Don’t look now Vladimir but GI Joe’s cheating with Steve Austin

Who remembers that freaky ’80s era action-hero toy with the really buffed, but transparent chest cavity which had visible arteries and lungs and stuff, and you pumped “blood” through it by squeezing the stomach?

Effing ugliest thing I ever saw.

Well bugger my Action Man doll buggering my GI Joe doll, this thread’s still going. In the pink you might say.

Don’t look now Vladimir but GI Joe’s cheating with Steve Austin. He didn’t mean for it to happen it was just one of those things. Their eyes met across a crowded toy-box.

Without getting judgmental about them either way, I think ‘Code Pink’ is probably just a goof on the phrase ‘code red’.

Yeah, we got that. But why ‘Pink’? Is it because they’re women, perchance?

Leigh says:

Elliot I used Code Pink as an example,I don`t agree with them.

And it’s a terrific example, I wish I’d thought of it. And of course you don’t agree with them. They probably couldn’t have even convinced Tojo with the “why were the Americans in Hawaii anyway” line.

They’re a fantastic example of what utter depths of risible stupidity the logic of really “out there” political theories can take a person.

What do you make of that, Sluggo?

What about Code Pink?This is a group of hard core gals not some fluffy girly types.They chose the colour pink.Wonder why?

Well, it’s better than ‘Code Stupid’. I mean, aren’t they the idiots who argue the USA shouldn’t have entered World War Two because it “had no right being in Hawaii” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.

Effing retards…

I often get the feeling that while marketing to the kids can be a fairly superficial exercise, it’s the marketing to the adults that all the efforts goes into.

Don’t underestimate the “badger and nag” potential of children’s taste preferences. Most cereal advertising, for example, is aimed at children and teens because their preferences drive their parents’ decisions about what to take off the super-market shelf. Parents aren’t that interested in Toby the Tiger or Coco the Monkey, let alone being a 15 year old “Iron Man”.

Oh fer cryin’ out… says:

…. but I clearly wrote “gender apartheid”, so it was pretty clear I was not implying a one to one correlation with apartheid in De Klerk South Africa.

Oh? So, there’s some other “apartheid”? I mean, it was your choice of word, not mine. Your “correlation”, as you say.

Time for some musical interludes I feel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaffpKAYcw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qNEkJ6MAyI
and bringing the thesis and antithesis together…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEjkPRp60bU

I’d like to think this was the last word on the matter but somehow I doubt it.

Obviously you haven’t read Barbara Ehrenreich’s superb article on that topic. She, and other cancer sufferers who have written on the web, feel quite put down and put off by the pinkification. Ehrenreich felt infantilised, especially when she received a “showbag” of pink products which included …drumroll… crayons.

Crayons!

For a grown woman going through chemo.

Lymphopo, Twisty and others have also experienced cancer personally and they have a definite knowledge of the territory.

No it isn’t. The ‘market’ here could be viewed as the market for use of one’s time, or life; the market of being, if you will. If people thought it was somehow ‘valuable’ to make and wear individually-styled homemade clothes, then they should ’spend’ the time to learn how to sew. And if they don’t, then they don’t get to enjoy that particular ‘value’. Once again, the market ‘knows’– whoa, stop, too many levels, my head is spinning around…

So maybe the ‘pinkification’ thing can actually be read as the ‘convenience-store’ commodification of what used to be the slow, patient, skillful work of learning to be ‘womanly’ in its historical fullness: buying the ‘pink’ stuff provides instant womanliness, or femininity-in-a-can, if you like. Instead of taking lots of time to learn the detailed arts of things like sewing and canning and other kinds of traditionally-feminine homecraft, today’s modern feminist lawyer-on-the-go buys a pink yoga mat and feels all “Sisterhood is Powerful!” within. The same way some yuppie bloke might read a car magazine and feel all instant-macho instead of learning how to fix cars, or a kid plays that rock-n-roll computer vidgame instead of learning to play guitar, or baby boomers con themselves into thinking they’re being patriotic by getting misty over the ‘Greatest Generation,’ now that they’re no longer at risk of having to sacrifice for their society. Huh. Kind of makes ya see the whole thing in a fresh new light, eh.

Naaah, what the hell am I saying, let’s just stick with the ’spit on the patriarchy’ meme.

You might like to examine the anthropological/sociological concept of reclamation/reappropriation of words, artifacts etc which have historically been used disparagingly.