I was browsing Walmart's cheapo 97 cent shipping stuff (horrible habit of mine...), when I came across this shirt. I found it pretty cute, and cool that the sample name was the name of my friend's ten month old daughter. And then I read the description, which included the following:
"Please specify boy or girl, girl designs will include some of the female Sesame Street characters."
Because, oh my God, a boy can NEVER have something with a GIRL character on it.
Also nice they don't have an all female option - you can only get all male or a mix of both.
Unbelievable, even though it really shouldn't be that surprising to me at this point - every time I go shopping for said friend's baby, I end up infuriated with the overgendering of baby clothing. It's damn near impossible to get anything gender neutral.
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Ahhh, that's so stupid! I was thinking about something similar the other day. When you do school plays when you're a kid, girls often play male roles but boys never EVER play female roles. I almost feel like we can't blame the teachers or whoever casts the plays for doing this because their obvious defence would be "any boy who was played a girl would get teased, bullied and tormented". Which, of course, is true. The problem is bigger than the teachers. The problem is that from a very, very young age, we are all taught that it's okay for girls to be like boys, but not for boys to be like girls. One could argue that this actually gives us an advantage and works in our favour, and that boys and men are the ones being discriminated against here. But the fact is, it's just saying IT IS OKAY TO BE LIKE A MAN BUT IT IS NOT OKAY TO BE LIKE A WOMAN. And this is getting ingrained in all of us from the moment we're born, and more enforced the older we get.
Now now, We must remember that including girls in boys' lives that doesn't involve her being eye/penis/hand/mouth candy is emasculating. Even for a baby.
I've seen a Spencer's shirt say "Nice tits. Mind if I try one?" for babies. Also for baby boys: "Lock up your daughters" , "My mom is hot" and "Fuck the milk wheres the whiskey titties?" An alcoholic baby
who feels breasts should be what he wants them to be. Cause even baby boys know breasts should be what men want them to be.
When the Harry Potter books first became popular, a teacher friend of mine told me that she read that J.K. Rowling publishes by her initials in the United States because boys won't read books written by women (of course, they know now who Rowling is, but she had to disguise her name to get a foot in the door in America!). The interesting thing is that she has published by Joanne elsewhere in the world (I have German copies of some Harry Potter books with "Joanne" as the author). I wonder if this huge dislike of things "female" among boys is simply an American thing? And I wonder where little boys get the ideas that they can't read female authors or enjoy female characters.
As for the baby clothes, I just came across a onesie that my neighbor had left in our shared dryer. They didn't know what gender they were having in advance, so they bought a lot of "gender neutral" baby supplies. I was looking at this onesie though, and it is hard to picture on a baby boy, even though it was white with polka dots of orange and green. Very strange.
I thought that it was Bloomsbury, the British publishing company, that encouraged her to use her initials instead of her first name. Sadly the attitude does not limit itself to the United States.
My mother seems to love the store Gymboree (only because she hasn't been able to buy "little girls clothes" in 20 years now), and she always talks about how she "misses dressing us up."
However, that store (like other children's clothes stores) annoy me because you walk in and one side is overwhelmingly pink and the other side is overwhelmingly blue.
Check this out on the Gymboree website.
This line of clothes for baby boys is called "Arctic Adventure" :
http://www.gymboree.com/shop/dept_category.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374306243635&bmUID=1228766507844
And this line for baby girls is called "Candy Shopee" :
http://www.gymboree.com/shop/dept_category.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374306243649&bmUID=1228766659934
Need I say more?
And some people still have the temerity to protest that "this whole socialization of gender notion" is overblown.
Gender is socialized even before birth.
And, as this post indicates, directly after it, too.