Last Friday, PepsiCo unveiled what will likely be the winner of October’s coveted “Who Can Offend the Most People with its Marketing Strategy?” award. It takes the form of an app for the iPhone, called “Amp Up Before You Score,” designed to promote the Amp energy drink to its target demographic (apparently males between the ages of 17 and 30 who have iPhones).
In theory, the application is designed to be used by men to get pointers on how to attract women. In practice, though, the application has been used by women to claim Pepsi is objectifying females.
Out of curiosity, I decided to search the Apple store for the offending app and see exactly how sexist it looked. According to the application’s description, it groups women into 24 categories such as Aspiring Actress, Goth Girl and Treehugger and tailors its advice to the individual. To quote the description: “Is she an Artist? Quote some Picasso. Indie Rocker? Here are her favorite songs. Sorority Girl? Good thing you know the Greek alphabet.”
OK, based on that, I can see how Pepsi meant this to be a harmless attempt at humor geared at its intended audience. And I can also see how feminists, who have gotten bored of complaining about whatever feminists were complaining about in September, might see this as sexist. But I still couldn’t make any definite conclusions either way, so I decided to download it and see what the big deal was (purely out of academic curiosity, mind you).
Before it would download, I got a message I’d never seen before, “IMPORTANT: This product contains material that may be objectionable to children under 17.”
“Oh, this should be interesting,” I thought.
When the download finished, I decided to start by testing the limits of this app as an actual means for connecting with women. So, I immediately searched the list of “categories” for what I thought would be the most difficult type of woman to attract, which I deemed to be the “Out of Your League” woman.
I selected this category, and the app displayed the heading: “Don’t look at us – this is a lost cause.” Looks like we’re off to a bad start. All it offered was a few “Hail Mary Passes,” which contained pickup lines ranging from “Where’s the men’s room?” to “Excuse me, do you mind moving? You’re blocking everyone’s view of me.”
I wasn’t able to find anything that actually appeared useful for picking up women (or anything particularly sexist for that matter). But, hey, the application said the “Out of Your League” woman was a lost cause, so maybe it’s my fault for choosing the most difficult one.
So I decided to move down to an ever-so-slightly more realistic “category” of woman, the “Women’s Studies Major.” And sure enough, the app had much more in the way of resources. It allowed me to jump straight to the Wikipedia article on feminism, or figure out who my new favorite singer is supposed to be (pro tip: Ani DiFranco). I can even pull up “Feminism Tweets,” which appear to be any tweets containing the word “feminist.” For example, the first result read, “If you want some feminist outrage, download Pepsi’s ‘Amp Before You Score’ app.” And, almost prophetically, the other “feminist tweets” the app returned were all expressing various degrees of feminist outrage.
After I looked through the application for a while longer, I had seen enough to conclude it is not sexist. Yes, OK, it does stereotype women into potentially offensive classifications. I’ll give it that. But even though no one will ever admit it in mixed company, almost every guy talks like that regularly when in the presence of other men.
Or so I hear.
The truth is, while women are talking about relationships or their feelings or whatever women talk about amongst themselves, men are making crude and potentially offensive jokes like the ones on display in the Pepsi app. There’s virtually no guy out there who genuinely believes women are objects – the average guy’s sense of humor just stopped developing after he hit puberty, and that kind of thing is still funny to him.
So please, ladies, give the application a break. It’s just trying to relate to guys on their level, childish and immature as that may be. The people at PepsiCo aren’t trying to push a male chauvinist agenda on anyone; they’re trying to sell drinks. Your time is much better spent protesting real issues, like sexual assault or the unrealistically high beauty standards for women in media . or that other feminist issue that I read about on the Pepsi app. It was something about employment discrimination, I think.
McNeill Williford is a senior majoring in industrial engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].