I'm Too Sexy for My Onesie

For their 2006 book Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes [2], Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb, both professors, waded through the pink muck of girl culture. They watched Dora the Explorer, [3] visited Hot Topic, and became familiar with Hilary Duff’s oeuvre. They found that girls were increasingly being encouraged to “choose accessorizing over academics, sex appeal over sports, and boyfriends over friends.” Girls just a year or two out of kindergarten were being sold sex in the form of skimpy underwear and French Maid Halloween costumes. “Welcome,” they wrote, to “the stark commercialization of gender.”

One of the questions they encountered most often in promoting the book was “What about the boys?” So they set out to find the answer. What they discovered was that boys were being pigeonholed as much as girls. In their new book, Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons From Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes [4], co-authored with Mark Tappan, a professor of education at Colby College, they offer interesting new insight into the way oversexed “raunch culture” is marketed to young boys in everything from T-shirts to cologne. Boys are being told, from an early age, to want sex just as much as girls are being told to embody it.

That boys are getting their share of raunch culture should be an unsurprising conclusion, but the examples they give are shocking both in number and extremity: onesies with “Chicks Dig Me” or “Playground Pimp” (spelled out in alphabet blocks) printed across the front; T-shirts that declare “My Mom Is a MILF,” “All Daddy Wanted Was a Blowjob,” and “Hung Like a Five-Year Old.” Abercrombie & Fitch offers tees with slogans like “Save a Cherry, Pop a Collar” and “One Man’s Junk is Another Woman’s Treasure.” Other favorite shirts cited in a survey answered by more than 600 boys across the country included such charm-free sentiments as “You Can Have My Sister" and “Let’s Flip a Coin. Heads I Get Tail. Tails I Get Head.”

The Packaging Boyhood team’s research serves to broaden our notion of who is being corrupted. By picking apart the messages—in products, pop culture, and the media—behind boys “just being boys,” the authors prove that boyhood is sullied just as much as girlhood. What they call “the general ‘pornification’ of the culture” is a problem that should concern us all because it points to a larger erosion of childhood, where a sexual precociousness that once began in adolescence now seeks out its victims, as those ribald onesies prove, shortly after birth.

The underlying message is that boys are being prepped for wanting sex all the time, and at younger and younger ages. The authors cite an episode of the Disney Channel show The Suite Life of Zack and Cody [5], in which Zack sets up his own underage dance club in the lounge of the luxury hotel where he lives. As the bartender, he pushes root beer after root beer to a shy girl character, Barbara, who proceeds to shed her glasses, shout “hit me again!” and dance while the crowd encourages her. The authors trace the origin of this less-than-G-rated scene. “Does it matter at all that the guy who wrote this episode, "Club Twin," got his own start in the raunchy 1983 film Screwballs [6] and the TV take-off of the movie, Police Academy?” they ask coyly. “Do all those studies connecting alcohol consumption and sexual violence just not apply here? Of course not. How dare we imply something so crass?”

It’s not enough that boys act out mature situations or wear macho clothing; they’re also supposed to exude manly pheromones. Boys still in grammar school are targeted as fragrance consumers by the likes of Disney (Cars, Buzz Lightyear, or Pirates of the Caribbean cologne) and Marvel Comics (Hulk Eau De Toilette Spray [7]). Axe body spray [8] has been hugely successful with teens and tweens, marketing its cologne with wink-wink naughty humor that shows packs of hot chicks sniffing out and hunting down Axe-wearing guys. In its defense, Axe, like fellow body spray manufacturer Gillette and celebrities such as David Beckham and P. Diddy who have signature scents, claims that its fragrance isn’t meant for teens. But as any woman who read Seventeen magazine while still in junior high will tell you, there is nothing more alluring than something that’s supposed to be too mature for your age level.

“How are boys expected to deal with all the messages about being out of control, having body parts that seem disconnected or out of their control, having desire that they are told is boundless, and having smells that offend?” the authors ask. Boys are told to take control by becoming tiny ladies’ men, who, even while still in diapers, have sex on the brain.

The authors take the realistic view that children can’t live in a vacuum. They assign most of the responsibility to parents, who they say should familiarize themselves with the products and media their kids consume and listen to why they like it. Media literacy is an ongoing education, and one that Brown, Lamb, and Tappan believe should start as early as possible. Their advice: “As soon as he’s old enough to be sorting out gender and asking what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl,” you can introduce a new word to his vocabulary. That would be stereotype.