The recent Lands’ End catalog featured a Gloria Steinem interview that has roiled its customer base. Lands’ End is a family clothing company selling mainly through its mass-circulated catalog. The company also has many contracts for uniforms with Catholic and other private schools. The interview with the dowager empress of feminism prompted the Fr. Tolton Regional Catholic High School of Columbia, Missouri to dump the Dane County (Madison) Wisconsin company soon after receiving the catalog. Principal Kristie Wolfe says it would be contrary to the school’s identity to support a company that celebrates the work of someone who backs abortion.
That was only the beginning of a flood of criticism and loss of business goodwill for Lands’ End. A Google search of “Lands’ End Gloria Steinem” brings up at least a hundred stories on this fiasco, none of them defending Lands’ End as far as I could tell.
Why all the fuss? Most of the news stories I read attempt to explain that Gloria Steinem is controversial (those are the charitable ones) or that Steinem is a symbol of what went wrong with feminism (those are the brutal ones).
Many say Lands’ End’s managers and marketing gurus should have know better than to mix politics into their business model. No argument there, if you just want to sell your product you want the widest possible customer base. If you are wise you realize that politics from any point of view is going to alienate some of your customers. Most companies that depend on the entire public for their business instinctively know this and avoid taking any stand that could be construed as even slightly political.
The one exception might be Hollywood where movie stars such as Julia Roberts apparently doesn’t think the largest possible box office for her movies is necessarily a good thing. Roberts famously said she has looked up “Republican” in the dictionary and found it between “reptile” and “repugnant.” She obviously doesn’t care if Republicans buy tickets to see her movies, and she’s also obviously illiterate and doesn’t know the alphabet because both “reptile” and “repugnant” are found after Republican, not before and after. [So embarrassing! I goofed, or I’m dyslexic or something]
The more interesting question in the Lands’ End debacle is not why Gloria Steinem is out of favor with certain people but why the Lands’ End managers and directors did not know in advance that taking a stance on abortion by featuring Steinem, who touts abortion as a positive good, would cause a ruckus. Why would they put their customer goodwill on the line for Steinem? What did they expect to gain from this?
The answer is easy if you understand liberals. It’s the Pauline Kael syndrome. Kael didn’t understand how Richard Nixon won a 49 state landslide in 1972 because she didn’t know anyone who voted for him.
Dane County, where Madison is located, is similar to Manhattan in that it is populated almost exclusively by liberals who seldom if ever interact with anyone who does not share their politics and their worldview. Liberals tend to live in their own hermetically sealed domains where contrary viewpoints hardly exist and are not tolerated on those rare occasions when someone from the dark side gets over the wall.
The men and women at the top of Lands’ End’s management would have to be liberals of this ilk or they wouldn’t hold those positions. It probably never occurred to them that the Steinem interview would be a huge mistake. They were and probably still are just as bewildered by the reaction they’re getting as Pauline Kael was at Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
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