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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30991 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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  1. The main reason why similar items targeted towards men and women sometimes have different prices isn't for the purpose of trickery, it's because prices are heavily determined by factors like economy of scale. People value product differentiation enough to sometimes buy the more expensive product, so companies make it, and then they charge a price that recoups the money they spent on manufacturing/shipping/etc. another product line.

  2. The actual overall "pink tax" seems to be approximately zero:

Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?

Further, we show that segmentation involves product differentiation; there is little overlap in the formulations of men’s and women’s products within the same category. Using a national data set of grocery, convenience, drugstore, and mass merchandiser sales, we demonstrate that this differentiation sustains large price differences for men’s and women’s products made by the same manufacturer. In an apples-to-apples comparison of women’s and men’s products with similar ingredients, however, we do not find evidence of a systematic price premium for women’s goods: price differences are small, and the women’s variant is less expensive in three out of five categories. Our findings are consistent with the ease of arbitrage in posted price markets where consumer packaged goods are sold. These results call into question the need for and efficacy of recently proposed and enacted pink tax legislation, which mandates price parity for substantially similar gendered products.

It is one of those issues that reflects the speakers more than the subject. Why is there a "pink tax" meme? Because many people view the world through the lens of feminism, so when they see a male-targeted product that happens to be cheaper than the female-targeted product next to it they believe this is an injustice and a systematic issue. Feminism's influence as an ideology means the "pink tax" then becomes a political issue, the subject of discourse and even legislation, without ever doing the first step of finding out whether it actually exists. Even if it existed it would probably just be a result of something like women statistically valuing product differentiation more so there's many smaller product lines, but we don't even have to move on to that argument because there isn't a notable difference in the first place.

I can confirm that I have bought womens' razors at times because they were cheaper (slightly) and didn't have the dumb 'lubricating strip' that clogs up with beard if you don't shave often enough.

When prima made that post about radical feminism and self-authorship, I worked on a post about different frames of view determining how people see their own lives and the lives of others. I really should finish that up and post it. Basically my point was just along your lines: feminists believe that the freedoms of men and women are different, and so they have a ready-made reason why things might exist that affect women more than men, and that becomes the default assumption. The null hypothesis is sexism if you have that frame of mind, and you need exceptionally strong evidence to counteract it.

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