Girl on the Net

Yesterday, as I was sipping coffee delicately from a pink china cup, I stumbled across the news that Doritos are considering making female-friendly crisps. Naturally, I was delighted, and I’d like us to take this one step further. If we’re going to start making crisps I can FINALLY eat without accidentally causing flavour or texture to harm the velvety inside of my womanly mouth, surely it’s time for more female-friendly foodstuffs? I’ve had a go at creating some of my own.

Sprisps

Bowl of doritos fragments and a teaspoon to eat them with

What’s this? This, my dearest fellow women, is a revolution in gendered snack-based eating. Doritos got to the ball rolling by floating the idea of crisps that would ‘have less of a crunch and be a generally cleaner eating experience’ but they really need to follow through on this properly. According to the CEO of Doritos’ parent company PepsiCo, women “don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces, and the flavour, into their mouths.”

It seems to me that the main problem here is embarrassment. Women are embarrassed to eat crisps gleefully in front of people. That could, potentially, be because society has focused so heavily on telling women what to eat, and how they must maintain a ladylike demeanour that is incompatible with licking their fingers.

But more likely it’s just that women are shit at eating crisps.

My ‘Sprisps’ will solve this problem once and for all: a packet of crisps that comes pre-crunched, down to tiny powdery fragments. No finger-licking, because they’re designed to be eaten from a bowl with a teaspoon just small enough to fit in your ladymouth. And no embarrassment, because thanks to the bowl you have to eat them in the comfort of your own home instead of ruining someone’s day by forcing them to watch a woman nourish herself.

Spoon crisps. Sprisps. Tell all your mates.

Spaghetti, but shorter

You know how you – a woman – have to put on all lipstick and look pretty and that? Well, as a fellow woman I am familiar with the burning humiliation of having gone to all that bother only to ruin it by accidentally eating some food that messes up my face. The primary culprit? Spaghetti.

So I’ve invented a new kind of spaghetti. Tastes exactly the same as the old spaghetti, but it’s 60% shorter. Eliminates the risk of getting sauce on your chin, or having to make accidental slurping noises if a stray bit sticks out of your mouth when you eat it.

Bloody difficult to keep on a fork, mind you, but we’re women! If we can secure the right to vote then surely we can learn to eat slightly more difficult pasta.

Spaghetti but shorter, for women, because that is what women need

Not convinced, ladies? How about now?

Revolutionary pink spaghetti designed with women’s tastes in mind

I knew you’d love it. New, shorter spaghetti, designed especially for women.

We’re going to call it ‘spagHERtti’, because we’re cunts.

Custard, but pink

This one does what it says on the tin, and mark my words: the tin will be VERY CLEAR that this custard is for women. We’ll shout about how low in calories and fat it is, because women must know at all times that any pudding-based enjoyment will come at the expense of later judgment about their body.

Our ads will feature a muscular yet curiously sexless gentleman feeding the custard to a lady with gleaming white teeth, and when she has eaten a spoonful she will look like she’s had an orgasm.

Ladycustard – for ladies who are sick of gender-neutral desserts

Bread that looks like shoes

Shoebread: for women who like shoes and sometimes also eat bread

Why not, eh? Women like shoes. And if you want to spice it up you can always spread your butter and jam to make them look like Louboutins.

Shoetoast: like toast, but for women!

Products for women

There’ll be people who complain about these products, saying ‘hey! Why the hell are you perpetuating the laughable stereotypes that women are still – STILL, IN THE YEAR 2018 – battling hard to overcome?’ To which I will say ‘who are you to decide what women can and can’t have? Feminism is about choice, surely, so women must be allowed to choose what they like, and that includes having the option to choose SpagHERtti or Shoebread or any of these delicious pink treats.’

And sure, SURE, you’ll tell me that actually there’s nothing the fuck wrong with Shoebread, if that’s what people want, but specifically creating crisps-that-are-not-crisps in order to sidestep the woefully tedious pressure on women to conform to ‘feminine’ expectations is coming at the whole problem ass-backwards. And I would reply that maybe you’ve got a point, but I’m still quite proud of spagHERtti.

You could accuse me of doing the ‘ironic sexism‘ thing, and in response I’d mumble ‘parody’ and hope you’d forgive me because sometimes the easy targets are far more fun to write.

You may ask me ‘GOTN, if you’re so sure Shoebread will be a hit, then why not just stick it on the market without relying on gendered assumptions and inaccurate stereotypes as the backbone of your marketing campaign?’ You could point out that although in the short term women have one more option on which to exercise their toast-based choice (feminist!), in the long term I’m contributing to the drastic limitation of women’s choices based on the idea that women as a homogenous mass all behave in exactly the same way, helping to create a world in which young women can’t eat the crisps they like, the way they like, because we have weird baggage about how we expect women to present themselves in front of others.

You may say all this and more, but just wait till you try a delicious bowl of sprisps.