A Singapore department store offered discounted frying pans on Women’s Day, and the reaction was exactly what you’d expect.
In an interview with Reuters, Jolene Tan of the Singapore Association of Women Action and Research slammed TANGS for offering the discount.
“Sadly, too many retailers present [Women’s Day] as a consumerist event to be trivialized through sales and discounts rather attention to the serious issue of gender equality,” Tan said. Women still face sexism, she said, that manifests itself from underrepresentation in the corporate world to laws that allow marital rape.
Tan’s comments drew attention to the discount, and on social media, the offended piled on.
“So many people don’t get it,” said one Facebook user posting under Liu INan. “That’s why we still need an international women’s day and a feminism movement. Why offer discount only on frying pans only? Because women only interested in kitchen utensils? How about smartphones, business suits, shoes, like things a woman needs in a work place?”
Another Facebook user, posting under the name Adrian Wee, wrote that the discount reinforces “the stupid stereotype that men work and women stay home.”
But some defended the TANGS sale. A Facebook user posting as Jasmine Liu said that she enjoys cooking and would like a deal on a good frying pan. “What’s wrong with that?” she asked.
Others saw the whole debate as evidence that America’s culture of offense is spreading across the world.
“This is the legacy of Obama,” a Facebook user posted under the name Jaxon Lee. “Infecting the whole world with his army of social justice warrior supporters…. All this ‘anger movement’ originated from the American left wing.”
