Ethical Ocean insists on putting you in a binary gender box. So much for Social Change.

[firecat]

For some reason I came to the attention of the company http://www.ethicalocean.com/ which is an online marketplace for products that it deems ethical. Its Wikipedia article says it offers ethical products in six categories: Eco-Friendly, Organic, Fair Trade, Animal-Friendly, People-Friendly and Social Change.

I care somewhat about the ethics behind products I buy so I went to look at the web site. You have to sign up before you can look. You can sign up with your Facebook account or with an email address. If you put in your email address, you are required to specify your gender and choose whether you care most about "rights," "environment," or "animals."

I guess I'm naive to expect that a company that is supposed to care about ethics, rights, and social change would have a clue that gender isn't binary and that gender isn't any of its effing business.

Comments

[delight]

Have you contacted them about this/do you have the mental capacity &or spoons right now to do this/would you like someone else to?

[firecat]

I unsubscribed from their mailing list; there was a field offering the option to explain why, and I explained.

I don't currently have the energy/spoons for more than that. If other people care + have the energy/spoons + think it would be worthwhile to complain, I would welcome it.

[centuryplant]

Also they're more interested in getting you to spam your friends than actually allowing you to buy things.

[firecat]

Aha!

[evilawyer]

Partner Facebook has a strong need to know. F*uck 'em all, I say. Or maybe don't. Whichever would annoy them most.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Rrrrrgh. They care more about "accurate and effective marketing" than they do about actual human rights, I see. Lovely.

[firecat]

Indeed. (Not that any marketing that would require me to pick a gender would be accurate as far as I am concerned. But gender variant folks are just an unimportant outlier to them, I suppose.)

[graymalkin13.livejournal.com]

What elynne said.

Also, I don't think the general public comprehends yet that gender isn't binary, and the general public includes people who run "ethical" new-age-type businesses. It's one thing to put a picture of a sea turtle on your website. It's quite another to understand reality. (Given some value of "reality" that includes nonbinary notions of gender.)

Also, how dare they try to make me choose whether I care most about "rights," "environment," or "animals"? As if those things are separate from each other?

Marketing (on the internet and otherwise) has always been about trying to get as much information as possible about who you are. If you want to deal with this company, I suggest doing what many people have been doing since internet marketing began: lie. They certainly don't deserve to know anything about your soul.

[firecat]

Even Google+ has more than two choices for gender, and they're utterly clueless. Facebook used to let you opt out of picking a gender, but I guess they don't any more.

And yeah, those things are definitely not separate from each other.

The idea of lying to do business with an ethical company is amusing...

(Note: I'm not saying lying is never ethical. But in this case, since "complain and walk away" is also an option, I'm choosing that instead.)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

never mind that, why do they need to know *anything* about you?

[treecat]

That's my question. If I have to register before i see what they are selling, I either leave or completely lie about everything. More often the first.

And asking for my contacts first? Proof that they don't define ethics the way I do, so they've just lost their point of existence to me.