Tea Shop In China Faces Social Media Backlash For Referring To Women As ‘Bargains’. What’s With The Sexist Branding?

Tea Shop In China Faces Social Media Backlash For Referring To Women As ‘Bargains’. What’s With The Sexist Branding?

Props. Sex Toys. Rag Dolls. Glamour. Entertainment. Maal. These are some sexist slurs that even though are often hurled at women, are in no way humorous or acceptable to us. From our bodies to our complexion, everything about a woman has always been sexualised to the point of it being normalised in the culture now. So much so that a tea selling brand in China thought it was okay to use sexist and derogatory slogans to sell their merchandise. Branding at the cost of a woman’s dignity, this Chinese beverage chain called the ‘Sexy Tea shop’ recently landed itself in the middle of controversy and ire from the netizens, after it referred to women as a ‘bargain’, while trying to market their products to people.

Incentivising their tea and products with the slogan that implied how men could ‘pick women up’ from their shops while they waited for their drinks, the ‘Sexy tea shop’, showed everyone that their branding was more ‘sexist’ than ‘sexy’…..

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What’s worse is that this isn’t their first time degrading women and reducing them to just their bodies either. The brand has been notorious for the slogans that it used on its tea bags previously, some of which included stuff like, “Master, I want you”, “The mouth says no but the body says yes,” and “My dear, I want you.”

The modern China tea shop which had printed these kind of slogans on mugs and tea bags, including statements like, “When I went to buy bubble tea, there were lots of pretty girls there. If you meet one like this, you can tell your friend – I picked up a bargain”, ultimately ended up apologising for their misogynistic branding.

The company put out a long statement issuing an official apology where they said, “We made a very inappropriate sentence that even people in Changsha did not approve of…. we are very ashamed. We have absolutely no intention of disrespecting women.”

Meanwhile, social media was bubbling up with anger as netizens went ahead and called them out for their “vulgar marketing”. One user even wrote, “It’s not the phrase itself that is insulting – its the sentence example given by the company.” Another one probed, ” “Didn’t anyone in the marketing team see anything wrong with this?” a question that all of us are longing to ask.

For the last time, women aren’t sexual objects to pine after, or to offer up as bargains by any tom dick or harry. We are our own people and deserve equal respect, especially in terms of being addressed. A lesson, that the Modern China tea shop learnt the hard way.

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Sadhika Sehgal

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