Press a button and a woman’s boobs will grow and she’ll fetch you a beer. Yes, such a product exists!

It’s called a Control A Woman remote control and can be purchased from Borders, Amazon and other assorted gift and novelty stores across Australia. And as lawyer Katie Robertson discovered this week, creating a little media storm can be at your fingertips with just the touch of a button.

Last Friday, Katie sent an email around her Melbourne law firm office:

From: Katie Robertson
Sent: Fri 12/03/2010 2:52 PM
To:
Subject: Control a Woman for $13.95 inc GST

Dear all,

As some of you are aware, I have been troubled this week by an item I saw for sale at Borders in my lunch break on Wednesday.

Following a fantastic morning tea put on at my workplace in honour of International Women’s Day, I popped into Borders Melbourne Central to buy a book.

While I was paying at the counter I noticed the following ‘gift’ for sale:

CONTROL A WOMAN

control_a_woman

I asked the salesman why Borders were selling it, particularly just after International Women’s Day. He shrugged and appeared embarrassed.

Some of you may believe that the ‘Control a Woman’ Remote control is intended to be funny. Maybe it was the range of statistics relating to domestic violence and gender inequality I had in my head following the fantastic presentation I had just listened to at morning tea, but I found it downright distasteful.

Many of you I have chatted to since Wednesday (female and male) have also found it so.

I have written a letter to Borders to express my disappointment at their choice of marketable gift.

I attach a generic letter that you too may like to send.

  • If you would like to send a message to Borders, simply edit in your details (name and address) then print and send.
  • Alternatively, you may also like to write your own letter, this is just to get you going.

Please forward this on to anyone you think may be interested.

As one impressive woman commented to me this week, ‘It will take more than $13.95 to control this woman.’ Damn right.

Katie Robertson | Trainee Lawyer
Maurice Blackburn Pty Limited

The email quickly went viral, particularly in Melbourne’s NGO sector, with others quick to jump on board to pen angry letters to Borders:

Posted To: Borders Customer Care AU

I’m writing to you to voice my concern and disappointment at the lassez faire attitude taken by Borders marketing staff in regards to objections over the Control a Woman Remote Control novelty product available in stores.

I understand that a number of people have written, called or emailed in with their feedback and I wish to add my name to the growing list of people who think that it is inappropriate, eye-rollingly un-funny and just plain daft that this product is on shelves.

Aside from the anachronistic attempt at humour, the message and values behind such a product (which Borders is implicitly endorsing in sourcing and carrying such a product) are clearly sexist, condescending and patronising. I would hazard a guess that a majority of Borders staff and customers are women, and it seems foolishly self-harming that Borders would consider it wise marketing practice to alienate and belittle a significant swathe of its customers and staff.

I have no doubt that Borders exercises significant discretion over the values that the company projects as part of its corporate and marketing image and brand, and would also assume that this flows into purchasing choices that Borders makes on a daily basis. I would strongly suggest that Borders re-evaluate its casual disregard for respect for women (and men) and take this opportunity to inject its product range with the same levels of respect for women that is most certainly the norm across modern, cosmopolitan Australia.

I would hope that Borders management takes enough personal affront at this product to remove it by their own volition, however failing that seemingly unlikely scenario, I would hope that the swelling opposition to this boringly un-amusing and misogynistic product would provide sufficient motivation to rethink your position

Regards,

To which Borders replied:

Subject: RE: Customer Enquiry
From: CustCareAU@borders.com.au

Dear

Thank you for your email and for alerting us to this problem. There was certainly never any intention to discriminate against women with this product and we apologise for any offence this may have caused.

Borders view this product as a light hearted and humorous gift, like many other books and products we stock.

Please understand though that we are taking your concerns very seriously and as such are currently reviewing this product.

Kind regards,

Kate Herford
Borders Customer Care

Followed by the reply:

Dear Kate,

Thank you for your prompt response – I appreciate you taking the time and consideration to reply quickly and update me on your current review with this product.

I understand the argument that these items are not intended to offend and are considered light hearted, however I would advise whomever is involved in the stocking decisions around these items to consider the thresholds of taste that they would consider it appropriate to cross or not.  Would an item humorously purporting to control people with disabilities, gay people, immigrants and so forth be considered by Borders to be light hearted and harmless?  If the item was a ‘leash’ for out of control women, would Borders similarly find it charming and unproblematic?

As someone who has worked in customer care management for a long time, I hope that all feedback is making its way to the appropriate Borders staff, so that they can take as much responsibility as your team does for hearing customer concerns.  I certainly would like the review of this product’s status with Borders to result in you and your colleagues no longer having to defend Borders’ poor decision-making in product purchasing.

Cheers,

After sending the email on Friday, Katie was called by Jon Faine’s producers on Monday after they received the original email via multiple forwards.

Jon Faine: This a kind of novelty, supposedly humorous item?

Katie Robertson: Sure, and I have no doubt that it’s intended to be a joke. For me, it’s actually about respect and it’s about what’s appropriate to sell. I’m troubled by this item mainly because it encourages a stereotype of women as submissive, who are to be controlled. But equally Jon, it encourages a stereotype of men as dominant and men as disrespectable to women. And I’m aware of a number of men, colleagues and friends of mine, who are equally as uncomfortable with this as women. But more importantly, it trivialises important issues of gender violence and gender inequality in society.

Lauren Thompson from Borders was offered right of reply:

Jon Faine: I don’t think I lack a sense of humour, but has this gone too far?

Lauren Thompson: Yeah, look, I’ve got to honest with you, we’ve actually been retailing Control A Woman, alongside Control A Man. I don’t feel that it’s necessarily specific to any particular gender, there’s almost no one who’s been off limits in this gag.

Jon Faine: Is either of them funny?

Lauren Thompson: Look, I think they are quite funny. They are meant to be humourous, they are meant to be based on gender stereotypes. These are time honoured jokes between men and women about the differences between men and women. The Control A Man remote, for example, allows you to force your partner to put the toilet seat down, to stop them snoring and farting, to make them buy you flowers, buy you chocolates. All I can say in its defence is that it’s base level humour, but it’s meant to be a bit funny, a bit of a gimmick, something that you might buy for your best mate before a stag night or a hen’s night.

Faine: That would be stocked in a different shop to yours wouldn’t it?

Thompson: not necessarily… but the majority of our content is books and i think if you take a view that we should pull off shelves anything that could be offensive, which may vary from person to person, it may differ. But if you take that view in a large bookstore like Borders, you’re dealing with potentially censorship issues and having to remove a lot of things from the shelves.

Thompson then proceeded to say that Borders had sold out of Control A Man remotes. However, according to several Borders staff, both current and former, that Crikey spoke to, Borders have long stocked the Control A Woman remote. It was one of the biggest sellers for Christmas 2008. But no staff have ever spotted the elusive Control A Man remote and no Borders store in Australia has it in stock.

When contacted by Crikey, Thompson said “We’ve had trouble getting repeat stock (of Control a Man).We could never get as much stock of it as Control a Woman. We just stock Control a Man and Control a Woman, but there is Control a Child, Control a Dog, Control a Cat. The head office says they did stock Control A Man in all stores at least in the 18 months. The Control A Man was sold at Borders Melbourne Central and it is listed as an active line in our stock. There is no stock currently, but they’ve had requests for it and have it on order and are trying to get back in stock across all stores”.

Thompson said there had been increased requests for Control A Woman in the last week and despite the media coverage, they had no intention of not stocking the product.

Even The Oz’s Greg Sheridan decided to weigh in on it when he went on Jon Faine directly after Katie to talk about “foreign affairs and international relations”.

Sheridan: I must say, I’m with Katie on this matter, i think that’s a pretty tacky thing for Borders to be selling altogether.

Jon Faine: It’s the sort of thing I’d expect you’d find in a s-x shop, in which case you’d have gone there looking for it rather than stumbling across it in a bookshop.

Sheridan: Yeah, you don’t go to Borders to buy a Control-A-Woman gizmos. I must just say Katie’s 100% right on this score and I’m a bit astonished that Borders took the attitude it did.

By the following day the story had made it on to The 7pm Project and Kerri-Anne and into the Herald Sun, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Katie was turning down offers from various news stations to appear.

“It just started out as I’m writing a letter to Borders to complain and it just spiralled. But it’s been pretty personal, people, mainly men have been saying some pretty nasty things. If a women gets annoyed about something, she’s hysterical,” says Katie.

And that’s the key word here, for all your media content production needs  — hit the h button for hysterical.