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So Brave: These Women Have Been Eating Men-Only Chips for Years

As we imagine a world with Lady Doritos, we must give credit to the centuries of women who had no choice but to eat man chips and fight for our rights to a soft potato.
Emily Pierson gallantly partaking in man chips in New York, 1915

"So Brave!" is Broadly's new humor column in collaboration with the feminist satire site Reductress.

For years, women have been laboriously eating chips with a distinctly manly crunch and sloppy texture—that is until February 2018, when PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said the company was considering "snacks for women," like Doritos that don't "crunch too loudly in public" and can fit in your purse. With a new "lady-friendly" version of the popular tortilla chips, we can exist just that much less in an office break room filled with loud men. Thank the goddess!

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But still, in this new utopian era of soft, feminine chips, it is important to look back and salute the brave women who've been fighting the good fight, and chomping on some of the most difficult, gender-threatening snacks man has ever created.

These women come in all shapes and sizes but they have one thing in common: They sucked up their pride, dug in their heels, smoked a ton of weed, and shoved greasy, cheesy fistfuls of chips in their mouths for decades. They didn't like it, but these brave women did it anyway, because it was their only option. Because the world gave them no other choice.

An undoctored photograph of suffragists bravely eating men-only Doritos in Washington, DC, 1913

These women had to make a choice: to choose the Girl World, where marriage and children are a constant, ever-pressing desire, or the Dorito World, where slovenly trolls in oversized sweaters smoke bad weed from an old bong, watch Rick and Morty reruns, drink a full-fat Coke, and fart cheese dust into their second-hand Craigslist couch. And that, my lady friend, is brave.

These women took to the streets, office break rooms, quiet corners of the park, and even their own beds to reluctantly but loudly munch on a snack that rendered their hands unusable without licking cool ranch dust off of every finger. This was a job that had always been meant for men, but these courageous and exceptionally stoned women pushed on, and—hands utterly soiled in cheese product—poured bags of crumbs directly into their filthy shameful mouth holes.

These women wondered to themselves and each other, is this the snack chip world our daughters will inherit from us?!

Although PepsiCo says they won't be putting Lady Doritos into production, it's heartening that the company finally listened to what women truly wanted, and that top execs were considering the extremely real concerns of its female consumers. And they heard us loud and clear: we want dust-free, sound-free nacho chips that we can eat in public without the guilt of making a crunch sound or the shame of licking the cheese off our fingers afterward. Now that we've started this important discussion, we're that much closer to breaking through the chip ceiling!

Still, as we imagine a world that will allow young women to never make a sound again, we must give due credit to the centuries of women who had no choice but to eat man chips and fight for our right to a soft potato. To the Suffragettes whose only option was to wipe their nacho fingers on their sashes, thank you. To the women working in factories during World War II who taught us women can do everything a man can do, like bite down on a sharp slice of processed starch, thank you.