Are women exploited by higher product prices?
In response to this article:
The Costs of Womanhood
https://medium.com/predict/the-costs-of-womanhood-340cef5279bf
The writer is a "male feminist" and of course a supporter of the Marxist Critical Race Theory and DIE. All you have to see is the "diverse" photo he chose to use for his article.
He says: "There is no such thing as equality of the sexes when it comes to how much it costs to simply exist."
I agree - men pay many times more, often the ultimate price, ending their lives by suicide far more often than women!
My comment posted under the article
You are joking, right? Please tell me you are joking!
You are talking about a capitalist market where prices are set entirely by customer demand!
Contrary to the the ignorant assumptions by Marxists & others who think that prices are somehow "objective" and "driven by cost", the cost of labor and materials is irrelevant in terms of consumer prices, which are set based on what customers are willing to pay.
The client does not know your production cost or your labor cost and he doesn't care. He only knows what the product is worth to him. He will only buy something that has more value to him than the price he pays. Yes, MORE than what he pays. If it had the same value as the money he pays, in his mind, it would be a waste of time. He'd not be feel better after the transaction than before, as he just swapped 2 items of the same value.
The same is true for the seller, but for the seller, the value of the product is typically very low, as he has more of them. So the price is really set by the buyer. The seller merely tries to find the price that optimizes the number of buyers.
Sometimes, a product has more value to the client when he pays a high rather than a low price.
If that sounds crazy, let me explain: in 1987, I got a full page article in BYTE magazine about a software development framework I had created. I had found a UK distributor who was selling it first in the UK, then worldwide. I thought $500 per licence was a good price. He tried that and sold a dozen or so.
He wasn't happy, so he set the price at $5000 and within 3 months, he had sold 100 licenses. I was shocked: why would people be willing to pay so much more? He explained that at $500, it sounded like "something for hobby programmers", but at $5000, it was a professional product. He listed it in his high-end product section and lots of companies were willing to buy. The buyers had high expectations and they were happy with what they got. The fact that I had been willing to give it away at $500 was irrelevant. My "cost" of making more copies was almost nothing (printed manuals and the disks, essentially).
Products for women are more expensive than technically equivalent products for men because women WANT to pay more!
How do we know?
Here's a hint: cometic products such as perfumes cost virtually nothing. I once chatted with the manufacturer of a Swiss cosmetics brand (manufactured in Switzerland) that is extremely successful in China. I asked him if it was true that they had about a 90% margin on those products. Him: "Oh no. More like 99%".
It's all branding, packaging and price. The fun part?
You cannot sell those products to women at a low price!
There have been companies that tried to sell cosmetic and hygiene products for women at a low price with a mark-up of 50% instead of 90 to 99%.
Guess what? Women did not buy them.
Why? Because they thought that they were "cheap" and that it would devalue them if they accepted to buy something cheap to look and smell good.
Women are also willing to pay more for clothes when the supply of those clothes is kept low. Big brands will typically ship only a small number of elegant dresses to each location. Women who dress up fear nothing more than running into another woman wearing the same dress. They are willing to pay a higher price if the supply of a given model is low where they live.
If you had looked into female psychology and talked to marketing experts, you would have learned all about that.
As for the cost to men and women: men pay INFINITELY much more just to enjoy the company of women than women will ever spend on their looks.
A simple date can set a man back hundreds of dollars.
Getting married, raising kids etc. will all be essentially at the man's expense. Even if the wife has an income, she will spend most of that income on herself, while the man pays for everything else.
You might say: "Oh, that's archaic, we now have equality".
A few years ago, a women's magazine asked women around Europe how they felt about sharing the cost of a dinner when they went on a date. The overwhelming majority of women said that they absolutely would, but that would also be the last date with a man who insisted on sharing the bill.
A US study from 2019 found that 1/3rd of women only accept dates for the free meals:
https://spsp.org/news-center/press-release/foodie-calls-dating-free-meal-rather-relationship
The last line of the article is a joke: "The researchers also note that foodie calls could occur in many types of relationships, and could be perpetrated by all genders."
Uhmmm, 99% of all men who try to get a woman to invite them for dinner will find that there is no equality. Maybe some exceptionally attractive guy could get away with it, but his self-esteem will probably not allow it. Women have absolutely no qualms about it.
There are multiple economics studies that found that government transfers massive amounts of wealth from men to women via healthcare insurance premiums and subsidies, social security, pensions etc.
Women live longer and have significantly higher healthcare costs throughout their lives. Neither is reflected in their contributions.
What's really interesting is that in the 1950s, a man with a normal income could cover all the expenses for a family with 3 kids. Then women massively entered the work force, driving down wages as the offer of labor increased. Yes, productivity increased as well, so we got more and better products and services. But the cost of things like housing, education and healthcare skyrocketed. Now most couples can barely afford one child, let alone owning a house.
If one considers dating as an economy as well, i.e. where people have "market value" in terms of attractiveness, the entire "equality" goes out the window - most men are much, much worse off than women!
https://medium.com/@bellehookwrite/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy-a70cbee8e4db
Life is much, much easier for women to a degree women simply do not realize when they complain about such irrelevant nonsense as the cost of cosmetics etc.
It was interesting to get this confirmed by a woman who underwent the changes to become a "trans" man. Her observations about how she was treated as a man vs when people saw her as a woman in this Washington Post article are really revealing:
And then there was the very courageous Norah Vincent, a lesbian who dressed up like a man to hang out with men - at first assuming that she could prove that men had it much easier only to find that she had been quite wrong - her experiences as a man were so hard that she recently came to Switzerland to commit medically assisted suicide as she never quite got over her experience.
Here is the archived version of the NY Times article without the paywall:
https://archive.ph/SPHsp#selection-295.0-849.192
So seriously, when you think that women have it so much harder because they pay more for some products, you might want to remember that men have a much higher suicide rate than women for a reason.