling clothes.
Donnie (#44)
That’s how I do mine. And I do my best to avoid clothes that won’t let you get away with that, because fuck unnecessary complications.
I grew up living with two sisters, and we all learned how to do laundry pretty early. My dad also did a lot of laundry. I have a lot of memories of my dad watching taped NASCAR races while sorting socks and folding towels (he was and is also a big nerd so try not to hold the NASCAR thing against him too much).
I’m sort of terrible at laundry. This is why I don’t own anything white. I just kind of toss shit in the washer. I usually remember to pull out bras and a few other items that I then hang dry, but not always…
I like to separate dark things, because black lint on my white shirts is irritating. And I let new things get washed separately the first few times, because I did manage to turn a shirt pink once. And always check pockets, because there’s nothing quite like getting tissue lint everywhere. I never had to wash my own stuff until I moved out of home, but it’s really not that difficult. The hardest part is remembering to check the bloody pockets.
(OT: Why is “separate” so difficult to spell? My fingers keep trying to go for “seperate” :( )
marilove (#56)
I’m only nice to my bras (stick ’em in a pillow case to wash and then hang dry) because now that I have to wear underwire ones, they’ll get destroyed in one wash cycle otherwise. I did try buying a special mesh bra washing container to make things easier, but the one time I used it, all the lint in the load got sucked into it and then into the bra itself. There was a layer of lint in between the lace and the lining on one of the cups for the longest time.
~*~*~*~*~*~
jste (#57)
Cherry cough drops with liquid centers are the absolute worst if they make it into the dryer. But I don’t tend to keep stuff in my pockets enough that it’s a regular problem. The thing I accidentally wash the most is tampons, but they stay self-contained.
re Caine #40
Reebok recalled about 18,000 boxes of women’s athletic shoes ’cause while the name sounded good and was not trademarked, no one actually looked up Incubus to see what it meant.
How about that. Use a brand name and it automatically makes a link to the brand’s web page.
Learn something new everyday.
Any way to prevent that?
Prevent automatic link making, not prevent learning something.
Oh damn. Sometimes I say something really stupid and this is a bad place to do that. Thanks for calling me on it, folks. I stand corrected.
I’m not sure how I feel about this.
On the one hand, they told an obvious and terrible lie, expecting us to buy it.
On the other hand, they felt the need to lie, which indicates, at the very least, that people opposing sexism have some significant market power.
That’s easy, don’t move away too far from mummy. She’ll do your laundry. That’s what my husband did and what his brother did. My husband at least had the decency to hand over some money while his brother kept on bringing his laundry even when he was living in a flat with a godsdamn washing machine. Did I say bringing his laundry? I mean making his father pick him up by car because it would be too much to transport all the laundry by train…
My wife and I do what we do best. I do the laundry. My wife cooks. It may be flattering if someone gives me a compliment for how well I do the laundry, but it is not flattering to hear “let the man do it – it’s his job”.
Pens are worse than cough drops. So are crayons. We get around this by all having the same low standards for our clothing.
A pen is what spelled doom for our current washing machine. People, always check for pens. Check twice when you have small kids.
Zaledalen @ 61:
Happens to us all. Thanks for posting again.
…Rice.
Yes – for approximately three collectors in the whole world.
Although many have tried to believe otherwise, there really is such a thing as bad publicity.
All of these are less important outside the US. :-)
I’m sure it’s much, much simpler: they actually believe what they wrote.
1) “White” clothes, including all underwear, at 60 °C.
2) Everything else at 40 °C.
3) About as much detergent as it says on the container.
4) Skip that fancy “prewash” step, you won’t need that unless you’ve been wallowing in the mud maybe.
I knew that since I was little…
Also, you can avoid a lot of fiddly laundry steps by not having any pale-colored clothing. Alternatively, never buy anything red or dark blue.
In my experience you never need as much detergent as suggested on the bottle or box.
Cold water only for blood. Hydrogen peroxide also works. If you are getting blood out of rough plaster, gauze or a dish scrubby works better than paper towels.
Caine @67, thanks. Even if that shirt tag was an intentional sleazy marketting ploy, which others have pointed out is unlikely, I regret leaving the impression that I approved of it or admired it. For the record, my wife and I split all chores as evenly as we can with no gender based distinctions. She is capable of fixing the plumbing and recently moved a door latch so that it would still catch after the house settled a bit. We take turns cooking dinner. We each do our own laundry.
What my original remark was intended to point out is that assuming marketting people are stupid or naive may be incorrect. My experience is that they work at a high level and play past the end game. It also may be incorrect to imagine they have any ethics or social conscience, even if top level companies have occasionally done the right thing, as vereverum@59 pointed out in the Reebok case.
Marketters do make mistakes. My favourite was the blunder with the Ovaltine account back in the sixties. The company wanted to expand beyond the senior citizens who drank their product and get into the youth market. So the advertising agency put together a campaign aimed at youth – a picture of an attractive young woman lounging in a bed with the tag line “Hi. My name is Ovaltine and you can get to sleep with me tonight.” (Yeah, I know that’s offensiver by today’s standards. Some found it offensive back then.) The ads worked great. College students cut the ads out and put them up on the dorm walls. Problem is, the kids didn’t buy any Ovaltine. And the senior citizens were offended and stopped drinking Ovaltine. The ad agency lost the account. But… would they have lost the account if the youth had bought Ovaltine? Not in that day and age.
Anyway, Caine, I appreciate your understanding.
At my house the chores are done by whoever finds it most annoying when they aren’t done. Fortunately, my guy finds used cat boxes, unmowed lawns, and grungy floors to be supremely annoying. Whereas I hate dirty dishes in the sink, piles of unwashed clothes, and wrinkled shirts. Now that we’ve had some sunny weather I am learning that he finds smeared windows to be annoying too :) The floors look better than they have in years.
I realize this isn’t a solution for everyone, but I’m glad I found someone who knows and appreciates the difference between a clean house and a grungy one.
The tag was bad, the “apology” was worse.
I’m a guy who does the laundry. It involves machinery, dammit, so it is manly. I kept the dryer element spliced together for a few months – I could drag the dryer out, take the back off, put a butt-splice in the coil, and be running again (until I re-checked the price and just replaced the damn thing). I tried to fix the washer, but didn’t have the tool, so I kept wringing the clothes by hand until Craigslist coughed up a cheap one.
As for the clothes, I wash everything in warm water, unsorted. I divide the drying into delicate/elasticated/synthetic to dry on low, and heavy cotton which can dry on hot. I usually finish-cool a big batch on air-dry, as I do not iron. Exceptions for new clothes, and multiple washes for the dog bedding. (The two people with similar clothing get separate laundry baskets and separate processing.)
I found a set of scrubs at the scrubs store that bore a tag saying “bleach the shit out of these.”
Had they been flattering, I might have bought them, as this is (1) amusing and (2) indicative of the sturdiness of the fabric.
This tag? Insulting and non-indicative of anything useful.
Zaledalen @ 70:
Yeah, much like Donnie and his spouse (upthread), and you and yours, we each do our own laundry as well.
Sorry, I mean the amounts suggested for the softest water. :-) The suggested amounts are for when you’ve wallowed in the abovementioned mud (if not grease); but I’ve lived on limestone pretty much all my life.