Some of us heard the initial warning back in July. “Cosmopolitan and Seat are designing a car just for you,” we were told. “Cosmo have decided to design a car for me?” many of us thought. “But, what did I do wrong?”
“The Mii by Cosmopolitan is being designed to meet women’s daily needs,” continued the threat. The panic-inducing words “most female-focused car yet” and “a tribute to the modern woman” followed. The colour … what would the colour be? “We can’t yet reveal much about the car – though we will say the colour is EVERYTHING” was the promise of doom from its designers.
For “women”, en masse. That ethereal and imaginary group that marketers pretend exist, who all want the same things. And for those things to only come in certain shades, low in calories, and full of soft feelings and romance, because “women” are idiots.
It will be pink or purple – we could guess. And it’ll have a secret compartment for low-fat yoghurt. The steering wheel will be small and dainty, for my delicate lady-hands. And I bet it will come with a copy of Love Actually in the passenger seat, for emergencies.
And if you’ve looked at this latest Mii, the Mii by Cosmopolitan, which was unleashed on a twitching and tired world last week, it turns out a few of those guesses are very close to its final form. Unveiled at the FashFest Gala (because according to Seat, a vehicle is a fashionable “key accessory” and not a mode of transport), the car is purple, and the car is pointless. It’s everything you’d fear a car designed for “women” would be. It’s like someone took all the successful and perfectly workable products that had been needlessly relaunched and remarketed towards “women” from the past few years, put them in a blender, and hit the “Let’s make something worse now” button.
Remember “Bic for Her”, the thin, pastel-coloured pen for weak hands and delicate eyes? The car has some of that in the mix. Bic really broke boundaries in stationery with their patronising pen, but not nearly as much as Sellotape’s “Just for Girls”. You might have thought: “Wait, isn’t it just regular Sellotape encased in pink plastic, created to draw £££s from parents who enjoy stereotyping children by gender?” But no, it was so much more than that: if a little boy-child picked it up, his hands dissolved.
Cosmo and Seat have not learned from Bic and Sellotape. Full details of fittings and accessories of the Mii car are yet to be released, but so far, official statements from the double-headed, yet empty-headed, chimera that gave birth to it are delights of patronising folly. Seat’s reveal starts and ends with infantilisation, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” scream pictures of one woman holding a giant lollipop, and another riding a carousel. If the car is aimed at small children, they’re hitting the target audience right in its sweet spot, but I don’t know about you, I’m not sure five-year-olds should be driving cars.
Cosmo claims that after asking its readers what they look for in their method of transportation, it was told “a place for impromptu karaoke performances, last-minute wardrobe changes, dramatic gossip sessions and emergency lunch-hour kips”. Which is terrifying, if it’s true. That means there are people out there, maybe some where you live, using cars as night spots, dressing rooms, cafes and beds, instead of cars.
What we know for sure about Mii by Cosmopolitan: the headlights are shaped to look like they’re wearing eyeliner – because of course they are – and as well as purple, it will also be available in “candy white” (previously known as just white).
Another certainty – women do not need this car. Just like women didn’t need this car when it was the pink Honda Fit She’s in 2012, and featured an anti-ageing windscreen, and pink stitching on the seats. That happened.
Instead of repackaged and pinked-up cars, pens and sticky stuff, what women could really do with is for big businesses like Seat, and influential brands like Cosmopolitan, to fully understand and accept that we’re all individuals who can’t be bracketed into one uniform group ready to obediently buy from them. Human beings come in many different forms, formats, shapes and sizes – like the cars, sticky tape and pens we use – what we don’t need is to be neatly categorised as pink or blue.