Who'd really want to belong to this first wives club?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/catherine-bennett-ann-romney-mitt-speech

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After a few weeks in which Amazon customers have transformed the shopping site into the go-to venue for competitive, gender-related comedy, Bic will be aware that the modern world is no place for a special lady's pen. Specifically, online satirists have vied, so inventively, to express disdain for its pastel Bic for Her retractable ballpoints with a "slimmer barrel designed to fit more comfortably in women's hands", that the quality of pen jokes, in the shape of fake customer reviews, outshines anything recently reported from the Edinburgh fringe festival, including its winning one-liner: "You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks".

Compare this top-rated Bic for Her review: "I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day's tree-felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to Earth between two giant redwood trunks." Another reviewer takes a different view: "I tried these on a whim and I have to say I wasn't very impressed. The applicator mechanism is much too fiddly and the plastic tampon inside far too thin..."

The title of my favourite Bic for Her review, discovered, you may imagine, after numberless hours of back-breaking investigation, would actually work as a one-liner: These Made Me Gay. "Don't let these monstrosities into your workplace," the reviewer continues, "or you will become an abomination as I have! Damn you, Bic! You are advancing the Gay Agenda, knowingly or not!"

Following decades of misery caused by plastic pens destined (once their cristal ‰ housing and iconic streamlined cap have parted company) to leak all over the lining of a lady's bag, perhaps it is natural if many women now conclude that, even in the ballpoint world, what goes around comes around. If, as a woman judge said last week, the theft of a bag is up there, pretty much, with the extinction of her entire personality, then an indelible bag stain must come a close second.

And yet anyone who believes that the scheme of karmic inevitability still leaves a role for human mercy might want to examine the mitigating circumstances surrounding Bic for Her. Consider the context: an Amazon site in which sales of ladies' gardening essentials, ladies' running shoes and ladies' face creams, to name just a few gratuitously gendered and often superfluously pastel and flowery items, continues unmolested by satirists.

Admittedly, the relevant manufacturers have probably avoided making asinine design claims that imply a disabling female weakness and have thus escaped the extremes of online sarcasm. That aside, is there anything culpably Bic about offering gendered products that either appeal or, if you will, condescend, to adult women through the use of shapes, colours and notions that are demonstrably culturally understood to be feminine, thus making them popular with some, but not all, female customers?

Pink phones, for example. Pink car insurance branding. Pink bibles for female religious believers. As for pens, the company might argue, what, other than product description, makes its cheap pastel ballpoints any more absurd than Mont Blanc's Ingrid Bergman La Donna ballpoint from its Diva range, "coated with a mother-of-pearl style lacquer, decorated with Ingrid Bergman's signature. Red gold-plated clip set with a royal-purple amethyst".

If it is Bic's clumsy "for her" designation that arouses such sustained mockery, along with the "designed to fit more comfortably" allusions to allegedly female needs, then the warm reaction to the US Republican party's new "for her" political message, specially designed to fit in women's hearts, should reassure the company that its own, significantly less demeaning sales pitch will one day be forgotten.

Outside the world of Amazon satirists, as Ann Romney has demonstrated, many people are delighted to listen to a gendered politics that portrays women as emotional spectators of the party scene, susceptible only to dimwitted, "for her" appeals relating to love, motherhood, Welsh cakes and visceral lady feelings. Or as Mrs Romney put it: "If you listen carefully, you'll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It's how it is, isn't it? It's the moms who always have to work a little harder, to make everything right".

For this, and much Bic-plus rambling about the female condition – "I'm not sure if the men really understand this, but I don't think there's a woman in America who expects her life to be easy!" – Ann Romney has been hailed as the inspired, super-normal saviour of her husband, whose peerless lady-escorting abilities had previously gone unacknowledged in the commotion about abortion, contraception and rape.

"He will take us to a better place," Mrs Romney told Americans, alluding to some key romantic reminiscence, "just as he took me home safely from that dance." Could Michelle, women will want to know, say the same for Obama? Forget abortions and the economy: did he watch her safely in through her father's front door after that unforgettable night, and then stare fixedly at the house until the light died in her window behind a pair of fluttering pink curtains? Or was Obama the kind of brute who would heedlessly push a girl into an unlicensed minicab without checking if she has the outrageous fare that will certainly be extorted by its leche rous, illegal alien driver?

Anyway, if Ann Romney had been a ballpoint on Amazon, she would have been flamed by now. Damn You, Ann! First, I start sighing competitively and now I find that voting with my heart has turned me gay! Instead, the preposterous lady rhetoric has inspired extravagant praise, even among her party's natural critics. The <em>Boston Globe </em>said hers was "the best convention speech by any candidate's spouse – and certainly the most important".

The obvious question, with British conferences coming up is: could it happen here? Although Mrs Cameron is generally kept busy designing pink bibles and notebooks with OMG on the front, that there is no depth guaranteed unplumbable by a loyal political wife has previously been demonstrated by Cherie Blair, introduced to voters as a "keen knitter", and by Sarah Brown, extolling the goodness of Gordon, her "hero". Mrs Cameron confided, equally objectively, that Dave has "never let me down" (albeit that was before the Rebekah lolz). If this drivel rarely gets the kind of savaging it deserves it's possibly because the language, however cringe-inducing, is so personal.

Maybe Mrs Brown genuinely thinks we'd like, as women, to replace her in the Kirkcaldy bedroom, watching while Mr Brown wakes up "thinking about the things that matter". President Obama wakes up, Michelle says, all "snore-y and stinky". Mr Romney, halitosis levels unrecorded, "will wake up every day", says Mrs R, "with the determination to solve the problems that others say can't be solved". Fine. But are any of these politicians proven to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles?