KEY POINTS:
The Ruby Connection: it sounds like a massage parlour. But it is Westpac's new website for women. It is "where women in business click". Funny, I felt more like thumping someone.
The site opens by asking you to "choose a colour for your business card" - an online
square with your name on it - as if we are 5-year-olds who will have a tanty if there isn't something pink and sparkly around. Girlies must be colour-co-ordinated, apparently. There is even a piece of puff about Westpac's online services with an entrepreneur who runs a company called, gag, Pink Lilly.
Also on the site: an interview with the head of a handbag company and the chance to win a handbag, tips for running a greener business (we're women so we must all be nurturing muesli-eaters, I suppose) and some fatuous marketing advice ("Find a point of difference").
Women who want to know about Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II move right along. The assumption is that all women prioritise passion and colour schemes above financial concerns. That might be true of many women, but not all. Some would like to make as much money as possible in the shortest possible timeframe. They won't find much of interest here. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this sort of material - it's good to encourage people to be entrepreneurial - but aiming holus bolus at women as a gender is patronising.
If the site was called "Marketing bumf for frustrated housewives who wish they could afford a Birkin bag and after a few wines fancy themselves the next Anita Roddick", it would be much more honest. Colour me unimpressed.
A friend of mine took two bottles of Bollinger to a dinner party and was surprised how pursed-mouthed the other guests were at her extravagance. I'm not.
This is the new era of Puritanism and it is not just about money. I don't mind a bit of austerity. It relieves the pressure to be fabulous, with a shiny house full of European appliances. It is a chance to stop the bogus pursuit of a "lifestyle" and just be grateful to have a life.
But just because we have to eat stew, it's no excuse to be boring and self-righteous about it. I fear it's now becoming unfashionable to spend money enjoying yourself. This is dumb.
Because when you are poor, grand gestures of indulgence - like champagne - are more important than ever. An arts-loving friend of mine was on the bones of his arse in the 1980s but spent his very last $100 on a copy of Robert Hughes' Shock of the New. (I have a lot of decadent friends.)
But I suspect hedonism is on the out and not just due to financial concerns. It's more moral than practical, like the suggestion on CNN's Business Traveller that your clients will be impressed if you take them to a cheap restaurant.
In a long think piece on financial decadence, New York Times writer David Brooks, author of Bobos in Paradise, also piles on the guilt. "For centuries [the US] remained industrious, ambitious and frugal. Over the past 30 years much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined." Brooks lobbies for a financial system that encourages saving as well as social values that shun conspicuous consumption.
The anti-Bollinger dinner guests were doing that already. Virginia Postrel, writing in the Atlantic, notes that the working class spends more on blingy stuff like cars and clothes. The middle class tends, oxymoronically, to do its conspicuous consumption in private - spending serious dosh on slate shower stalls no one else sees. And popping a secret bottle of Bolly.
deborah@coneandco.com
