top of page
Victor C. Bolles

Lady Doritos

In a January 31 interview with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi mentioned that men and women eat Doritos differently and that PepsiCo was designing products that would appeal to women. This off-hand comment has generated a hubbub of worldwide protest apparently against gender discrimination, demanding that women get the exact same Doritos as men. The Austin chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) is planning a protest on the steps of the State Capital to show solidarity with other protests around the world.


Needless to say, all these protests are fodder for late night comedians and almost everyone who has a twitter account. It would be easy for me to write a blurb on how ridiculous these vacuous feminist protestors are. But the organizers of this protest are not vacuous (although some of the participants may be). There is a serious purpose to what they are doing.


A key part of the divisiveness of identity politics is that everything, and I mean everything, must be viewed solely on the basis of identity. This identity may be feminist so that everything must be viewed on the basis of gender. Blacks want everyone to view things on the basis of race and every bad thing is due to racism. The truthfulness of a fact is irrelevant. The only relevant truth is based on identity. So the Enlightenment philosophers are not philosophers but white philosophers and the Enlightenment is only relevant to whites and is meaningless to blacks.


So it is absolutely true as Ms. Nooyi noted that men like to crunch their Doritos and lick the orange residue off their fingers and that women don’t like to do that. So even though this “fact” is viewed by Ms. Nooyi as an opportunity to create different products that are more appealing to women, the truth of this “fact” is irrelevant to the Austin Chapter of NOW and others who view things only from the perspective of their feminist identity.


So it is the goal of progressives to view facts, not based on their truthfulness, but on their political implications (to be fair conservatives apply thei