too cynical, or not cynical enough?

[rone]

The Iron Man 2 Dr Pepper limited edition cans feature Tony "Iron Man" Stark and Ivan "Whiplash" Vanko on the regular Dr Pepper cans, and Pepper Potts and the Black Widow on the Diet Dr Pepper cans.

[Poll #1577122]

Comments

[jwgh]

argh. Why did I not notice this?

[wisn.livejournal.com]

If only I drank Dr. Pepper so that I could boycott this injustice!

[jwgh]

To follow up, I got a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper with Tony Stark on it at lunch.

[oh6.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, now I get it. Sheesh.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

May I link to this?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Always; linking policy in my profile.

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

Come on, everybody knows that chicks are always on diets and manly men never diet.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Sugar makes you strong and aspartame makes you hott. That's just the rules.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

Voted 'coincidence' by application of Hanlon's Razor.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Objection! Assuming that stupidity precludes conspiracy.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

+1

[palecur.livejournal.com]

Was going more with 'stupidity went on autopilot and used unexamined stereotypical assumptions' than 'stupidity deliberately chose to exercise such'.

[dagon.net (from livejournal.com)]

Too many people forget the last part of the Hanlon's Razer formalism. "Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" is a good start, and you need to add "but you can't rule out malice completely" to make it fully general.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Interesting: In Kansas, all the Diet Dr. Pepper cans have Iron Man....

[xythen.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I would consider this conspiracy so much as market share. In my completely anecdotal experience more women drink diet soda.

One anecdote that stands out has to do with the "Friends" tie-in with Coke products. Coke wanted some of the women to appear in the campaign drinking regular coke. The actresses had a hard time with this because they only drink diet coke- so they agreed to change the ads to feature the diet soda.

I'm not sure I would attribute this to malice and oppression or even stupidity. They probably have millions of dollars of research saying that more women than men drink diet soda.

You could go into the whole chicken and egg thing with who pushed women to drink diet sodas first: Business or did women demand low-calorie options?

[zeborah]

And why might it be women in particular who demand low-calorie options, hm?

[xythen.livejournal.com]

Because, since the beginning of consumerism, women have been pushed to conform to impossible standards of beauty... long before soda was the gleam in any ad executive's eye.

[zeborah]

Right. And of course this soda illustration didn't cause that, let alone all by itself; but it uses and benefits from it, and it plays into maintaining it.

[xythen.livejournal.com]

ehh...It's a business. If women, all of a sudden, stopped being a large consumer of diet soda, I guarantee you, whatever they wanted instead, would be the primary focus of the black widow/Potts ad gimmicks.
To be some vast, oppressive conspiracy trying to keep women down, at this point, would mean they would offer nothing but diet soda, no matter what the consumer wanted. No one who wanted to stay in business would do that.

[zeborah]

To be some vast, oppressive conspiracy trying to keep women down, at this point, would mean they would offer nothing but diet soda, no matter what the consumer wanted.

That'd be silly: then what would men drink? They've got to offer products for both genders to maximise their profits; all they need to do is make it very clear which product is appropriate for which gender. You can't actually refuse to sell one gender the wrong one, because you'd get in trouble with the law, but you can certainly use subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues to build up the fact that most men don't want to be seen as girly and most women want to make themselves conventionally attractive.

--But no, I doubt they're literally colluding with the International Association of Patriarchs, with secret passwords and all. But if it was a coincidence, then you'd expect the coincidence to go the other way approximately 50% of the time, and I... I'd be pretty surprised if it went the other way even 5% of the time.

So my vote's with "vast, oppressive agreement-to-go-with-the-flow which is quite happy for women to be kept down as long as they get to keep making a profit off of it". Which is just as oppressive in effect if not intent, plus also cowardly.

[(Anonymous)]

In fairness, women (on average) should consume fewer calories per day than men. Men are taller and a much larger fraction of their body is muscle mass, yielding a higher resting metabolism (again, on average). Furthermore, overweight men lose fat more easily than overweight women (on average).

In other words, their are entirely legitimate reasons for women (on average) to prefer lower-calorie products than men.

That said, I agree that women are pushed to impossible standards of beauty.

[epileptikitty.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain soda existed at the dawn of consumerism.

In facet plain soda water started in the mid 1700s (Schweppes I think). The pubkeepers stored it upright and the fizz got out of the dry corks. The company changed the bottles to have rounded bottoms so they had to be stored on their sides.

<a href="http://www.drpeppersnapplegroup.com/brands/schweppes/>http://www.drpeppersnapplegroup.com/brands/schweppes/</a>

[snippy]

Conspiracy of stupid people: men are more likely to drink regular and also (being majority heterosexual) more likely to want to look at Pepper or Black Widow, and vice versa for het women. They did it exactly backwards, in other words.