Man-[Noun]

Recently I’ve noticed that the concept of reinventing supposedly girlish or ‘women-only’ products such as iced coffee and dip by adding the prefix ‘man-’ to them has become a popular marketing ploy. Everything these days seems to be marketed at men. ‘Man-sized chips’, ‘tea that men can drink’, ‘made by men for men’, and so on and so on. And apparently, it works.

And it got me wondering: how far could you take this apparently successful man-[noun] formula? By making products that really are secure ‘woman-only’ products ‘manly’, could you actually sell them to men? Would it be possible to make, say, high heels appeal to a manly man’s manly tastes?

So here’s my attempt at taking a few products that are universally regarded as pretty much women’s territory and making them manly.