Acer responds to claims its gaming laptop intro was misogynistic: 'Acer makes no difference in gender, our objective is to make technology available to everybody'
Last week, alongside announcing the new Nitro Blaze 7, and a slew of gaming laptops, Acer's Valerie Piau soured the announcement by linking the aesthetic of its new Nitro V 14 gaming laptop with the rise of «women and casual gamers» in the gaming space.
You can listen to that clip from the conference here. In it, Piau says «Within gamers and gaming, almost half are female, so women and casual gamers are on the rise, and so is the search for a gaming laptop that is not just powerful but also beautiful.»
In this IFA conference intro for the laptop, the implied rationale for explaining why this laptop is good for women and casual gamers is because its white colour is very pretty, and it's more beautiful as it drops the gamer aesthetic. And this clumsy framing has not gone down well.
Implying that something is inherently for women based on it looking pretty is not only a tired and misogynistic trope—one we've seen since the invention of marketing—but lumping women with casual gamers implies that hardcore gaming is a man's pursuit. There's not really any argument put forth as to why casual gamers and women are linked together there, other than that they both seem to enjoy aesthetics. This seems like an especially strange comment to make, given how RGB-laden PC gaming has been for the last few decades—a hobby stereotypically associated with, and marketed to, men.
Laptop Mag had a chance to talk with Eric Ackerson, the Associate Director of Product Marketing at Acer America, who seemed to condemn the implication of this line, but without condemning the line itself. He says: «I think it's absolutely horrible to try and say it's a gender-related colour.»
This is all before talking about the «pink tax» that can come as a result of any kind of gender-related marketing along these lines. Due to the restrictions of their chassis and weight, small machines often end up being more of a premium device, despite being relatively underpowered when compared to their larger brethren,
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