How to Respond to Clueless Advertising: An Exercise in Self-Esteem

Sarah Dopp is the editor of Genderfork, a blog that explores androgyny and gender variance through artistic photography. I asked her to write a guest post about gender and money. These are her words…

I’ve given up on television and I avoid magazines. I haven’t figured out a way to escape billboards and pay-per-click banner ads yet, but I know how to cope with them now: I laugh at them.


The way I figure it, marketing is about power. Good marketing is about empowering consumers, while evil marketing is about overpowering them. Then there’s bad marketing, which is in a category of its own. Bad marketing lobs its power in the wrong direction and misses its mark entirely, wasting everyone’s precious time, energy, and money.

Those of us who reject traditional gender roles get to face an excessive amount of bad marketing in our daily lives. We threw a wrench into marketing strategy when we took on nontraditional motivations, unpredictable desires, and unusual ways of expressing our identities. As a result, they lost track of how to reach us. Fortunately for the marketers, we’re a relatively small chunk of the population that can be easily ignored. Continue reading at Queercents.