Silly women and their silly shoes

Oh hey look, here’s another “news story” based on a media release from a marketing company that says women are silly for spending money on some stereotypical thing: Some home truths about that shoe addiction of yours, by Jessica Martin. Well, it’s not by Jessica Martin. The article is by Bianca London for the Daily Mail and published a month ago. Martin did a re-write for Fairfax today.

The flimsy argument is that the amount of money women spend on shoes over their entire lifetime adds up to a house deposit:

Women wondering why they don’t have enough savings for a house deposit could do well to look in their cupboards for the answer. A survey has revealed women will spend more than $57,800 on shoes in their lifetime – almost $3400 more than the 10 per cent deposit needed for an average $544,000 mortgage in Australia.

So, if you never ever buy shoes, by the time you die you’ll have saved enough for a house deposit. Presumably so your corpse can rot in it for a month or so until the bank repossesses it because you’re not making any repayments because you are dead. Never mind the fact that you’ll have a hard time getting a well-paying job to save that deposit if you don’t wear shoes. ManFriend and I tend to have pizza on Friday nights (today, hooray!) – if we don’t do that for the next 70 years, we’ll have a house deposit. We’ll also have died from old age, but I won’t let that get in the way of the re-write of a re-write that I’m gonna pitch to smh.com.au.

There’s another problem with the calculations. From the PromotionalCodes website:

This results in an average annual spend of £570 which, over the course of 60 years, equates to a massive £34,200 spent on shoes.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that a woman in her early 20s who has bought 12 pairs of shoes in the last year will be doing that for the next 60 years. It just doesn’t make sense. Also, most flats will only last one season because they’re made of cheap pleather with crap soles, and don’t get me started on how hard it is to find a pair of boots that look like they’ll last more than a few months.

Mindy has a great take-down of this click-bait at Hoyden About Town:

To say that women frivolously buying shoes is the only thing between them and home ownership is really crap. Structural inequality might have a little something to do with it too. Also, for the majority of women just try and get one of those $100K per year jobs (I don’t have one) without being well turned out with nice shoes and see how far you get.

What Martin doesn’t mention in her re-write is that the survey was conducted by PromotionalCodes.org.uk – a URL that should have made a journalist think, ‘hmm, this survey is probably a load of bollocks and if I pretend it’s newsworthy then I’ll be adding to the whole pile of stinky bollocks that we call stories about women on news sites’.

Snarking ain’t over yet, it’s just more political

The Daily Telegraph‘s Sydney Confidential has reached a new low when it comes to pathetic snarking (a snide remark). Three sentences, 71 words, because the good old anonymous source said Sandra Sully “spent too much time complaining about her shoes”. Not only what the fuck, but who gives a fuck?

Women still can’t win when it comes to being judged on their appearance. If they wear makeup they’re dismissed as being lightweights; if they don’t, they’re criticised for not caring about their appearance. Case in point: today’s story in the Sydney Morning Herald about Kristina Keneally:

Keneally, who is often observed applying and reapplying lip gloss during question time, has immaculately manicured red acrylic nails and a stylish bobbed haircut. She is slim and striking, popular with men, but less so with female colleagues who are never short of catty remarks.

”She’s just so up herself without any good reason,” one senior female MP said. But other colleagues are more forgiving.

”She’s green, she’s untested but at least she isn’t Nathan,” one senior MP said.

When’s the last time you read a news story where the male politician’s appearance was described? Has anyone commented on Della Bosca’s skin? I bet there are male MPs picking their noses during question time but we’ll never read about it. And is “popular with men” a euphemism for slut?