IKEA Homes, Minus The Women | Intentious —- Image Sourced from Original Article Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444592404578030274200387136.html?mod=e2tw
Isn’t it great to see giant, multi-national companies bowing – no, caving – to pre-Biblical crimes against sexual equality in the name of a few sales? It just leaves you with a warm, fuzzy family feeling inside. IKEA, under the guise of “upholding cultural values” decided it’d be in their best interest to wipe out women from their catalogues in order to sell more furniture in super-backward Saudi Arabia.
Yes, as staff working at the Swedish furniture giant know, women are a scourge of the Earth and dare one pose in a bathroom to brush her teeth or in any sort of family scenario, the blow to IKEA sales would be unacceptable. Better to crush them and their equal rights to participating in regular family life rather than stand up to the ultra-scary, knee-trembling threats of retaliation by offended, bearded, ultraconservative Muslims.
The real question is, why sell Western furniture and Western ideals at all, if you can’t include women? Talk about cherry picking values. What a fucking pack of hypocrites.
Here’s an excerpt from an article from The Wall Street Journal:
A comparison of the Saudi catalog to a standard version of the catalog showed that several women photographed in the standard version are missing from pages of the Saudi version. Otherwise, the photos throughout the catalog appear to be virtually identical.
The discrepancy was reported earlier by Metro, a free newspaper in Stockholm.
A spokeswoman for Inter IKEA Systems B.V. – the arm of IKEA that oversees all franchisees including the company’s three Saudi Arabia stores—said the move is in conflict with company values and IKEA is reviewing its procedures as a result.
“We’re deeply sorry for what has happened,” Ulrika Englesson Sandman said. “It’s not the local franchisee that has removed the photos. The error has occurred in the process of producing the proposal to Saudi Arabia, and that is ultimately our responsibility.”
Ms. Englesson Sandman said the omissions were completely needless since Saudi Arabia doesn’t prohibit women from being depicted in marketing material. “We understand why people are upset,” she said.
Saudi Arabia is often criticized for treatment of women that includes forbidding travel, study or work without permission from their male guardians. Saudi Arabia also prohibits women from driving a car.
Based on this, it seems as though IKEA are the stupid cowards who once again set a nice example for the Free World by caving to the disproportionate and in this case probably 100% imagined fear of extremists. Ridiculous.
Go buy your furniture from a company with BALLS.
Related articles
- Ikea regrets editing women out of Saudi catalogue (cbc.ca)
- IKEA Is Really Sorry About Deleting Women From Saudi Catalogs (consumerist.com)
- Ikea Erases Women from its Saudi Arabia Catalog (blogher.com)
- IKEA: No Vagina In Saudi Arabia, Sexism (koolnews.wordpress.com)
- IKEA Deletes All Women From Saudi Catalog (buzzfeed.com)
- IKEA Erases Women From Saudi Catalog (abcnews.go.com)
- IKEA Photoshops Women Out of Its Saudi Arabia Catalog (jezebel.com)
- Adventures in Marketing: Women Photoshopped Out of Ikea’s Saudi Arabian Catalog (curbed.com)
- IKEA Edits Women Out of Saudi Catalog (mashable.com)
- Ikea’s Saudi Arabian catalog is missing something: women (bottomline.nbcnews.com)
In the western world we airbrush fathers out of families for real.