Joe Awesome and Jane Unicorn
Kate Long read some T shirts.
In last night's #VintageMagTweets I asked how come boys are generally raised to be confident, and girls to be compliant (and the impact that has on their education and career progress). Well, today I was in Primark and I had a look at the messages on girls'and boys' T shirts.
— Kate Long (@volewriter) August 13, 2018
What did she find?
T shirts in the boys’ section (and those things are always labeled, so it’s not as if all kids can just grab unisex T shirts just because hey they are T SHIRTS) with
LIKE A BOSS
LEGEND
FEARLESS
BREAK THE RULES
TOTALLY AWESOME
NO RULES
EPIC SUPER
30% DUDE 20% EPIC
And in the girls’ section
DANCE DANCE DANCE
SPARKLE
sparkle always smile often dream big
SELFIES WIFI UNICORNS SPARKLE
STYLE BE WHO YOU WANT TO BE NEW YORK LONDON MILAN PARIS
MAKE TODAY BEAUTIFUL
make your dreams happen
FASHION ICON
love love love
shimmer
little LOVE
HAPPY
[a cartoon unicorn]
YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
DREAMING OF Y♥U
Now it’s possible that there was a lot of other stuff that broke the pattern, but frankly I doubt it.
Marketers think of girls as fluffy morons and boys as bombastic egomaniacs.
Talk about “gender”…
And 50% what?
I think Ophelia’s summary, that marketers appear to “think of girls as fluffy morons and boys as bombastic egomaniacs” is spot on.
I’m not sure the girls’ shirts, with one or two exceptions, really make Kate Long’s point about girls being taught compliance, except relative to the boys’ shirts. And as Ophelia points out, the boys’ shirts seem excessive, so girls’ shirts not encouraging egomaniacal behavior isn’t necessarily bad. It is quite the contrast though.
May I recommend “Man who has it all” on Facebook? Recently released a range of gender flipped T-shirts such as “Rad like Mum”.
I’m eagerly awaiting delivery of “Too Handsome to do Maths” and “Unicorn Prince”.
Then again, as WC Fields said: “Nobody ever went broke by overestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
And I am sure that those marketers with just that pitch would do equally well anywhere in the Anglophone world.
But how about DISREGARD THIS T-SHIRT…? As the full message.
Worth a try, surely.
Compare G1 My Little Pony with G1 Transformers… Transformers wasn’t particularly clever, but G1 MLP was vapid and thoroughly stupid (though another Hasbro product of the time, Jem and the Holograms was anything but and probably one of the best programs from the era overall).
BKiSA – my nieces preferred Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (even being brought up very traditionally by my fundamentalist sister). They did mix in some MLP and Rainbow Brite with that, but TMNT was the fave.
#3
You’ve got it backwards.
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by UNDERestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
‘Notes On Journalism’ in the Chicago Tribune (19 September 1926)
Frequently compressed as: “No one ever went broke UNDERestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Tangentially related: I took my grandsons to a local, small park on Saturday afternoon to play on the slides, swings, etc. There were only two other children there, girls of around 2-3 years-old, and their mothers (no assumptions; each girl was constantly yelling “Mummy, watch me do….”) were sat on the same bench as I was, so I couldn’t help but overhear them talking about their daughters and referring to them as ‘she’. One of the girls wore a t-shirt bearing the motto ‘Daddy’s Little Princess’ and a little denim skirt, and she had been playing with a small teddy bear.
Long story short, as they were leaving, my eldest grandson brought me the bear that the girl had forgotten to take, so as they were some distance away I started walking to them and called out “Excuse me, your daughter’s left her teddy bear behind”. The mother walked back to met me, thanked me but followed up with “By the way, she might be dressed as a girl but you don’t just get to assume her gender like that!”
And that is how to confuse the Hell out of a granddad.
I agree with Skeletor on this one. It’s not that the girls’ shirts are horrible–they really aren’t, and some of them would genuinely be supportive of self-esteem and self-determination.
The issue is that the boys’ shirts are pretty much precisely how you get to “Boys will be boys”. All the ‘Break the rules’ blather sounds like it comes from an ’80s manager’s guide–the kind that would’ve been ghostwritten under Trump’s name.
Well I agree with Skeletor on this one too! I find the slogans aimed at boys at least as gruesome as those aimed at girls – they’re Trump-level bombastic.
I think the girls’ slogans are pretty horrible too though once you keep in mind that they’re gender-specific.
Acolyte – seriously? That really happened? If so what did you say?
Yes, it happened. I apologised for mis-gendering her son and she told me to fuck off and stormed off in a huff.
After you did her and her child a favor. What a shit person.
“But how about DISREGARD THIS T-SHIRT…? As the full message.”
Yes! Or, as Sally Sparrow might suggest:
“Don’t Blink”
John @6:
Further research indicates that it was from Mencken. Interestingly it works both ways, both ‘over’ and ‘under’.