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Virtual Influencers: Harmless Advertising or Dystopian Deception?

photograph of mannequin in sunglasses and wig

As social media sites become more and more ubiquitous, the influence of internet marketers and celebrities has exponentially increased. Now,  “Influencer” has evolved into a serious job title. Seventeen-year-old Charli D’Amelio, for example, started posting short, simple dance videos on TikTok in 2019 and has since accrued over 133 million followers and ended 2021 with earnings of more than $17.5 million dollars. With so much consumer attention to be won, an entire industry has spawned to support virtual influencers – brand ambassadors designed using AI and CGI technologies as a substitute for human influencers. Unlike other automated social media presences – such as “twitter bots” – virtual social media influencers have an animated, life-like appearance coupled with a robust, fabricated persona – taking brand humanization to another level.

Take Miquela (also known as Lil Miquela), who was created in 2016 by Los Angeles-based digital marketing company Brud. On her various social media platforms, Miquela claims to be a 19-year-old AI robot with a passion for social justice, fashion, music, and friendship. Currently, Miquela, who regularly features in luxury brand advertising and fashion magazines, has over 190,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and gives “live” interviews at major events like Coachella. It is estimated that in 2020, Lil Miquela (with 2.8 million followers across her social media accounts) made $8,500 per sponsored post and contributed $11.7 million to her company of origin.

The key advantages of virtual influencers like Miquela revolve around their adaptability, manipulability, economic efficiency, and persistence.

Virtual brand ambassadors are the perfect faces for advertising campaigns because their appearances and personalities can be sculpted to fit a company’s exact specifications.

Virtual influencers are also cheaper and more reliable than human labor in the long run. Non-human internet celebrities can “work” around-the-clock in multiple locations at once and cannot age or die unless instructed to by their programmers. In the case of Chinese virtual influencer Ling, her primary appeal to advertisers is her predictable and controllable nature, which provides a sense of reassurance that human brand ambassadors cannot. Human influencers have the frustrating tendency to say or do things the public finds objectionable that might tarnish the reputation of the brands to which they are linked. Just as automation in machine factory labor reduces the risk of human labor, the use of digital social media personalities mitigates the possibility of human error.

One concern, of course, is the deliberate deception at work. At the outset of her emergence onto the social media scene, Miquela’s human-ness was hotly debated in internet circles. Before her creators revealed her artificial nature to the public, many of her followers believed that she was a real, slightly over-edited teenage model.

The human-like appearance and mannerisms of Miquela and other virtual influencers offers a reason to worry about what the future of social media might look like, especially as these computer-generated accounts continue to grow in number.

It’s possible that in the future algorithms will create virtual influencers, produce social media accounts for them, and post without any human intervention. One can imagine a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque future in which it is practically impossible to distinguish between real people and replicants on the internet. Much like deepfakes, the rise of virtual influencers highlights our inability to distinguish reality from fabrications. Many warn of the serious ramifications coming if we can no longer trust any of the information we consume.

One day, the prevalence of fake, human-like social media presences may completely eradicate our sense of reality in the virtual realm. This possibility suggests that the use of virtual influencers undermines the very purpose of these social media platforms. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter were created with the intention of connecting people by facilitating the sharing of news, photos, art, memories – the human experience. Unfortunately, these platforms have been repurposed as powerful tools for advertising and monetization. Although it’s true that human brand ambassadors have contributed to the impersonal and curated aspects of social media, virtual influencers make the internet even more asocial than ever before. Instead of being sold a product or a lifestyle by another human, we are being marketed to by an artificially intelligent beings with no morals, human constraints, or ability to connect with others.

Moreover, the lifestyle that virtual influencers showcase raises additional concerns. Human social media influencers already perpetuate unrealistic notions of how we should live, work, and look. The posts of these creators are curated to convey a sense of perfection and success that appeal to the aspirations of their followers. Human influencers generally project an image of having an enviable lifestyle that’s ultimately fake. Virtual influencers are even more guilty of this given that nothing about the lives they promote is real.

As a result, human consumers of artificially-created social media content (especially younger audiences) are comparing themselves to completely unreal standards that no human can ever hope to achieve.

The normalization of virtual influencers only adds additional pressure to be young, beautiful, and wealthy, and may inhibit our ability to live life well.

Virtual influencer companies further blur this line between reality and fantasy by sexualizing their artificial employees. For example, Blawko (another virtual influencer created by Brud) who self-describes as a “young robot sex symbol” has garnered attention in part for its tumultuous fake relationship with another virtual influencer named Bermuda. Another unsettling example of forced sexuality occurs in a Calvin Klein ad. In the video, Lil Miquela emerges from off screen to meet human supermodel Bella Hadid, the two models kiss, and the screen goes black. Is the complete, uninhibited control over the sexual depiction of virtual influencers a power we want their creators to have? The hyper-sexualization of women in advertising is already a pervasive issue. Now, with virtual influencers, companies can compel the talent to do or say whatever they wish. Even though these influencers are not real people with real bodily autonomy, why does it feel wrong for their creators to insert them into sexual narratives for public consumption? While this practice may not entail any direct harm, in a broader societal context the commodification of virtual sexuality remains problematic.

Given the widespread use and appeal of virtual influencers, we should be more cognizant of the moral implications of this evolving technology. Virtual influencers and their developers threaten to undercut whatever value social media possesses, limit the transparency of social networking sites, cement unrealistic societal standards, and exploit digital sexuality for the sake of fame and continued economic success.

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Meaning-as-Use and the Punisher’s New Logo

photograph of man in dark parking garage with Punisher jacket

Recently, Marvel Comics announced plans to publish a new limited-series story about Frank “The Punisher” Castle, the infamous anti-villain who regularly guns down “bad guys” in his ultra-violent vigilante war on crime; set to premiere in March 2022, early looks at the comic’s first issue have revealed that the story will see Castle adopt a new logo, trading in the iconic (and controversial) skull that he’s sported since his introduction in the mid-70s. While some Marvel properties (like Spider-Man or the X-Men) could fill a catalog with their periodic redesigns, the Punisher’s look has remained roughly unchanged for almost fifty years.

From a business perspective, rebranding is always a risky move: while savvy designers can capture the benefits of adopting a trendy new symbol or replacing an out-of-date slogan, such opportunities must be balanced against the potential loss of a product’s identifiability in the marketplace. Sometimes this is intentional, as in so-called “rehabilitative” rebrands that seek to wash negative publicity from a company’s image: possible examples might include Facebook’s recent adoption of the name “Meta” and Google’s shift to “Alphabet, Inc.” But consider how when The Gap changed its simple blue logo after twenty years the company faced such a powerful backlash that it ditched the attempted rebrand after just one week; when Tropicana traded pictures of oranges (the fruit) for simple orange patches (of the color) on its orange juice boxes, it saw a 20% drop in sales within just one month. Similar stories abound from a wide variety of industries: British Airways removing the Union flag, Pizza Hut removing the word ‘pizza,’ and Radio Shack removing the word ‘radio’ from their logos were all expensive, failed attempts to re-present these companies to consumers in new ways. (As an intentional contrast, IHOP’s temporary over-the-top rebrand to “the International House of Burgers” was a clever, and effective, marketing gimmick.)

So, why is Marvel changing the Punisher’s iconic skull logo (one of its most well-known character emblems)?

Although it looks like the new series will offer an in-universe explanation for Castle’s rebrand, the wider answer has more to do with how the Punisher’s logo has been adopted in our non-fictional universe. For years, like the character himself, the Punisher’s skull emblem has been sported by numerous groups also associated with the violent use of firearms: most notably, police officers and military servicemembers (notably, Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL whose biography was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Sniper, was a Punisher fan who frequently wore the logo). Recent years have seen a variety of alt-right groups deploy variations of the skull symbol in their messaging and iconography, including sometimes in specific opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, and multiple protests and riots (including the attempted insurrection in Washington D.C. last January) saw participants wearing Frank Castle’s emblem. In short, the simple long-toothed skull has taken on new meaning in the 21st century — a meaning that Marvel Comics might understandably want to separate from their character.

Plenty of philosophers of logic and language have explored the ways in which symbols mean things in different contexts, and the field of semiotics is specifically devoted to exploring the mechanics of signification — a field that can, at times, grow dizzyingly complex as theorists attempt to capture the many different ways that symbols and signs arise in daily life. But the case of the Punisher’s skull shows at least one crucial element of symbolization: the meaning of some sign is inextricably bound up in how that symbol is used. Famously codified by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (in §43 of his Philosophical Investigations), the meaning-as-use theory grounds the proper interpretation of a symbol firmly within the “form of life” in which it appears. So, while the skull logo might have initially been intended by its creator to symbolize the fictional vigilante Frank Castle, it now identifies violent militia groups and other real-world political ideologies far more frequently and publicly — its use has changed and so, too, has its meaning. Marvel has attempted to bring legal action against producers of unauthorized merchandise using the skull symbol, and Gerry Conway, the Punisher’s creator, has explicitly attempted to wrest the symbol’s meaning back from control of the alt-right, but the social nature of a symbol’s meaning has all but prevented such attempts at re-re-definition. Consequently, Marvel might have little choice but to give Frank Castle a new logo.

For another example of how symbols change over time, consider the relatively recent shift in meaning for the hand gesture made by touching the pointer finger and thumb of one hand together while stretching out the other three fingers simultaneously: whereas, for many years, the movement has been a handy way to mean the word “okay,” white supremacists have recently been using the same gesture to symbolize the racist idea of “white power.” To the degree that the racist usage has become more common, the meaning of the symbol has become far more ambiguous — leaving many people reluctant to flash the hand gesture, lest they unintentionally communicate some white supremacist idea. The point here is that the individual person’s intentions are not the only thing that matters for understanding a symbol: the cultural context (or, to Wittgenstein, “form of life”) of the sign is at least as, if not more, important.

So, amid calls to stop selling Punisher-related merchandise (and with speculation abounding that the character might be re-introduced to the wildly lucrative Marvel Cinematic Universe), it makes sense that Marvel would want to avoid further political controversy and simply give the Punisher a fresh look. But what a vaguely-Wittgensteinian look at the skull logo suggests is that it’s been years since it was simply “the Punisher’s look” at all.

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Is Microtargeting Good for Democracy?

photograph of "protecting america's seniors" sign next to podium with presidential seal

“Suburban women, would you please like me? Please. Please.” This was Donald Trump’s messaging at a campaign event this month. While there are many striking things about a statement like this, what particularly struck me is how transparent Trump is about trying to appeal to specific voting demographics rather than to women, voters, or Americans at large. This is not new of course, political campaigns have spent decades trying to find the specific target voters they need to win, but what was once the terminology of campaign logistics and pundits has become public campaign rhetoric. A campaign is able to identify and target voters through a process called microtargeting. But what is it and does it make democratic politics better or worse?

Let’s say that you enjoy a certain television program. What you may not realize is that there may be a significant correlation between your viewing habits relative to others and how you may vote. As a result, when that program goes to commercial, you may be bombarded with political advertising for a certain candidate. This actually happened in 2016. The Trump campaign determined that people who watched The Walking Dead were more likely to have specific views on immigration and as a result, Trump advertising on immigration was aired during the program. This is microtargeting, and through careful statistical analyses of large amounts of data, political campaigns can find and try to reach specific voters in order to improve their chances of winning.

Microtargeting involves the use of a large pool of data that tracks potentially thousands of variables about a person in order to determine the political messaging that you will best respond to. How this data is collected is a matter of controversy. Some of this data can be limited in scope to matters like what precinct you live in, whether you voted in previous elections, etc. Other times, the data can be much more specific including viewing habits, social media habits, personal details, and more. By using various algorithms in data analysis, a company or campaign can target you with online and television advertising, door-knocking, and even mailed literature. You may get different advertisements for a candidate than your neighbor gets for the same candidate because of this.

The issue carries a whole host of ethical problems and concerns. For example, the Facebook-Analytica scandal involved the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica providing such services using data collected from Facebook without permission from users. How this data is collected and who can access it are major concerns for those who worry about privacy. However, for my purposes I will focus on the ethical concerns that microtargeting raises as it pertains to democracy and the democratic process.

Proponents of microtargeting argue that this is just a more effective means for a campaign to reach out to potential voters. The Obama campaign made great use of microtargeting techniques in order to mobilize young people, Latinos, and single women in key swing states. Traditional forms of advertising can leave certain voters out if advertising is based only on factors like geography or party registration. This also means that advertising can be more efficient as there is no longer a heavy reliance on wide-run television advertising.

Being able to recognize people who may support a candidate and then figuring out what exactly will motivate them to vote isn’t a bad thing. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing that political parties learn more about who their voters are and what kinds of things they care about. This may reveal more about what voters care about than what is typically captured by opinion polling, media coverage, and focus groups. Such tools could be effective at identifying and perhaps re-engaging those who have dropped out or are otherwise ignored in the larger democratic conversations that take place during an election year. Likewise, it is not necessarily a bad thing for a voter to get the kind of advertising that they may wish to see.

On the other hand, microtargeting can be harmful to democracy in several ways. Microtargeting seeks to identify issues important to you and to feed you advertising that will motivate you to vote. However, democracy should not just be a matter of appealing to the often subjective and idiosyncratic views you already have. Election campaigns are not a mere matter of logistics, they are a national conversation. Microtargeting enables and encourages narcissistic voters.

Voters should be aware of the larger democratic conversation taking place at an election time and they may not understand these issues if they are only receiving targeted advertising that only focuses on narrow issues in a narrow way. If gun rights or the environment are the most important issue to you in an election, that’s great; but you should be aware of how those issues affect others and what other issues may require the attention of the public.

Another significant problem lies in the irony of microtargeting; it narrows the focus to the individual while simultaneously lumping that individual into specific segmented target groups based on correlations of certain variables in other groups. Each target group has its own interests, motivations, and desires (and fears), and campaigns are then free to exploit these as they see fit. This makes it easier to create conflict between these groups, as there is evidence that microtargeting can contribute to polarization. It means that politicians focus more on voting blocks and less on the public at large, hence why even presidential candidates now speak directly to voting blocks. It also means that a campaign doesn’t have to focus as much on a single consistent message, making it easier to tell different things to different target groups. Political parties choose their voters rather than the reverse. And it isn’t only politicians. The media coverage of the election spends an unhealthy time obsessed with which target group will support who, or how demographics in certain districts have changed over time. The election becomes about the process of the electioneering rather than about policy, character, or other issues of public importance.

Even more disturbing is that these correlations between variables may signify nothing rather than being a predictor of political preference. Models may build incorrect profiles of the groups they are targeting. Indeed, some have posited that this is little more than snake oil posing as science. The advertisements are also less accountable. These are targeted ads rather than ones that will be seen by the public at large. They are often shared on Facebook and social media and can often contain misinformation. All of this can serve to undermine political trust and transparency.

There are great benefits that microtargeting can have for democracy. It could be used as part of a massive campaign to encourage voter registration and voting. Experts will often suggest that it is neither good nor bad, but it is only how it is used that is ethically relevant. However, the larger concern is that we do not understand the effects of the use of the technology yet to know in what ways that it can be used for good or bad. Thus, while banning its use may not be wise, limiting its use in politics seems wise, at least until we learn whether it can function as a tool for the improvement of democracy.

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Smoking Legislation and the E-Cigarette Epidemic

photograph of Juul pods with strawberries, raspberries, a peach, and a cocktail

At the end of the year, President Trump signed legislation changing the federal minimum age for tobacco and nicotine purchase from 18 to 21. This move to raise the federal smoking age was made in response to the popularity of e-cigarettes amongst teen users and the e-cigarette epidemic. To combat this public health crisis, attempts have also been made to ban flavored e-cigarettes. For e-cigarettes to stay on the market, vape companies will need to prove that they cause more good than harm. This proposed legislation applies to all e-cigarette companies, threatening the smaller vapor manufacturers as well as Juul Labs, who make up seventy-five percent of the nine-billion dollar industry.

Juul pods, marketed at millennials and teen users, contain twice the amount of nicotine found in traditional freebase nicotine e-cigarettes These products are especially addictive and are sold in a variety of fruity flavors making them very appealing to children. It’s unsurprising, then, that America’s youth are hooked. In fact, one can hardly walk across a college campus or use the bathroom of a high school without seeing a Juul user “fiending.”

But Juul Labs isn’t just selling their products to children; children are their targeted demographic. Although e-cigarette executives publicly claim nicotine vaporizing devices have always been about a safer smoking alternative to traditional combustible cigarettes, looking to social media advertising tactics from the company’s inception, as well as interviews with investors and employees, children have always represented a main marketing target. Using youthful brand ambassadors that fit the young demographic and advertisements featuring millennials at parties demonstrate the company’s clear attempts to market the sleek e-cigarette device to young people. A study conducted by the University of Michigan two years ago emphasized the dramatic rise in high school students – a generation with historically low tobacco use – in just a single year. And many blame Juul Labs for their irresponsible marketing tactics that created a generation of kids addicted to nicotine.

Even scarier than the addiction that it causes are the health risks. Throughout the summer of 2019, thousands of teens were hospitalized and 39 e-cigarette related deaths were reported to the CDC. Although the vaping illness was linked to vitamin E acetate, an ingredient in illicit THC vape cartridges, since the outbreak, legislatures have had full support of curbing teen vaping from concerned parents across the nation.

Another issue with Juul Labs is their association with Big Tobacco. While it may seem as though e-cigarette companies are the tobacco industry’s biggest competitor, for the most part, the tobacco industry and vaping industry are becoming more and more related. Altria, of Marlboro cigarettes, recently bought a 35% stake of Juul Labs for $12.8 billion, and the e-cigarette company’s CEO was replaced by K.C. Crosthwaite, an Altria executive. These changes left employees concerned and angered with their new relationship with Altria. How can a company whose mission is to provide a safer smoker alternative to combustible cigarettes be associated so closely with Big Tobacco?

While the danger the vaping epidemic presents is dangerous, and the specific targeting of kids seems objectionable, many wonder if the FDA should regulate e-cigarettes quite so heavily. The regulation of the vaping industry is a case of paternalism, where one’s choices are interfered with in order to promote one’s well-being and long-term interests. Some are concerned that the raising of the federal minimum smoking age is an overextension of the government’s authority, especially considering there is lack of evidence that nicotine e-cigarettes cause significant health issues. Similarly, because there are less immediate consequences of teen nicotine use (compared to teen alcohol use for example), such regulations may appear overcautious. There are more practical concerns at play as well; if vape products are banned, teens may be pushed to use combustible cigarettes or illicit vaping products that have been linked to respiratory disease. Although some are concerned about the restriction of personal choice, others view such laws as similar to mandatory seatbelt and compulsory child education laws.

Issues of classism and racism are rooted in the e-cigarette industry as they were in the tobacco industry. Because a large amount of stigma surrounds combustible cigarettes in the United States, smoking cigarettes is especially frowned upon by the middle class, and the habit is associated with those of a lower socioeconomic class according to British economist Roger Bate. Middle-class, adult vapers are conditioned to feel ashamed for smoking traditional combustible cigarettes. Similarly, many feel wronged that e-cigarettes are being regulated so heavily when flavored menthol cigarettes, claimed to be more addictive and are most commonly used by African Americans, remain on the market. Tobacco companies’ use of racially targeted marketing tactics of the addictive menthol flavored cigarettes are eerily similar to Juul’s early advertising blitzes, however, it seems that it is only when “young white people [are affected], then action is taken really quickly,” according to LaTroya Hester, spokeswoman for the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network.

Ultimately, any form of governmental intervention will cause debate about which personal liberties warrant being curbed, what our “best interests” are, and who is best positioned to know what those interests actually are. Juul and other e-cigarette companies might be blameworthy, but for many it’s not clear that the government should go to such great lengths to save us from ourselves.

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The Ethics of Brand Humanization

close-up photo of Wendy's logo

Brand humanization is becoming increasingly common in all arenas of advertisement, but it’s perhaps the most noticeable on social media. This strategy is exactly what it sounds like; corporations create social media accounts to interact directly with customers, and try to make their brand seem as human and relatable as possible. It’s ultimately used to make companies more approachable, more customer-oriented. The official Twitter account for Wendy’s, for example, has amassed a massive audience of nearly three million followers. Much of their popularity has to do with their willingness to interact with customers, like when the account famously roasted other Twitter users, or when they post memes to reach out to a younger demographic. The goal is to make the brand itself feel like a real person, to remind the consumer of the human being on the other end of the interaction.

In an article advising brands how to humanize themselves in the eyes of consumers, Meghan M. Biro, a marketing strategist and regular contributor to Forbes, describes how a presence on social media allows companies,

“to build emotional connections with their customers, to become a part of their lives, both in their homes and—done right—in their hearts. The heart of this is ongoing, online dialogue. Both parties benefit. The customer’s idiosyncratic (and sometimes maddening) needs and wants can be met. The company gets increased sales, of course, but also instant feedback on its products—every online chat has the potential to yield an actionable nugget of knowledge.”

The tactic of presenting ads as a mutually beneficial conversation between consumer and brand has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Studies have shown that millenials hate being advertised to, so companies are adopting strategies like the one Biro recommends to restructure the consumer-company interaction in a way that feels less manipulative. However, not everyone believes this new arrangement is truly mutually beneficial. In an article for The New Inquiry, Kate Losse takes a critical view of conversational advertising. “The corporation,” she notes, “while needing nothing emotional from us, still wants something: our attention, our loyalty, our love for its #brand, which it can by definition never return, either for us individually or for us as a class of persons. Corporations are not persons; they live above persons, with rights and profits superseding us.” On the subject of using memes as marketing, she says, “The most we can get from the brand is the minor personal branding thrill of retweeting a corporation’s particularly well-mixed on-meme tweet to show that we ‘get’ both the meme and the corporation’s remix of it.” In this sense, the back-and-forth conversational approach is much more one-sided than it seems.

There is, however, a difference between traditional marketing strategies and the tactics employed by social media accounts to gain popularity. If you follow Wendy’s on Twitter, it’s because you choose to follow them, because you want to see their content on your feed. For those who don’t want to be directly advertised to, it’s as simple as not following (or if you want to be more thorough, blocking) corporate Twitter accounts. Responding to transparent advertising with a sarcastic meme, an increasingly common and often funny response to these kind of Tweets, only gives the brand more exposure online, so the best strategy is to not engage at all.

Furthermore, a 2015 study on brand humanization conducted by the Vrije University of Amsterdam provides another dimension to this issue. When studying the positive correlation between social media presence and a brand’s reputation, they wondered whether “the fact that exposure to corporate social media activity is, to a large degree, self-chosen raises the question whether these results reflect a positive effect of exposure on brand attitudes, or rather the reverse causal effect–that consumers who already have positive brand attitudes are more likely to choose to expose themselves to selected brand content.” No extensive studies have been done on this yet, but it might provide valuable insight on the actual impact of corporate Twitter accounts.

Using a Facebook page to take questions or criticism from consumers seems like a harmless and even productive approach to marketing through social media. Even corporate Twitter accounts posting memes, while not as beneficial to the consumer as companies like to present it as, is hardly unethical. But brand humanization can steer companies into murky moral waters when they try too hard to be relatable.

In December of 2018, the verified Twitter account for Steak-umm, an American frozen steak company, posted a tweet that produced significant backlash. The tweet reads, “why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I’ll tell you why. they’re isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meet, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems.” A similar tweet from February of 2019, posted by the beverage company Sunny-D, reads cryptically, “I can’t do this anymore.” Both of these messages demonstrate two things; firstly, the strategy employed by modern companies to speak to customers in the more humanizing first-person, to move away from the collective corporate “we” to the individual (and therefore more relatable) “I”. The voice of corporations has changed; once brands were desperate to come across as serious and professional, but now brands marketing to a twenty-something demographic want to sound cool and detached, and speak with the voice of an individual rather than a disembodied conglomerate of shareholders and executives.

Secondly, these brands are now appropriating and parroting millennial “depression culture”, which is often expressed through frustration at capitalism and its insidious effect on the individual. To quote Kate Losse again, “It isn’t enough for Denny’s [another prominent presence on the social media scene] to own the diners, it wants in on our alienation from power, capital, and adulthood too.” There is something invasive and inauthentic about this kind of marketing, and furthermore, something ethically troubling about serious issues being used as props to sell frozen food. The point of the Steak-umm tweet may be salient, but the moral implications of a corporate Twitter account appropriating social justice issues to gain attention left many uneasy. As John Paul Rollert, a professor of business and ethics at the University of Chicago, said in an interview with Vice, “It can’t say anything good about society when depressed people feel their best outlet is the Twitter account for Steak-umm.”

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The Pink Tax (And Why It’s Time Women Opt for the Blue Razors)

Photo of three pink razors in a diagonal line on a white background

Paying significantly more money for a product based almost exclusively upon its pink color seems ridiculous. However, many women are unaware that they are doing exactly that on their weekly trips to the grocery store. In fact, the physical separation of men’s and women’s products in many stores often prevents both sexes from ever noticing the price difference between products. Awareness of the “pink tax” and the ethical debate associated with gender-based pricing has risen significantly in recent years. In fact, both New York and California have made gender-based pricing against the law and many consumers are calling for more states to do the same.

In order to grasp just how widespread and significant this issue is becoming a study was published in New York City called “From Cradle to Crane: The cost of being a female consumer”, which was research conducted to encourage government action. The study, as referenced on an NPR broadcast, illustrated that on average women are paying 7-8 percent more than what men were paying for comparable products in departments such as clothing. However, personal care products are the items most notorious for blatant price discrepancies, being on average 13 percent more expensive for women across a variety of products including deodorant, shampoo, shaving cream, and particularly razors.

In fact, many news outlets including NPR, NBC, and CNN have investigated these price differences at drugstores and grocery stores across the country to understand how this discrimination plays into female consumers’ everyday lives. Karen Duffin from NPR went to a Walgreens in Times Square and found one packet of the same basic razors from the women’s section and the other from the men’s. The brand and quantity for both packets remained the same, however, the men’s razors were priced at 59.9 cents per razor, whereas the same razors for women were doubled at $1.25 per razor. Also, price differences are not exclusive to retailers. Investigative reporting on The Today Show actually depicted gender-based pricing in services such as dry cleaning as well. A male and female reporter both bought the same white button-down shirt from the same department store in men’s and women’s aisles and took them to a dry cleaning store. The male reporter’s total bill totaled only $2.50 while the female reporter’s bill totaled $5.00. When asked about the price difference, the manager explained that the machines used to press the shirts were only made in sizes suitable for men’s clothing, women’s smaller shirts are unable to fit in these machines and thus must be hand-pressed. This difference in pricing between genders introduces the ethical issue of why services such as dry cleaning are designed for male consumers while not acknowledging the needs of female consumers. In other words, why can we not begin to standardize these sorts of businesses so that one sex is not charged more for the same service than the other.

Although a few dollars here and there may not seem like a significant issue for female consumers, these slight differences in pricing for comparable products result in women paying an annual “gender tax” of approximately $1,351 extra annually compared to men, according to the Study of Gender Pricing in NYC. The difficulty in addressing this issue, however, is because it is difficult to determine exactly where in the supply chain the price hikes are added to feminized products, as trade lawyer Michael Cone explains to CNN Money. Cone is convinced that price gouging is occurring on women’s products. The study elaborates on the example of women’s shirts:

“[S]hirts with buttons on the right side (for men)…were taxed a couple percentage points less than shirts with buttons on the left side (for women). He brought both examples to the federal court claiming that US import tariffs discriminate based on gender, however both of his claims were dismissed.” (Sebastian, 2016)

Higher taxes on women’s products, (for example, shoes: the tax on men’s shoes is set at 8.5 percent whereas women shoes are taxed 10 percent) have been under research for over 15 years. The United States is also not the only country becoming increasingly aware of the implications associated with gender-based pricing. In Britain, the issue has been brought to Parliament as women “could be paying up to twice as much as men for what appeared to be identical products” (Sebastian, 2016).

Another important ethical question is if perhaps these price differences are not discrimination at all, and are simply due to legitimate contrast in the ingredients and formulas between men’s and women’s products. However, the New York City study brings up a counterargument that these higher prices are difficult for women to avoid and that “individual consumers do not have control over the textiles or ingredients used in the products marketed towards them, and must make purchasing choices based only upon what is available in the marketplace.” As a result the choices made by marketers and manufacturers place a substantially higher financial burden upon female consumers in comparison to males.

This discrimination deserves more media attention, which is why many of these studies are becoming a call to action for women to become aware of price discrimination in products they buy. This awareness also has the potential to encourage women to compare products marketed to either men or women in a variety of categories, and base their product choices upon unit price instead of merely packaging. Eventually, if women begin utilizing this knowledge to put pressure on companies, more state governments would be willing to introduce a ban on gender-based pricing. In the meantime, it may be worth walking a few aisles further and picking up that blue razor.

 

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Classical Music’s Accessibility Dilemma

As music becomes increasingly accessible in the digital age through means such as Spotify, traditional live-music presentations of classical music have taken a bit of a beating. Even long-standing, socially prominent venues have recently faced financial turbulence. In 2014, the Metropolitan Opera found itself in a $22 million deficit due to shortcomings in both its ticket sales and donor contributions. Desperate to attract more audiences in order to keep afloat, the greatest modern minds in classical music have been forced to rethink how to market classical music to make it consistently appealing to a broad range of audiences. In the process, ethical questions have risen concerning the preservation of the art – is the integrity of classical music being sacrificed as the industry strive to create new events that will ignite new interest?

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The Fashion Industry’s New Target Market

Italian fashion company Dolce & Gabbana recently released a new line of clothing containing hijabs and abayas. People around the world who follow the fashion industry were excited about the new line, which appears to be championing inclusiveness. Muslim women have been buying high-end fashion for years – most of which either stays in closets, or is only worn under abayas – and the brand’s new line appears to be in response to the general lack of fashionable options for Muslim women that can be worn out. Other brands, such as DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger, have also expanded their collections to include pieces that appeal to the female Muslim market. The Muslim market is lucrative, as many women from oil-rich countries shop for expensive, high-end clothing, primarily shoes and handbags. This line is supposed to give more options for expression beyond shoes and bags. Forbes said that Dolce & Gabbana’s move was their “smartest move in years” from a business perspective. Numerous lines have come to set up stores in Dubai, which even hosted its first fashion week this year. Since the sociopolitical culture is currently dangerous for women, Dolce & Gabbana’s new release was considered a move toward demonstrating the potential for harmony between Muslim and Western societies.

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