Oddball Update

Swedish furniture-maker IKEA made headlines today after taking heat from Norway’s prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik. Apparently Mr. Bondevik believes that IKEA is discriminating against women because their furniture assembly instruction manuals only depict men or asexual cartoon figures building their products.

IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds.

“This isn’t good enough,” Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was quoted Thursday as telling the daily Verdens Gang. “It’s important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations.”

“They should change this,” he said. “There’s no justification for it.”

You know what I think there’s no justification for? Anybody expending this much energy on finding bias where clearly none exists. In fact, the irony here is that IKEA made a conscious choice to create their manual illustrations the way they did so as not to offend certain other cultural groups. The best solution would be to use vague cartoon characters or stick figures whose gender is indeterminate, but according to the news story, IKEA is already doing that:

Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear.

This reminds me of some marketing / help documents I created for the company I work for, most of them two or three years ago. Back then I was in a design phase where I liked to use a lot of iconography, much of it also in the somewhat cartoony/friendly vein. Each time I wanted to represent the user, I would employ a silhouetted figure with no discernable body shape or even hair on its head. You know, something that people would recognize as a person, but not as a man or a woman.

I took so much ridicule for those stupid fucking figures. Some people guffawed that it looked like the dude was as bald as Patrick Stewart. Others (female employees, of course) asked me why I didn’t depict women there instead. Uh…why do I have to depict either males or females? Can’t we just use little asexual restroom-sign human whose gender could only possibly exist in your own dirty imagination? Isn’t that good enough? So in a way, I can sorta relate to what IKEA is going through—no matter how far you dumb down something to avoid offending anyone, somebody will always complain. They’ll bitch because they have some personal problem with what you’re doing, but they always veil it in some kind of “greater good” mentality like they’re sticking up for poor downtrodden people somewhere. In reality they’re just hypersensitive twits who would legislate against ever being offended if they could. Or they’re trying to curry favor with somebody. Isn’t that how politicians subsist, anyway? By currying favor with people who can do stuff for them?

But really, what it comes down to is, I just can’t understand why some people are offended when their particular group—race, sex, religion, whatever—isn’t explicitly represented in completely meaningless things like furniture instruction manuals. What, because they don’t specifically show women building furniture, that means women can’t build furniture? Because you have your own problems if that’s the deduction you naturally arrive at.

Anyway, I’ve said all that needs to be said. You know who I feel most sorry for in this flap? The poor people at IKEA who design the instruction manuals, who are now probably gonna have to appease the complainers by revising all of their illustrations!

Categorized as Headlines