The “Buy and Donate” Model that Complicates the “Perfect Gift”
Thinx is a company who sells underwear that can be worn during menstruation as a substitute or a supplement to traditional feminine hygiene products. The company not only has a pronounced and sometimes sensational (see Redstone 2016) feminist take in their marketing, but also emphasizes the charity aspects of their business model. One aspect is about how its manufacturing facility based in Sri Land values female leadership, employee well-being, and environmental sustainability (Thinx 2020); another aspect is that for “every pair of Thinx that the Western women purchase,” the company donates seven washable pads to women in a developing country through a Uganda-based for-profit organization, Afripads, whom Thinx also give money to, to help the organization “grow” (Pastorek 2012).
The idea of the “perfect gift” is complicated in the “buy to donate” model, since the pair of Thinx bought by the consumer is a commodity, but the pad given to the woman in the developing country is a gift. On the consumer’s side, she exchanges money with a pair of Thinx, but one with more moral value in it because of the noble cause. Stirrat and Henkel (1997: 80) argues that an essential precondition for the gifts given to NGOs is the pragmatic idea of poor, the starving, and the powerless of those who receive the gifts. Therefore the idea of helping, of “overcoming and denying the mundane world of interested calculated exchange” (1997: 79) is used to encourage consumerism here.
Although it seems that when Thinx donates pads to women in developing countries, and when it funds Afripads, they are receiving free gifts unconstrainted from the need to reciprocate, this is hardly true. On one level, the donation turns the women into recipients of charity (1997: 75), dependent on the help. On another level, an important reason for things Thinx, among other donors, to fund Afripads is because it implements their ideas of development and provides the account that the money helps the poor, which legitimates the status of the donors. When receiving the gifts from companies in global North, Afripads, founded by two white Canadians who “saw the direct need for an affordable sanitary pad in these parts of the world [such as Uganda]” (Afripads 2020), puts the women who the companies claim to help in the position to reciprocate the gifts. On Afripads’ website, two of the three agendas they list as their goals are worth noticing: empowerment and hygiene. As it “empowers” women who now could “go to do work” instead of staying at home when having their periods, Afripads (2020) is imposing the capitalistic culture of productiveness and the Western feminist ideology onto the women – who tells them that working during menstruation is encouraged, and why women are “empowered” when they work as much as possible? Here the Ugandan women reciprocate the gifts from the global north by performing the feminist and empowerment narrative expected from Euro-American women. Under the “hygiene” section, Afripads (2020) states that many local women rely on “improvised” solutions like rags and leaves during menstruation, but these are “ineffective, uncomfortable, and unhygienic” ways of doing it. Although the new pads might reduce health-related issues, Afripads is inscribing bio-medical norms from the West on Ugandan bodies, making self-regulating subjects who now use its products to meet the hygiene standards it enlisted.
Therefore, while Afripads benefits from the gifts to reduce their production costs and make more profits, the women are the ones who reciprocate the gifts, as they need to think and behave to accord the idea of development proposed by the companies from the North. One of the co-founders of Thinx claims that the money they donate to Afripads help “creating sustainable business models, creating local jobs, and then subsidizing the cost of the end product, which makes it affordable for the end user: the women” (Patorek 2012) – in another word, Thinx is helping to accelerate the efficiency of Afripads as a capitalistic venture and making consumerism work more smoothly locally by encouraging women to depend on the for-profit company. The women who are “empowered” and “educated,” as they reciprocate the gifts, further perpetuates capitalism locally and globally, as they now consume Afripads regularly, and their stories are used to encourage consumerism in Euro-American countries.
References
Carrier, James. 1990. “Gifts in a World of Commodities: The Ideology of the Perfect Gift in American Society.” Social Analysis, 29 (1990 December) p19-37.
“Ethical, Sustainable Manufacturing.” 2020. Thinx website. Jan. 20, 2020 accessed. https://www.americananthro.org/StayInformed/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2044
Pastorek, Whitney. 2012. “How the Team Behind Thinx Created the Sexiest Way to Give Back.” Fast Company website. Jan 20, 2020 accessed. https://www.fastcompany.com/3020787/how-the-team-behind-thinx-created-one-of-the-sexiest-ways-to-give-back
Contributed by SiyuTang on 20/01/2020
