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I’m still on vacation, but while I’ve been gone people have been sending me various outrageous items they’ve come across that, again and again, illustrate of increasingly sexualized, commodified ideas about femininity being foisted on our daughters at an ever-younger age. To me, some of them are the equivalent of the toddler beauty pageants–they are so out there that they become perversely reassuring: whatever the rest of us may be doing it’s not THAT bad. Ultimately, I fear, they discourage us from truly examining mainstream culture, desensitizing us to the less extreme but relentless creep (and I mean that in every sense of the word) of sexualization and consumerism. So to me, while despicable the French company Jours Apres Lune’s totally pedo lingerie for 10-year-olds ( see below) that was all over ABC and Time, risks taking our eye off the true problem.
Similarly, the same outlets’ alarm over the 10-year-old model, again in France, styled like Pretty Baby in that country’s Vogue.
And on our home turf, while one hopes that the company Baby Bangs that is, essentially, selling WIGS FOR YOUR BALD BABY GIRL will never get off the ground, it is also the equivalent of focusing on a brush fire when the forest is burning.
Baby without wig
Okay, I can’t resist posting the company’s “philosophy”:
At Baby Bangs! we believe in the beauty of childhood. Our unique designs are sprinkled with MAGIC! ~inspiring a world of whimsical wonder and mystical magical memorable moments for you and your baby girl to cherish Forever! For she is, and always will be, Your LiTTLe PRINCESS! [boldface and capitalization original]
I’m not saying these things aren’t worth our attention. And I still TOTALLY appreciate people sending me emails and facebook updates on what they’re seeing out there (more on the diet book for girls another time. Sigh). But the real problem is not any single item but that these products and images are CONSTANT and have created a truly toxic culture for girls.
Meanwhile, girls are commodified in every day, garden-variety, banal ways that we barely even notice. By trusted companies like Disney and Mattel. And trusted retailers like…JC Penney. Take this t-shirt.
Yes, it does indeed say, “Too Pretty to Do Homework, So My Brother has to Do it for Me.” And it really is intended for 7-16 year old girls. And the description really does read:
Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.
Must I comment on this? First I will have to reattach my jaw which hit the floor and then broke through to the next level down. The fact that a TEAM of people had to have okayed this, that they thought it was appropriate, attractive and that parents and girls (who should be INSULTED by it) would dig it is so horrifying I’d say the message was a throw-back to the 50s, but it’s not. The propaganda for girls and women back then was about taking pride in housework and child-rearing which, yeah, was a touch limiting. This, however, is arguably worse: taking pride in being a narcissistic, willfully ignorant, spoiled, superficial, self-objectifying, helpless (save for the ability to manipulate) PRINCESS. So not funny.
You want to protest? Here you go, folks. Click to send an email. Or call 1-800-322-1189. Or post on their facebook page. Or tweet @jcpenney.
(thanks to Johanna Cohen for alerting me to this one).
POST SCRIPT: Apparently J.C. Penney got the message and according to today’s Daily Beast is pulling the T-shirt. Good going parents!
People must have complained like crazy – the JC Penney link to the shirt says something like “This product is no longer available.”
Great job! Love your line about how your jaw hit the floor and then went to the next level down! Who, on earth, would buy such a thing????
Love, also, the use of the word “sassy” in the marketing material, which has kind of a positive connotation (ie, I’m no doormat!). Very interesting and disturbing.
I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw the wig. I don’t think we have to worry about *that* product getting off the ground.
The “too pretty to do homework” t-shirt is as bad as the “math class is tough” barbie. I hadn’t realized how far back the pendulum has swung.
I’m reading “Pink Brain, Blue Brain” by Lise Eliot; I love it. But I think our culture has a tremendous influence on how our boys and girls turn out, and I feel powerless about it. Even Eliot’s own daughter is obsessed with appearance, prom dresses and pink and has turned away from math. If two scientists can’t raise a scientist, what hope do I have?
(Before anyone comments that this is proof of the power of genetics, please read Eliot’s book. Humans have evolved to have highly plastic brains. Gender behaviors that are inherently encoded in other animals’ brains, don’t seem to be strongly encoded in ours. Instead, our plastic, highly adaptable brains learn much of our behaviors. It’s beautiful, really. It’s a testament to how much we can learn, change, adapt and grow, even as adults.
That said, I truly believe that our culture and social environment profoundly shape who we are, possibly even more so than our parents. As a new parent, this is what I find disheartening.)
I have a long interview with Lise in CAMD. I love her. I adore her. She is my go-to gal on gender and the brain. I am so sorry that book did not sell more. I don’t know why it didn’t. I guss people WANT to believe that nurture has no influence. Lets them off the hook. Other great books: Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender” which coins (I think) the excellent term, “neurosexism,” and the forthcoming book by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers called “Same Difference.”
Fantastic post. I agree 100%, and I love your writing. There are messages everywhere about women being less capable than their male counterparts. Many are more covert than the topics you cover in this post, but these examples of blatant sexism show us what unfortunately still lies behind the veil of so-called gender equality.
Way to go for calling them out.
I mentioned you in a post today about this–and subsequently in comments where I often find it easier to say, “just read what she has to say” than to try and paraphrase your entire book. I’m so glad to find your own eloquence hear about it.
It’s so frustrating to hear people repeatedly argue that if don’t like tees like this, that you either 1) can’t take a joke or 2) have too much time on your hands. If only either were true of me, I could probably achieve a whole lot more.
Thanks for the mention. Yeah, I find myself saying “read the book” a lot not so much because I’m trying to make a sale but because finding ways to condense an argument can be difficult. And repetitive. Though I do it!
And as to the “can’t take a joke” or “too much time on your hands,” well, that’s the argument people use to shut up anyone who wants to make change that they find threatening. I like to respond with the brilliant quip by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
Thanks for the chance to write JC Penney about the tee.
I think it is worth writing even though they pulled the shirt just so they REALLY get it!
If Nabokov’s could have portrayed “Lolita” in photos instead prose some of the photos above may have served very well.
The impact of this kind of premature sexulization of children? At ten I was still playing outside in the mud, building forts, and tossing Barbies from the second story window.
Keep up the great work, Peggy. Thanks.
Jody Schoger
Jody, so true. Best we can do: I keep my daughter far, far away from images like this (and much of the pop culture crap) and outside where she CAN climb trees and get muddy. She spent a lot of the summer either at camps in the woods or with us up near Yosemite, in Yellowstone etc etc. Yes, she still watched Netflix movies, but she was much more absorbed in pretending to be Maid Marion…..(or my version of Maid Marion, where she is the hero of the story….).
Good lord…has the bloody world been taken over by pedophiles???
Sigh.
Can we get Jo Hadley to make a Handsome in Pink shirt that says “I’m smart enough to do my own homework, thank you very much.” Really – shocking!
Nina, LOVE that. Tell her!!
Do you think it would be okay if I got the Baby Bangs wig and Jours Apres Lune lingerie for my bald Reborn Baby Daniella?
http://www.reborn-baby.com/pictures-of-baby-daniella.html
Oh God, Bart, you are so sick. Just for that, I am tattooing the message from the JC Penney t-shirt onto Jinx.
When I read about this, I thought, “People are stupid.” Like you, I was shocked a TEAM of people thought this was OK. Group think is scary.
Minnesota transplant? I love that! Does that mean you are transplanted TO MN or from it? I am from it….
I am totally appalled on a regular basis with the stuff they are selling young girls, however, it gives me hope that so many people were outraged by the JC Penney shirt that it was pulled within hours after the blogs world learned about it. I hope that marketers, designers, and all others that are in the business of selling this crap will learn something from this.
Yeah, it’s really great. ANd I still wonder WHO APPROVED THAT SHIRT?????
When our second child was on the way, our first being a boy, I thought “Oh. Cool. I can use the skills I’ve acquired.”
Oops.
Different kids. Totally. The skills did not transfer.
Number three is a girl. Now past one, is she treated any differently? Of course! Because she’s a girl? Erm, no. Because she’s a different human.
Oh — and as for pictures one and two above: It’s not the clothes. It’s the makeup. And that’s *really* weird.
I know, right? Though it does remind me of Brooke Shields in the 1970s. Ick.
Artie, I don’t know you or your daughter, but if I may respectfully disagree: She is treated differingly to your sons just because she’s a girl. As soon as people know she’s a girl (which might have been when she was still inside you), they raise the pitch of their voices to speak to her, and say different things than they would to your boys. I find it hard to believe you haven’t read or heard this. It’s empirically proven. PS It works even “better” if you make sure to dress her in pink.
I stumbled across PBBB in my local library shortly after release and devoured it. As a female physicist who has sometimes felt like I have to justify that I can be as good at math and visuo-spatial exercises as “the boys” AND a mother who wants to raise both my son and daughter in a way that will encourage them to develop a broad spectrum of abilities, it rocked my world. Thanks to Dr. Eliot for writing it and so glad to hear CAMD will include her. I personally love this blog and can’t wait for CAMD to come out. Thanks also for the other book recs; I’ll definitely check them out!
Gosh, Jenny, I am SO GLAD you are out there fighting the good fight for physicists who don’t fit the mold. But FYI, CAMD has been out since last February! The paperback comes out Jan 31, 2012, but you can get it in hard cover or on kindle now…..
SJR- I think “sassy” in this context just means “has a snotty attitude.”
In CAMD I say that “sassy” is generally marketer’s code for sexy with training wheels.
You know who fought a great fight against teaching little girls to be vain, empty and silly in order to make it easier for men to despise and exclude them? Mary Wollstonecraft. Two hundred years, no new strategies, just cheaper bling.
As a mom of a son, all I can say is that I will have to make sure I teach him the value of a person, and to stay away from girls that would dress in a shirt like that. Absolutely ridiculous.
You are so right, Gina. So often moms of sons tell me they’re relieved they don’t have to think about these issues. And I say, really? Assuming your son is heterosexual, who do you think he’s going to date? What do you think he’s going to learn about how to treat women? Sexualization, narcissism masquerading as femininity and hyper-segmentation by gender are not JUST about girls but about raising human beings with solid values who are capable of intimacy and positive relationships with the other sex.
This is an outrage. I’m disgusted the most by the t-shirt sold by JCP. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, even though I hate seeing it.
Any company or store that chooses to allow this kind of advertisements that show girls dressed like prostitutes, will not get any purchases from me. I will gladly take my business elsewhere.
this is horrible
God, I just blogged on those awful baby headbands and now Peggy has one-bettered me! Wigs for infants! Oy gevalt. Peggy’s correct (as usual) that when we see this stuff, we get smug about how WE would never put our kid in that, but forget that it’s just one cog in the Corporate Predator Machine.
i see nothing wrong with any of this sure the shirt is a little vain but have you seen the shirts like that for boys that look very retarded that say things like that about homework i think the baby bangs are pointlees if there not gonna make the hair longer its ugly either can someone please tell me whats cute about a baby i’ve never thought they were cute i don’t understand i don’t find anything innaproprite though about these things
It’s sometimes hard to have distance on a culture that you’re immersed in. We grow up with all of these images, playthings, all of this media so it becomes normalized to us. And my role (as I see it) is to question that. So if you are interested in finding out more in terms of studies etc that show the impact on girls (and boys) of living in a culture that so over-emphasizes appearance and sexiness at such a young age, i’d suggest you take a look at the American Pscyhological Association’s report on the sexualization of girls. I’d also suggest checking out some web sites like Spark Summit and Powered By Girl and the other sites they link to. The APA report is pretty academic, but the sites are by girls and for girls so you may find them more fun.
Funny. My 10 year old sister found this shirt revolting. I am 13, and I would LOVE to burn it myself.