Gender Based Pricing

Man, this is a retarded country. It has always had a definite proclivity for idiotic ideas but there seems to be an acceleration of nonsensical "causes" cropping up all over the place these days.

Just this week we have some moronic provincial legislator who wants to outlaw what he calls "gender based pricing" with fines up to $5,000 for anyone who chooses to use different pricing criteria than those he approves of. What a fucking asshole!

By the way, until "gender based pricing" does become illegal in Ontario, this website has adopted a new pricing policy. As of Thursday, March 17, 2005 access to any of the pages on w3taxi shall remain free of charge to all male visitors. Women, on the other hand, shall henceforth be required to pay a small fee of $5.00 US for each page visited. This policy will be based on an honour system.

Female visitors are advised to contact the webmaster to arrange payment. (Cash or money order only). Ignorance of this new policy will not be accepted as a valid reason for refusing to pay.

Question: How come "gender based pricing" is only restricted to a small number of goods and services? Why is it, when you go to the supermarket to buy groceries there is only one price regardless of the gender of the shopper? Do women pay more for gasoline than men? For computers? Musical instruments? Hand-tools?

I know, I know.... there IS gender based pricing here. The reason it is not immediately evident is because items such as, for example, tools, electronics and gasoline should cost men more. Politicians and activists, unlike producers and sellers of goods and services,are endowed with a special gift - the ability to know what price should be attached to a good or service. Everyone else is merely guessing. The fact men are not being asked to pay higher prices for these goods is solid proof therefore, that men are benefiting from reverse discrimination.

Yes, men should be asked to pay more for these items than women do. The fact that they are not asked to pay more is proof positive that there exists a bias favouring men in these other areas as well. In paying the same price for a computer as a man paid, a woman is actually being ripped off.

Ontario legislator, Lorenzo Berardinetti, evidently views himself as a member of the gifted class able to know the "true" or "fair" price of a good or service. Having established, certainly to his own satisfaction, that sellers of goods and services discriminate against women he should ammend his bill to include fines for any business selling non-(clothing, dry-cleaning, hair styling) goods/services that dares defy his innate price sensing ability by charging men the same price they charge women for all of these other things.

Mr. Berardinetti obviously believes strongly in the nonsense he is spouting here. When someone advocates using the punitive power of the state to enforce his own personal opinion it demonstrates a great deal of confidence in one's own infallibility.

In order to approach an acceptable level of infallibility though, I think it only reasonable that we peons, ask for some credible evidence of this awesome gift.

A good place to start would be in getting Mr. Berardinetti to answer this question: Why does the heinous form of discrimination seem to be restricted to such a narrow range of goods and services? Why is it not randomly distributed amongst all businesses? Is it because only people who get some perverse thrill out of seeing women pay too much for haircuts, dry cleaning and bluejeans naturally gravitate to these occupations?

And what about people who try different businesses or change jobs frequently? Why would some male chauvinist who opens a gas station or sells plumbing supplies charge women and men the same price suddenly start disriminating against women when he opens a drycleaning shop? Why does the corner store guy who sells junk food, rents videos and does drycleaning only discriminate against women with the price of drycleaning? Why doesn't he also charge women more to rent movies or buy smokes or milk? What is this peculiar hangup that afflicts these pathetic, soon to be outlaws, that compels them to charge women more for haircuts, drycleaning and underwear but not for Twinkies, batteries and lottery tickets?

When my daughter goes to the local junk food mart why isn't she charged more than boys for the gummy bears, goopy bars and drippy schlopps they consume? Why is it this so called "gender based pricing" seems to apply only in areas where the product itself tends to be gender specific?

Other thoughts:

Do female impersonators pay less to have their outfits laundered because they are not actually women? Is the alleged discrimination in this case against the person or against the item being treated? If female impersonators are not, in fact, being given a break on the price of their women's clothing then the discrimination quite obviously not against the person requesting the service. Rather, it is against the actual item or service itself!

This revelation opens up a bit of a conundrum for Mr. Berardinetti since his proposal does not, therefore, properly belong in the Ontario Human Rights Code at all. In fact it calls for several new codes including but not necessarily limited to:

• The Ontario Laundered Clothing Rights Bill
• The Ontario Haircut Rights Bill
• The Ontario Women's Clothing Bill

And if Laundered Clothing, Haircuts and Women's Clothing are going to be given legally protected rights in Ontario shouldn't other goods and services be given rights?

How about the right's of chairs not to be sat upon by human asses? The rights of screws not to be twisted into metal and wood without consent? The rights of dirt not to be pushed and plowed to provide food for humans? How about the rights of rock not to be penetrated by oilwell drilling bits and mining equipment - "stealing rare minerals, where they can be found"?

The issue is further complicated by the flip side of rights as they are understood in modern democracies. Rights imply responsibilies. What will the responsiblities of bras be once Mr. Berardinetti's heroic initiative has been adopted? Will they have to pay taxes? Serve on juries? Wear bike helmets? Restrict smoking to designated areas only? Vote?

How long will goods and services imported from other countries have to wait to become Canadian citizens? Will they be deported if sold at a price above the one approved by Mr. Berardinetti? If accused of gender based pricing will they have a right to trial by jury?

What about tampons? Men don't buy tampons (most don't anyway - this is just a guess... what do I know.... maybe lot's of men buy tampons) ahhaaahhh! Got you there ... if a man buys tampons at a pharmacy will he pay less than a woman would?

The more you think about it the more you find yourself wanting to ask the impolite question: Where did this Berardinetti doofus come from???? But let's be fair kind reader. Let us remember where we are living. We are living in Dalton McGuinty's Ontario and Mr. Berardinetti is an Ontario Liberal.

He actually thinks this inane farce he is engaged in constitutes meaningful activity! Yaw, yaw, yaw.... i wanna be a politician... Yaw, yaw, yaw.... i wanna do a whole lotta good for people...yaw, yaw, yaw, being endowed with a superior moral conscience I need not produce the merest sump ditch, leave that for the mindless peons I wish to guide and command, ...yaw, yaw, yaw, I am gonna work hard for the people of Ontario (...actually, doing nothing but a bunch of jaw flapping and hand waving while someone else (I.E. private sector businessmen and their employees), do the real work.

Berardinetti, like a true liberal, will uses taxes and other forms of coercion to pretend he is doing something that hasn't already been done by the productive sector.

Who are you kidding man?

Using fines and jails to shift the benefits of private endeavour around just ain't the same as creating those values in the first place. Yaw, yaw, yaw.... Yaw, yaw, yaw.... Yaw, yaw, yaw.... Yaw, yaw, yaw.... maybe they'll name a highway after me, or an arena, or a shopping mall. The people who actually build highways, arenas and shopping malls? No one will remember them. Maybe they'll build a statue of me... and the peons who bow, scrape and pray in front of my image will never tweak to the fact that I represent that band of know-nothing, do-nothing parasites who live like leeches and lice.

"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think." -- Adolf Hitler

last modified:Wednesday,March 19, 2008 at 04:40