T shirt indoctrination
This garbage again. Boys are to be ambitious and strong, girls are to be humble and kind. It might as well be shirts marketed to slave-owners and slaves respectively.
A bestselling author has criticised Primark over a “sexist” children’s clothing line that encourages girls to be “grateful”, “humble” and “always perfect” while telling boys to be more assertive.
Kate Long, a teacher and novelist, condemned the “hugely sexist messaging” she found emblazoned on many of the retailer’s clothes for children. On a visit to a Primark in Chester, Long found tops for girls that had printed on them phrases such as: “Be kind”, “Kindness always wins”, “Grateful, humble and optimistic” and “Be good, do good”.
The messages displayed on boys’ clothing encouraged them to be more ambitious and self-assured. One read: “Change the game. Rewrite the rules. Go for it. Born to win.” Another read: “Explore. Nothing holding you back,” and a third said: “You are limitless.”
It could hardly be more unabashedly sexist if it sat down and worked out a plan.
No doubt the people who design this shit and the people who sell it will say it’s what parents want, but I don’t believe that. It’s not written in the stars that shirts have to have Messages written on them in the first place, and if you’re going to insist on putting Messages on shirts there are surely plenty of exhortations that are gender-neutral. Boys should be kind too after all, and girls should reach for the stars.
Here’s the Twitter thread the paywalled article is based on:
https://twitter.com/volewriter/status/1490350107950301188?s=21
(Ophelia, do you subscribe to every UK news site?)
I’m happy to see Ms. Long says she does what I suggested last time this came up (no causal relationship implied) — just buy the shirts you want for your kid regardless of what section they’re in.
Her points are good ones, but there’s kind of a funny mistake with one. She says this shirt says “POWER”:
https://twitter.com/volewriter/status/1490367898774351874?s=20
The whole shirt undoubtedly says, “XBOX: POWER YOUR DREAMS” (the last word isn’t visible but that’s the slogan they use elsewhere). So more an ad for a video game system than a call to arms.
There’s a girls’ shirt that says “always perfect” that she takes as an admonition that girls have to try to be perfect. I think it’s more a cheeky brag about being a perfect person.
But I agree with her on most of them.
Still, if forced to answer honestly, if these shirts are all mixed up and a group of boys and girls are allowed to pick one shirt each, how off would the store’s assumptions be? I’d guess the boys would pick 100% “boy” shirts and the girls would probably pick at least 75% “girl” shirts. I think they are fairly accurately catering to what parents/kids want. Which is not to say I’m happy about it (I’m not). At the very least they should give the girls more choices. Maybe it’s not their job to reshape society, but it’s also not their job to reinforce stereotypes either.
That might not work so well in terms of sizes and shapes, though perhaps for little kids it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Still, I think it’s an implication that girls are “perfect” whereas boys could never claim to be perfect because “boys will be boys” and it’s cool for them to be “bad” and “naughty”.
So where are the messages coming from? I’m sure that parents are a big part of it, but let’s leave parents aside. What about TV, games, school? Any one factor — these shirts, TV, games, school — wouldn’t be enough on its own to turn off sexist stereotypes, but all together they crate and reinforce them. I’m not saying that these shirts pay nearly as large a percentage as the factors that I listed, but they definitely play a factor.
‘I’m happy to see Ms. Long says she does what I suggested last time this came up (no causal relationship implied) — just buy the shirts you want for your kid regardless of what section they’re in.’
In principle that makes perfect sense, particularly as pre-puberty it doesn’t really matter much. But little kids are particularly sensitive to ‘what’s for boys’ and ‘what’s for girls’–even if a kid is fine with going to the ‘other side’ for their clothes, which is not generally the case, their fellow kids will bully them for wearing things that are ‘supposed to be’ for the other sex. And even if this weren’t the case, what kind of message are kids getting when the shirt message they prefer, or their mom prefers for them, is only on clothes ‘meant for’ the other sex?
Yesterday I saw “Be good, do good” on boys’ clothing. I was refreshing my T-Shirts and the men’s section was right next to the children’s one.
Anyway, aside from the tackiness of motivational postering and the sexism in just who gets what motivation, the thing that strikes me is that the shirts, are basically lies. I’m not a fan of lying to children.
No, kindness does not always win. Sometimes you need to tell it like it is, particularly if you’re female. “Be kind” is all too often really “Be silent and take it” – and that never really works out for anybody.
If I got a T-shirt telling me to be grateful, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be the emotion it inspired in me. You’ve got to let your tastes be known for people to cater to them, being outwardly grateful while inwardly wincing doesn’t lead to better presents.
Being “humble” – means not getting your work recognized for what it is, and can actually be harmful not just to the humble person, but toxic to teamwork. Humility breeds groupthink, where you don’t speak up about stuff that is clearly wrong because you don’t feel important enough to do so – leading to bigger and worse disasters down the road.
“Be good, do good”, may sound generic and safe but what do you mean by “Good”? All too often, “good” is a shorthand for being convenient.
“Explore, nothing holding you back”? You mean apart from the good common sense to recognize that maybe the storm drain might be subject to flash flooding? There is plenty holding you back, and that isn’t altogether a bad thing.
“Rewrite the rules”, you mean cheat? One shouldn’t obey the rules just because they’re rules, one should be critical of the rules, but, and this is important, pretty often the rules are rules because bad shit happened when they weren’t in place that required instituting rules.
Fairly frequently the rules work just fine and don’t need rewriting, fairly frequently rewriting the rules is a waste of time that makes things worse.
If your dreams are being powered by Xbox, you’ve got problems mate.
The problem with slogans is that the world is a nuanced place – “safe” generic statements are never really all that safe, and often what you end up doing is encouraging things that shouldn’t really be encouraged.
If all the shirts were flung in a big pile and a flock of children released to pick out the ones they wanted, they would immediately sort them into boy shirts and girl shirts based on the colour. That’s how this works – the colour tells you who it’s for, the slogan tells you what they are meant to (be) like. How rigidly individual children will stick to this rule will depend on a lot of factors – my nephew gave up purple as his favourite colour about 6 months after becoming aware that purple is “for girls” – but I would guess that most boys would choose the greys, blues and army greens, including the boys who would prefer pink but know that there will be repercussions if they choose from the girl’s shirts (with the possible exception that quite recently society has started telling boys that if they like pink, there’s nothing wrong with that, it just means they are in the wrong body and actually girls. So there may be some boys who will go with what they like, but attach far too much meaning to that preference). Girls on the other hand will be a little more free to make real choices outside of the sea of pink-purple-pastels because little girls who imagine that they could be something more than a decorative sandwich-maker / incubator are cute and funny and allowed to aspire to the cool things that are for boys, at least until the they are put back in their place the minute they hit puberty.
All the slogans on all the shirts in all the colours, I say. If you have girl slogans on boy colours and vice versa, it becomes much more difficult to work out why any of them are for girls or boys in the first place.
There are some colors that are permitted for both sexes, no? Like red for instance? In fact are any of them really NO NO DON’T GO THERE apart from pink?
One thing my husband and I do each year is buy Christmas toys for children sponsored by our school (these are children of students). We get to pick from an assortment of ornaments with their preferences. I am finding a frequent preference for red in boys while still seeing a lot of pink in girls. I always select ornaments that do not list strictly gendered choices for the kids, allowing me more fun and freedom. And I never pick up a boy’s ornament that wants blue or a girl’s ornament that wants pink. Too much contribution to stereotype.
I do agree with Catwhisperer, though. The best enforcer of stereotypes are little kids who have learned what is supposed to be where. They can be cruel to kids who wear the wrong thing. And many of them believe this is just what is, and what must be, because they haven’t learned how to sort through ideas critically yet.
That sure sounds like the sort of admonitions one hears directed towards girls in the creepy “purity culture” cults of the sort that the Duggars follow.
Doesn’t it though.
I think I’d phrase a description of the “Perfect” message a bit differently: not as an admonition to be perfect, but as a goal that of course girls are expected to aspire to, and for which girls are complimented and rewarded. Like all the T-shirts that say “Pretty” in some form. I see parenting advice nowadays that says not to keep telling your daughter how pretty she looks or how pretty her hair is; it is incredibly difficult to avoid doing this. The little girl absorbs the message that being pretty is valued and appreciated. Same thing as an admonition, but with positive intent, so it’s harder for many people to see the problem.
So my mother was doing good parenting when she told me I was ugly? (Rhetorical; it still gave the same message – pretty matters, and you are not it. Because of those messages through my childhood, I couldn’t hear the messages of the men telling me the opposite. And of course, from both of them, I got the message that pretty is important.)
Re #11
Damn, that sounds awful. I’m so sorry you had to deal with that.
Bruce @4, damn straight.
iknklast @11, calling a kid ugly is just a horrible thing to do. I have some friends that have never made a big deal out of it, but have mostly avoided telling either their girl or boy they are good looking. I get the impression that they want the kids to value things other than the transient physical. We’ve pretty much respected their wishes there. It does help that both kids have skills and attributes that have actually taken work to achieve that they can be praised and complemented on. it’s tricky and easy to get things wrong even when trying to do something for the right reasons. Still, no need to ever call a kid ugly.
It’s true what Bruce says @ 4 – slogans are not a particularly good thing in themselves, because…they’re slogans. It’s much like the problem with trans ideology, in fact: it’s all slogans, because there is no good argument.