Raise your spirits with ‘lady vodka’

Ladies, have you ever felt that regular vodka is just a little too masculine for your taste? Does its high alcohol content upset your delicate constitution? Have you been praying to the liquor gods for a vodka designed specifically for women?

No, me neither. But that hasn’t stopped Bacardi Limited from coming out with Plume & Petal, a new line of low-alcohol vodka designed “by women, for today’s modern woman, intended to be enjoyed with other women”. It’s pretty subtle marketing, but if you read between the lines it seems to be targeted at women. Plume & Petal comes in three “spa-inspired” flavours, and is packaged in delicate bottles with a somewhat uninspired pastel and floral design.

Look, I get it: being locked inside for months means that many of us have developed a warped sense of time. But there’s a difference between forgetting what day it is and forgetting what decade it is: Bacardi seems to think it’s still the 1950s. The cringeworthy marketing did not go down well on the internet, and the brand has now apologized for its use of “gendered language”.

To be fair, Bacardi is far from the first alcohol company to unnecessarily gender its drinks. A couple of years ago Johnnie Walker did its bit for women’s lib(er)ation by coming out with Jane Walker, a whisky for women. “Scotch as a category is seen as particularly intimidating by women,” the brand explained at the time. It’ll put hair on your chest, I’ve heard.

It’s not just scotch that scares women – crunching is also a cause of consternation, apparently. In 2018 Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of the Doritos parent company, PepsiCo, told Freakonomics Radio that the company was considering a range of female-centric snacks. Women “don’t like to crunch [Doritos] too loudly in public”, Nooyi explained. “And they don’t lick their fingers generously.”

Her comments were not generously received, and any plans that were in the works for Lady Doritos seem to have been shelved. Which is a shame, really; they’d have gone really well with some lady vodka.

Depressingly, there are endless examples of unnecessarily gendered products. Bic has pens “for her”; Colgate has whitening toothpaste “for men” featuring very butch “power peppermint”; Yogi Tea has “men’s tea” which is, apparently, tailored to men’s “spicy taste”. I regret to inform you that there are even gendered dog treats.

These products aren’t just completely pointless, they’re pernicious; they reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. Products targeted at women often also end up costing more – there’s long been a philosophy in marketing that you pink it, shrink it and raise the price. A study conducted by New York City in 2018 found that women pay as much as 13% more for some categories of products.

Perhaps what’s most infuriating about the abundance of ridiculous gendered consumer goods, however, is that women’s needs are frequently ignored in areas where it really matters. Experts have warned, for example, that female healthcare workers’ lives are being put at risk because personal protective equipment (PPE) is designed for men. A 2016 survey found that just 29% of female respondents were using PPE designed for women, and 57% said their PPE hampered their work.

But, hey, while women might be putting their lives at risk because they can’t get a properly fitting face mask, we can take some solace in the fact that they can go home and have a glass of vodka designed specifically for the modern woman.

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