Me, You, and Meme Reviews: Bic for Her Pens
Earth, 2012. A simpler place, a stupider place. Kinda.
On this little planet, a little over 8 years ago, Bic dropped something on all of us, a product line no one was expecting and few seemed to be asking for. Since the 1950s, Bic had been delivering pen upon pen to our clutching, grabbing hands, but it took them 60 years to try to capitalize on all shapes and sizes of hands.
Enter the Bic for Her.
Gendered items have appeared innumerable times on stores shelves and in advertisements. Women get their own razors, own lotions, own shampoos, and plenty of pink-tinted tools. Do any of those make sense? Marginally. Women’s bodies are, on average, different from a man’s, and might - MIGHT - be better suited to products specifically tailored to them, for one reason or another. Gentle soaps, pH balanced hoohah, razors designed to (force them into thinking they need to) reach sensitive areas. All of that, for the most part, checks out okay.
But Bic tried to do this with pens. Pens.
We’d had pink and purple and thin pens for years. Nothing about regular pens really prevents a woman from using them. But Bic saw (what they thought was) an untapped edge of the market, and Bic pounced. They brought us Bic for Her pens and we brought them wrath, outrage, and a deluge of sarcastic reviews.
Buzzfeed articles were littered with screencaps of these reviews, but it wasn’t just garbage-y listicle websites that took notice. Huffpost, The Daily Mail, Adweek, and Forbes all have similar articles reacting to the outpouring of snarky reviews. Ellen talked about them on her show. Ellen! Remember when we had better feelings about her? Well she was on the right side of this debacle.
Bic for Her pens are, in a word, unnecessary. And offensive. And stupid, and hilarious, and sad, and remarkable, ALL at the same time. That this happened, that an entire company - a household name, one of the biggest in the industry - that they somehow approved this all the way from conception to production to promotion and delivery is nothing short of amazing.
Here are some of the words that mark the packaging of a Bic for Her set of pens:
Beautifully smooth
A Fashionable accessory for personal expression
Elegant silhouette and jeweled accents add style and fashion
They are available in pinks and purples. They feature filigree from the plastic chamber, over the rubber grip, all the way to the metal tip. Just gorgeous. And stupid.
Below are just a few of my personal favorite reviews, and as you can see, they were written well after the initial wave of “what the heck is this idiocy?”
SO WHAT’S THE POINT OF ALL THIS?
Glad you asked. I bought myself some Bic for Her pens. I aim to touch my feminine side and figure out how offended I should be about this whole thing. Then, me, myself, and Matt will write a meme review and a real review of the pens. But you’ll have to wait another week to see it.
