Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Snorting derisively is the only appropriate response

The article is so inconsequential and ephemeral as to not warrant comment but it serves, I suspect, as an example of the virtue signaling, first-world-problem, bubble-like preciousness that so grates against people and fuels anger against the self-serving elite. From Dear Gap (and other retailers): Listen to this girl by Beth Jacob.

Nobody is at fault here. It is a cocooned journalist mom from the upper class complaining that her daughter likes to wear clothes with motifs more common in boys' clothing than in girls' (dinosaurs, sports, superheroes). Her daughter is of slight build and therefore can't wear boys clothing.

She highlights her five year-old daughter writing to the retailer GAP requesting they better serve her with the types of clothes she wants. There's a lot of the sort of mawkish "girl-power" type ethos permeating the article. The mom/journalist doesn't want to pay more for these clothes.

The commenters are not especially sympathetic pointing out that you can get these type of clothes from museum shops, from Etsy, from various other sources.

This comes down to an ivy-league journalist mom, cocooned in upper class Washington, D.C., complaining about a minor inconvenience and wrapping her carping around a virtue signaling profiling of her daughter's precociousness. The fact that choices are a function of supply and demand seems not to enter her thought process. She wants something and it is up to retailers to provide that something regardless of whether anyone else demands it as well.

For the great mass of Americans, I suspect this article would cause them to sigh deeply in exasperation or, in more extreme cases, snort derisively.

Of all the possible problems out there, this seems pretty far down the list that might elicit sympathy.

No comments:

Post a Comment