Hey ladies! Anyone up for overpriced food (at $72 and upwards)? The Ritz Carlton has some good news for you: if you’d be willing to kill your feet with a pair of painfully high stilettos, you could get a discount on your (still overpriced) meal!

When I first saw Ritz Carlton advertising their Stiletto Tuesday promotion, one thing came immediately to mind:

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Businesses big or small often court female customers – women increasingly have that all-important spending power. Yet banal, everyday sexism means that we often seen ad campaigns and promotions that are supposedly fun for women, but are actually more damaging to social mindsets than anything else.

Ritz's Stiletto Tuesdays promotion

”Now, walking in stilettos not only exercises your calf muscles and elongates your legs, it now also gives you dining privileges at the Ritz-Carlton! How awesome is that?” gushes an advertorial for Greenhouse published on Yahoo! Singapore.

The Stiletto Tuesdays promotion at the Ritz Carlton’s Greenhouse restaurant is just the latest example.

For about four hours every Tuesday evening, women having dinner at the restaurant will get a discount based upon the height of the highest stiletto in the group – 10% off for a one-inch heel, 20% for a two-inch, and so on.

Men and children are explicitly excluded from this bizarre package (which makes you wonder what the plan is for the stiletto-wearing mother, or the stiletto-wearing drag queen, or the stiletto-wearing drag queen with children).

Sexist idea masquerading as a “fun perk"

It’s a gross, sexist idea masquerading as a “fun perk” for women.

What it really means is this: once a week, women going for a meal at Greenhouse will be objectified, judged by the uncomfortable footwear they’ve felt obliged to put up on meet society’s exacting standards of fashion and female grooming. For that, they will be "compensated" with a discount – provided that they’ve met with expectations.

Women already find themselves plagued with all sorts of campaigns, promotions, films, photos, articles and ‘advice’ on what they should wear, what they should eat, how they should dress or cut their hair or put on makeup. There is a whole industry up-and-running to create all sorts of insecurities among women, to ensure that women are constantly in need of something (usually in the form of a product that money can be spent on) to make them feel good about themselves.

Now, women can’t even have a nice night out without having their shoes measured. This is how we want you to be dressed when you come here, is what Ritz Carlton is really saying. This is the type of clientele we want to stack our restaurant with, so it builds our brand and the atmosphere.

These are campaigns that public relations and marketing executives – men and women – come up with around boardroom tables, and high-five each other over. But no one in this process thinks about how demeaning it is to women, or how no one would ever quite come up with the same idea for men.

Perhaps that’s exactly what the Ritz should do: embrace the full absurdity and create a promotion for men, too. I’ll leave it up to their imaginations to choose what to measure.

Top photo from Ritz Carlton Millenia Singapore Facebook. 

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