A couple of months ago I took the plunge and bought myself a Cobra. The Cobra, for those of you who are culturally deprived, is a top-of-the-line Coleman tent.
Purchasing it was like taking a plunge only in the financial sense. In every other way, it was a lot like any other purchase, involving the exchange of capital, banal conversation at the register as the the clerk and I waited for my debit card information to dial-up, the quick exchange of contemptuous glances as I return his pen after an unsuccessful attempt to steal it, etc. But the Cobra itself, the product I acquired that day, was expensive, so I didn’t think I was being na?ve to assume that it would be able to live up to everything the catalog boasted. It turns out that I was.
The Cobra claims to be a two-person tent. Having spent several nights in it, I want to challenge this. On a good day I stand 6-foot-1-inch, which puts me just an inch or two above what I last heard was the average height for a male, and the rest of my body’s dimensions are more or less proportional to what being 6-foot-1-inch means for the male build. In other words, there’s nothing extraordinary about my body that the engineers at Coleman product development could be forgiven for not taking into account. And I do not fit comfortably into the Cobra with another person of the same size, even without the large backpacks that normally accompany the type of campers who would buy the Cobra, which, due to its relative lightness (the magic of “duraluminum”), seems like it would be well-suited for an extended hike that would remove people from civilization for a week or more and demand the carrying of all essentials.
Maybe it’s not marketed to males. Is the size-difference between the sexes really so significant that the Cobra could comfortably fit two females and their gear? I don’t think so. And hasn’t the entire outdoor equipment industry traditionally tried to sell itself to a predominantly male market? The name “Cobra,” evocative of venom, danger and, arguably, the phallus, seems to be more appealing to traditionally male tastes. The bag into which the Cobra fits once it’s folded and rolled is red. I can’t imagine it being pink or baby blue. So, does the outdoor equipment industry seek to sell predominantly to males, does it seek to conform campers of both sexes to a specific gender norm, or is it trying to do something different entirely?
No matter what the social agenda of Coleman might be, the Cobra still will not comfortably fit two people and their gear. My suspicion, then, is that, with the Cobra, the Coleman corporation is trying to tap into a complex feature of the American consciousness that knows, but doesn’t want to admit, that it has always sought to marry the worlds of the outdoors and sexual intercourse. Certainly two people who were spooning would fit more comfortably into the Cobra than two who were trying to stretch out after an exhaustive day of hiking. While the purchaser, who may or may not be male, can convince himself that he’s buying the Cobra for when he and his buddy hike the Appalachian Trail someday, in the meantime it’ll serve him nicely as a portable backseat that can be erected a few feet from where he parks his car in some nauseatingly overcrowded and unsanitary campground 15 minutes from the city center.
So were the engineers fully conscious of what many Americans would be using the Cobra for when they agreed on its dimensions and labeled it a two-person tent, or does the marketing research only let them know that the inscrutable American public is calling for ever-smaller tents?
I’d like to contact the Coleman Returns Department, or some other department if Returns does not exist, and find out how many dissatisfied campers have returned their undersized tents when they discovered how unsuitable it would be for their needs as serious campers, and how many were completely content with the sensual, form-fitting Cobra.
