Health & Science
I'm Too Sexy for My Onesie
The raunch culture that’s inundating our boys from babyhood.
For their 2006 book Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes, Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb, both professors, waded through the pink muck of girl culture. They watched Dora the Explorer, 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, 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, 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 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?”
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Comments
tshirts with death & mayhem
By: heid_pe | Wed, 11/18/2009 - 20:57
punkteacher - that is so true
it also annoys me that it is constantly put back on the parents. i mean where the hell am i going to find the time (or skills for that matter!) to make my kids clothing
am really upset about this
By: heid_pe | Wed, 11/18/2009 - 20:53
am really upset about this because i can see how true it is from the way my boys from the age of 3 talk about 'sexy girls', or say 'i'm naked like a girl', & think they are cool if they have a girlfriend. yes i constantly talk to them about stereotypes, etc but pop culture hits them at the subconscious level & short of turning amish i don't see how i can block it out
One of the most common
By: Mizz.Givens | Fri, 11/13/2009 - 23:23
One of the most common suggestion at the school where I work is for the male students to say (mostly to female staff), "suck my balls," and variations thereof. Some of them surely have never even had any sexual experiences; in fact, one of the students described "butt sex" as "two people rubbing their butts together." The lack of information combined with hypersexualized society is just revolting.
My beef
By: Abby Normal | Fri, 11/13/2009 - 13:20
I know this is a trend that's been around a lot longer than pimp shirts for little boys, but what bugged me when my son was born was how practically everything for little boys is sports related. I had a hard time just finding shirts for him that didn't say "Daddy's Little MVP" on it.
I know, it's fairly innocuous by comparison, but all the sports stuff got on my nerves because in just reinforced a stereotype that none of the men in my life fit. My husband is a soft-spoken sci-fi nerd who only knows what day Superbowl sunday is if somebody reminds him--it seemed ridiculous that his child wear stuff that proclaims him to be a future Heisman trophy winner.
Not the worst problem out there for boys' clothing
By: punkteacher | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 21:32
I agree that overt sexuality in children's clothing has been a problem. I see another one equally or more unfortunate for boys. I have a toddler son who has always been big for his age. Now he is 3 years old and wears size 5/6. When he left "toddler" sizes (generally these end at size 4T or 5T), for me the real problem became finding boys' clothes that had nothing to do with death, destruction or mayhem. While little girls are made to look like whores, little boys are made to look like killers or criminals. The sexed-up/violent clothing situation is also far worse at lower price-point stores. If you can afford to buy more expensive clothes, or have the free time to shop around, you can purchase clothes without villains, skulls or military camouflage, as I am sure you can find girls' clothing that is stylish and youthful and modest. People with less time and money are left with fewer options, as usual, and their children are being pushed into stereotypical roles with great force. It also gives people who can find higher-quality clothing another mechanism with which to judge those who can't due to lack of time or funds.
Yes
By: feministworkingmom | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 11:13
A culture that sexualizes children and creates rigid gender divides is just as damaging to boys as it is to girls. I've been saying for a long time--patriarchy hurts men as well as women, just in different ways. Perpetuating male (sexual) domination as a cultural value and norm through gendered products, advertising, and expectations actually forms men into the oppressors that women despise. It is vitally important that we raise our sons to reject sexist ideas, to view women as their equals in every way, to act with the assumption of RESPECT and DIGNITY in their relationships with all human beings regardless of race, gender, economic status, religion, sexual identity/orientation, etc.
Not the case, Duckie. The
By: donaldsg | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 17:59
Not the case, Duckie. The sexualization of children affects how they see others and themselves. Little girls also learn to think of themselves as sex objects and boys learn to see girls and women as sex objects.
Alarmist research gets the buzz!
By: TheMrLee | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 13:57
When an author—even a professor!—lets something as stupid as this into their article, it makes me find a new article. This is an interesting concept, but if the people researching it can't sort out that a writer can write for different audience, why should anyone believe they can sort out anything else? If J.K. Rowling wrote an unpublished erotica novel 10 years before Harry Potter, would that suddenly make Harry Potter full of inappropriate sexual overtones? Of course not. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a guy who writes for Zack and Cody is not the most thoughtful and gifted writer out there. I might even suspect he was a hack. So the fact that he wrote a terrible, thoughtless episode doesn't mean that the show routinely espouses the idea that women just need to loosen up a bit (via beverage consumption). Did the researchers investigate the content of the show with as much vigor as they did the background of the writers? If so, the article neglects to mention it.
I remember when I was a boy, maybe 4th grade. I was with some older boys who had some Playboy magazines. To go along, I looked at them, but couldn't figure out why anyone would want to. A year or two later, I figured it out. Things like onesies with "Playground Pimp" on it might reflect parental attitudes that will later be reflected in their boys. But the babies themselves—who can't read yet—won't be impacted by whatever ironic, crude or moronic things their parents opt to adorn them with.
With a bit more thought than brought to the average episode of Zack and Cody, this could have been engaging. Instead, we get what is functionally a press release for an alarmist book.
early differences
By: duckiedumonde | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 12:37
Onesies that say "Playground pimp" are dumb and reflect poorly on the parents who dress their toddlers in them. But I think encouraging 10-year-olds to buy Axe body spray is far more insidious--it encourages children (whose man-funk issues exist only in their own minds) to make a choice about their own sexualization at a very young age.
That said, it's different, I think, than thongs for 6 year olds, which parents also buy, because it sexualizes little girls in a way that a tee shirt on a little boy doesn't.
Which brings up an interesting distinction. The sexualization of little girls in this comparison affects the way others think about them, and the sexualization of little boys affects the way they think about themselves.