Ikea. Great concept, but in the pursuit of the almighty buck, they have landed in the kind of climate that invites massive boycotts. Their recent expansion into a potentially lucrative market – Saudi Arabia – has resulted in a catalogue where women are airbrushed away. away, as in the above photo. Presto, change, ladies, you no longer exist!
We received two references to this travesty today, the start of a cluster synchro. One came from a woman in Malibu, California, who has bought a lot of Ikea merchandise, and the other email came from a man in Australia who worked for them for 24 years and was recently “rendered redundant” – fired.
The story:
A local version of Ikea’s yearly catalogue, published on its Saudi website, shows images that are identical to those in other editions save for one detail: the women are gone. “We are looking into the issue and holding a dialogue with our Saudi franchise holder,” said Ulrika Englesson Sandman, a spokeswoman for Inter IKEA Systems, which owns the Ikea trademark and concept.
When entering a new market the company always takes into account the ability to balance local culture and legislation with its own values, she added.
The removal of women from the pages of the Saudi edition, including a young girl who was pictured studying at her desk, has prompted a strong response from Swedes, who pride themselves on egalitarian policies and a narrow gender gap.
“You can’t remove or airbrush women out of reality. If Saudi Arabia does not allow women to be seen or heard, or to work, they are letting half their intellectual capital go to waste,” Trade Minister Ewa Bjoerling said in a statement. Her sentiment was echoed by Swedish European Union Minister Birgitta Ohlsson, who branded the incident “medieval” on social networking site Twitter.
Saudi Arabia applies strict rules of gender segregation, banning women from driving and requiring them to have permission from a male guardian before travelling or receiving medical care. Ikea’s Saudi franchise partner currently operates three stores in the country, where it has seen ‘double digit’ yearly growth over the past five years, according to its webs.
Our Aussie friend was going to do a post about this, but he figured that since he had an axe to grind, it might not mean much. But the bottom line is how can a country like Sweden do business with a country like Saudi Arabia, where women are rendered completely irrelevant? Saudi women can’t even leave their homes without the permission and accompaniment of a male relative. They must cover themselves completely. Why? Is the female body oh so tempting to Saudi men that it might incite unprecedented lust? Might it lead to the collapse of marriages?
I’ve never understood Saudi Arabia, never understood their attitude toward women, have never understood why these women don’t rise up in some huge rebellion and take this ridiculous monarchy down. But I do know one thing: I will never buy anything made by IKEA, just as I will never step foot inside a Walmart.
These companies are soulless scourges, after profit at any price, sacrificing the very individuals who do the shopping. I mean, seriously? You airbrush women out of the catalogue and really think they are going to buy your products? How about keeping them in your catalogue? Maybe it would help to change hearts and minds, IKEA. Maybe you could sweep into this market as agents of CHANGE rather than business as usual.
Of course! LOL 😉
🙂
That is just plain sad, the female counterpart to existence needs to be restored world wide in my opinion. And some day her spirit will strike out and reclaim her rightful position, making those who knew her intricate place in our world but tried to ignore her existence, her significance, her power, forever lost in darkness. Oh and IKEA furniture in my opinion is fine for the college dorm but other than that it is overpriced crap. And personally I’ve never liked furniture that requires an allen wrench to assemble it. Just sayin’
An alien wrench! LOL!
There are still countries around the globe where female newborns are murdered immediately. Only the infant sons are allowed to live. What will happen when there are no more females around to conceive and bear the men their sons????? Or to satisfy their sexual urges? Aaarrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Such an offense to the natural order of the universe, obliterating females. MY God(dess) is a Female, and is SHE ever pissed!!!!!
You ask “how can a country like Sweden do business with a country like Saudi Arabia” but unfortunately a lot of the western world, including the UK, has close connections with Saudi Arabia.
IKEA see profit before principles but sadly this is happening the world over.
You’re right Mike,and considering that the majority of the alleged 911 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia,why was Iraq bombed and not Saudi Arabia ?
Answer: $$$$$
$$ and the fact that W had to prove something to his daddy!
I just found 2 of your comments in spam, daz. Sorry! They’re now up. Not sure how that happened.
You can take them down if you want.
I shortened them with just links when they wouldn’t appear on your blog.
They are essentially the same answer,anyway.
Naw, I put them up! The links are great.
Funny, I just posted about the “Burning Times” and the Inquisition on my blog (https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/) . Math is correct……Christianity has a very dark history of the hatread of women as well. If one wonders where the “war on women” going on in Congress right now comes from, the Inquisition is one of the precedents. It is estimated that as many as 10 million people, all most all of them women, were murdered in this time, ironically, the same period when the Renaissance was flowering in Italy. In some villages virtually all the females, from grandmothers to small girls, were exterminated – an example is the village of Lagendorf, Germany, in 1492 (when America was being “discovered”) all but two women were accused of witchcraft and destroyed. Just try to imagine that: an entire village with all of its mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and even female infants destroyed.
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism arise from the same root. In some Islamic sects, for example, women are not considered to have souls, but rather like cows, simply end here while good men go to Paradise where they are awaited by beautiful virgins (Houris) who are “pure” and “uncontaminated” by earthly existence, and presumably have been saving their virginity for their arrival. This belief of a reward in Paradise, as strange as it may seem to us, is a belief that may have impelled men like those who killed themselves in order to destroy the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.
Sorry to go on, but the hatred and suppression of women, and by association, the hatred of the Earth and earthly existence, is deeply embedded in all three religions. I applaud Ewa Bjoerling (and you!).
One of the novels I wrote – a time travel novel – took place during the years around the Salem witch trials. I was appalled at what I learned when researching that era.
this happens every day, everywhere. just recently here… woolworths became a target after it was leaked to the press that there is a ban on employing white people in their organisation. woolworths has a 75% white shopper demographic. what are they trying to do???
Shadow – you live in South Africa, right?
Right, I do!
It’s funny you say that,because Woolworths
(I don’t know if we’re talking about the same company here)
is the first company that contacted me to see if I would like to drive forklifts for them,after I became redundant…and I’m white,although from Jewish stock,so maybe not white enough.-)
Woolworths must have outsourced itself right out of the U.S. I haven’t seen one anywhere in the U.S. for many years. They used to be in every town, like Wall Mart and Target are now.
I don’t know if the Aussie Woolworths is the same company,but they certainly go way back.
We don’t have Wall Mart yet (thank the Lord),but we do have Target,which is owned by Coles
(Woolworths competitor is the supermarket quest for dominance in Oz)
Woollies in SA you could compare to Britain’s Marks & Spencer, mostly convenience food and specialty goodies, then a clothing section…
” IKEA accused of using East German political prisoners to manufacture furniture ”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ikea-accused-of-using-east-german-political-prisoners-to-manufacture-furniture-7704201.html
“IKEA founder ‘was Nazi recruiter ”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/8720214/IKEA-founder-was-Nazi-recruiter.html
“Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.”
― Adolf Hitler
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/30691.Adolf_Hitler
That says it all really.
Thanks for the links!
Here’s another log for your fire;
“Ikea accused of using East German political prisoners to manufacture furniture .”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ikea-accused-of-using-east-german-political-prisoners-to-manufacture-furniture-7704201.html
The Swedish flat-pack giant Ikea is today reeling from potentially scandalous allegations that it used scores of political prisoners in former communist East Germany to manufacture its affordable furniture products in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The charges, which include the suggestion that the world’s largest furniture retailer, also once worked hand in hand with East Germany’s despised Stasi secret police, were made in a Swedish public television documentary which will be broadcast for the first time tomorrow night.
The broadcaster, SVT, said yesterday that its investigators had found evidence in Stasi files which pointed to the direct involvement of East German political prisoners in the Ikea manufacturing process during the 1970s and 1980s. ”
But that story shouldn’t surprise anyone once they’ve read this one;
” IKEA founder ‘was Nazi recruiter ”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/8720214/IKEA-founder-was-Nazi-recruiter.html
IKEA’s billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was a member of the Swedish Nazi party and was such a concern to secret service they opened a file on him, according to a new book.
The 1943 file, revealed in a book published on Wednesday by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, will revive the long-standing controversy over the far right sympathies of the 85-year-old businessman.
It proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling – the successor to the Swedish Nationalist Socialist Workers Party – even detailing his membership number, 4013.
It quotes letters intercepted from Mr Kamprad, then 17, in which he enthuses about recruiting new members and says that he “misses no opportunity to work for the movement”.
The secret service concluded that, as Mr Kamprad received the party’s youth newspaper, he must have held “some sort of official position within the organisation”.
Ms Åsbrink accused Mr Kamprad of failing to come clean about the full extent of his Nazi past.
“He said in 1998 that he would get everything up on the table and that there would be nothing hidden. Why then didn’t he tell us that he was a member of the worst Nazi party, and that the police found it serious enough to create a file on him?” she said.
Mr Kamprad has long fought to escape the stain of his involvement with the far right New Swedish Movement, revelations of which first surfaced with the publication of the letters of the group’s leader, Per Engdahl, in 1994.
Those letters showed that Mr Kamprad gave money and recruited members, and that Mr Engdahl had been one of a select few invited to Mr Kamprad’s wedding.
Ms Åsbrink said Mr Kamprad’s feelings about Mr Engdahl remained mixed even today. “Per Engdahl was a great man, this I will maintain for as long as I live,” he told her last year in a two-hour interview recorded for her book.
In 1998, Mr Kamprad said he could not remember whether he had been a member of Nordic Youth, Sweden’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth, when faced by further revelations.
But he has never admitted to membership of the more radical Svensk Socialistisk Samling, which was so close to the German Nazi party that it had dropped the Swastika symbol only a few years before Mr Kamprad joined.
“Great liars are also great magicians.”
― Adolf Hitler
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
― Adolf Hitler
But this may well explain the Saudi lack of women in an IKEA catalogue –
“Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.”
― Adolf Hitler
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/30691.Adolf_Hitler
” A glorious future! ”
Ingvar Kamprad
https://www.ikeafans.com/new-member-guide-alias/ikea-for-beginners/593-a-furniture-dealers-testament.html
Informative post. Did you know that Catholics are quite similar to Saudi Arabia in their opinions and treatments of females? They just hide it better. Of course, women are allowed to become nuns. But in marriages and other aspects of life in general, women are considered far less important than men and are under the total control of men. Even the nuns are under the strict, rigid control of the priests and the Pope. It’s a sorry situation in this day and age, that the gender bringing these men into the world are treated not much better than a family pet, and many cultures will actually still KILL the women for the slightest breaking of a rule in their regard. And Catholics? They revere Mother Mary, yet treat their own women as chattel.
Here’s another log for the fire.
“Ikea accused of using East German political prisoners to manufacture furniture”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ikea-accused-of-using-east-german-political-prisoners-to-manufacture-furniture-7704201.html
” Ikea is known to have farmed out the manufacture of several of its more affordable furniture products to former communist east European countries from the 1960s onwards, including Poland.
A documentary by the German public television channel, WDR, revealed last year that in East Germany alone, at least 65 workshops were used for the manufacture of Ikea products. WDR said that it had also identified several East German prisons where inmates, including political prisoners were used to make furniture.
The programme identified one East German factory located next to a prison in the town of Waldheim, where Ikea’s popular “Klippan” sofa was produced. A former prison guard told WDR that furniture production was part of prison labour.
WDR also cited Stasi documents which claimed that Ikea’s multi-millionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad found his company’s cooperation with the communist authorities to be “completely in the interests of society. ”
But why would that story be such a big surprise when you read this story –
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/8720214/IKEA-founder-was-Nazi-recruiter.html
“IKEA founder ‘was Nazi recruiter”
” IKEA’s billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was a member of the Swedish Nazi party and was such a concern to secret service they opened a file on him, according to a new book. ”
The 1943 file, revealed in a book published on Wednesday by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, will revive the long-standing controversy over the far right sympathies of the 85-year-old businessman.
It proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling – the successor to the Swedish Nationalist Socialist Workers Party – even detailing his membership number, 4013.
It quotes letters intercepted from Mr Kamprad, then 17, in which he enthuses about recruiting new members and says that he “misses no opportunity to work for the movement.
The secret service concluded that, as Mr Kamprad received the party’s youth newspaper, he must have held “some sort of official position within the organization”.
Ms Åsbrink accused Mr Kamprad of failing to come clean about the full extent of his Nazi past.
“He said in 1998 that he would get everything up on the table and that there would be nothing hidden. Why then didn’t he tell us that he was a member of the worst Nazi party, and that the police found it serious enough to create a file on him?” she said.
Mr Kamprad has long fought to escape the stain of his involvement with the far right New Swedish Movement, revelations of which first surfaced with the publication of the letters of the group’s leader, Per Engdahl, in 1994.
Those letters showed that Mr Kamprad gave money and recruited members, and that Mr Engdahl had been one of a select few invited to Mr Kamprad’s wedding.
Ms Åsbrink said Mr Kamprad’s feelings about Mr Engdahl remained mixed even today. “Per Engdahl was a great man, this I will maintain for as long as I live,” he told her last year in a two-hour interview recorded for her book.
In 1998, Mr Kamprad said he could not remember whether he had been a member of Nordic Youth, Sweden’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth, when faced by further revelations.
But he has never admitted to membership of the more radical Svensk Socialistisk Samling, which was so close to the German Nazi party that it had dropped the Swastika symbol only a few years before Mr Kamprad joined. ”
https://www.ikeafans.com/home/a-glorious-future/
” On growth
It is our duty to expand….Those who cannot or will not join us are to be pitied…. Let us continue to be a group of positive fanatics who stubbornly and persistently refuse to accept the impossible, the negative. What we want to do, we can do and will do, together. A glorious future! ” Ingvar Kamprad
To me it always sounded like something you might hear at a Nuremberg Rally.
Especially hearing that “A glorious future! ” bulls#!+ at the end of a staff training session.
“Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.”
― Adolf Hitler
“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
― Adolf Hitler
The nine principles touted by IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad in his Furniture Dealer’s Testament:
1. The product range – our identity.
2. The IKEA spirit. A strong and living reality.
3. Profit gives us resources.
4. Reaching good results with small means.
5. Simplicity is a virtue.
6. Doing it a different way.
7. Concentration – important to our success.
8. Taking responsibility – a privilege.
9. Most things still remain to be done. A glorious future!
Banner left is hanging at IKEA headquarters in Helsingborg, Sweden.
https://www.ikeafans.com/new-member-guide-alias/ikea-for-beginners/593-a-furniture-dealers-testament.html
But here is the kicker –
“ Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men. ”
― Adolf Hitler
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/30691.Adolf_Hitler
Let’s just be grateful that Ingvar Kamprad is only the head of a furniture company and not the head of a country with the population and size of…oh let’s say Germany for instance.-)
Aside from the political ramifications that is the dumbest add I ever saw – keeping women out of the bathroom? Out of the picture with a child? Do the men do all the shopping in that country? Do women brush their teeth? What the . . . and so on?
Yeah, keeping them out of the bathroom. Very weird. And stupid..
The apartment complex I lived in downtown Portland from 2006 to 2010 was near a university. There were a lot of residents from Saudi Arabia who were attending the university. Apparently, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia pays full tuition and room and board for all citizens who attend university abroad. Anyhow, I was in the lobby once accessing the wi-fi when I overheard one American ask the young Saudi women what they did for fun back in their country. I was appalled by the answer. The woman answered: “Uh…shopping. Then more shopping. Then shopping again. And shopping.” A nomadic desert people have become a bunch of repressed, materialistic consumers!!! Yikes.
OK, that’s scary Really.
OMGosh! are you KIDDING! what an atrocity – and i dare say that were the figures known, the number of female Ikea customers would out weigh that of male customers – at least in this country – i’m speechless – and had no idea this had taken place – thanks SO much for the post –
time for a [boy]cott, i would say!
I read about this somewhere but seeing it like this makes it real. I will not buy IKEA either! (And I already never shop at Walmart.)