So yeah… Go Girl?

An interesting discussion has followed my original post about Go Girl energy drinks. One of the people from Go Girl emailed me.

This is what she had to say:

Dear Denieal:

I was reading your blog today and was sorry to hear that you do not like Go Girl Energy Drink. Our goal with this drink is to offer women an alternative in the male driven energy drink category. We designed the drink with women in mind hence the drink is sugar-free, low in carbs, and has an appetite suppresant. From our research we found that these are all things women cared about. By making the can and product pink we wanted women to know that this product is for them. In addition to offering women something different we are donating a portion of our proceeds to Breast Cancer research.

We appreciate you trying the drink and hope that someday you will give it another try.

Sincerely,

Angie M. Hermosillo

And this is how I responded:

Dear Angie,

I really didn’t expect that many people would read my blog, so I apologize if my comments about Go Girl offended you or you feel like the product was misrepresented. Having said that I stand by the heart of what I was saying. In retrospect I wish I had written a more eloquent critique, but what’s done is done. The reality is that products like Go Girl energy drink are not marketed towards people like me. They are marketed towards the type of people that really think that the products they consume need to rely on gender stereotypes. I don’t doubt that there are many women that you encountered in your research that felt like this was a necessary product, I just don’t happen to be one of them.

I don’t necessarily agree that energy drinks on the market now are male driven. For the most part it seems like they are gender neutral. I am all for creating products for women, but I feel like having an energy drink that is really focused on dieting issues is not focused on women, it’s focused on women’s insecurities and profiting from those insecurities. There are enough messages in the media communicating the prevalent idea that women need to lose weight. Isn’t it possible for women to have an energy drink that doesn’t express that as well?

The tag line “Beautiful Energy” is problematic for me because it implies that everything marketed to women is on terms of how we look. It makes me think that on some subconscious level consumers of this product think that by drinking it they will become more beautiful, and the appetite suppressant is how that beauty is supposed to come about.

It would be different if there were nutrients in the drink that were designed to support a woman’s body and help fight things like osteoporosis for example. In that way I would feel like this was a woman’s product that was necessary.

I am not sure what your background is but I feel like for the most part you/ and or the people behind Go Girl are well intentioned. I think that it is great that you support breast cancer research, having a mother who is suffering from cancer right now I feel like cancer research is extremely important.

I don’t expect that you will agree with me on most fronts, I am a radical queer feminist for the most part my perspective is not represented in the mainstream. I respect the fact that you wrote me to express your point of view and I sincerely wish you the best of luck.

Denieal Williams