Bog Off Moonpig, and the Male Horse You Rode In On

I'm so pissed off. The Patriarchy* strikes again.

Sometimes, we don't even realise the patriarchy is in action.

I was doing a simple thing.

Personalising a birthday card for my God-daughter on Moonpig.

She turns 11 on Wednesday. Her tastes have changed over the years. It turns out, she is pretty bloody good at golf now. She has an ex-champion coaching her. I wanted to send her a cool golf themed card as encouragement. This is where my pissed-off-ness kicked in.

I did the usual, a wee search on Moonpig.com...'golf' 'birthday'

And got this:

I thought 'cool, at least there are some pics with/of women' and clicked...

Brilliant - all 3 that feature pictures of women have either a sexual connotation and/or are centred around a man...

It's okay I thought, I'll search for 'golf' 'birthday' with all female derivatives and got this:

For EVERY SINGLE 'birthday' 'golf' search - this is the only card that comes up when the sub search is ANY FEMALE category. Also, the female categories are not the same as the male ones:

17 categories for males, 8 for females.

It's 2 thousand and fucking 17.

Apparently, 11 year old girls don't play golf, and if they do, they don't play well.

My God-daughter would beg to differ.

So, Lili, I'm awfully sorry that you got such a lame birthday card with all the funny stuff on the inside COS THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE I COULD SEND YOU.

* a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.