If you read feminist blogs, you’ve surely already seen this gem of a T-shirt, which JC Penney was hawking until they (sensibly) withdrew it in response to public protest and apologized for its sexist nitwittery:
Available in sizes for girls in roughly grades 1 through 8, the T-shirt sports the pseudo-sassy phrase, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”
Feminist bloggers have rightly slammed the shirt for its obvious sexism. Recalling the notorious “math is hard” Barbie, feMOMhist snarks:
What person would want to encourage a little girl to think that beauty and intellect are mutually exclusive? Clearly no one who has met moi!
The shirt is a disaster aesthetically, politically, and intellectually. It’s part of a larger phenomenon of T-shirts with attitude, mostly marketed to boys; this particular specimen adds sexism to the mix for a little extra charm. It reinforces the idea that girls and women have to trade sex, sexiness, and prettiness for security and success, an idea that you’d think would be moribund by now but just refuses to die: see Laurie Penny’s hilarious takedown of a new book by LSE researcher Catherine Harkin, who makes exactly that argument.
At Feministe, Caperton questions how “every employee who touched it between wholesaler and Web site” could have thought the shirt innocuous. I’d add that the design team, too, brings to mind the fine fellows from “Dumb and Dumber.”
But there’s one point that I haven’t seen other commentators skewer, and that’s the idea that a girl’s brother ought to be swayed by her prettiness. Am I the only one creeped out by this? Why should a brother be inspired to do his sister’s homework just because of how she looks? I mean, this shirt is encouraging boys to look at their sisters in a way that verges on incestuous. Ewwwww.
It goes to show that in a world where sexuality is seen basically as transactional, even young sisters and brothers are pushed into that paradigm. While actual brother-sister incest is (obviously) a real thing, it’s relatively rare, compared to adult-on-child incest. In most families, brothers and sisters are either indifferent to each other’s looks or insult them. I imagine this T-shirt slogan refers to brothers because most girls in the target age group don’t have boyfriends yet. Its dumb-and-dumber designers probably didn’t think through its incestuous implications. That doesn’t make it any less twisted. Ewwww, again.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
My question is, who’d buy this piece of crap for their kid? What kind of a parent thinks it’s OK for their daughter to wear something like this?
It’s mind-boggling to me.
Clarissa, I agree completely. I didn’t want to get into that whole issue because it can quickly shade into blaming mothers solely for the trashy crap their children – especially the girls – wear. It’s a complex issue because so little of the clothing in the juniors department is non-trashy. Plus girls want to wear the stuff their friends wear, which again is often crap.
But if I had a daughter, I wouldn’t buy that shirt for her if you paid me a million bucks. Some commentators observed that Penney had marked the shirt down, which may indicate it wasn’t a big hit. For me, the bottom line is that parents still have a responsibility to be gatekeepers and to fend off the worst junk that our culture offers.
I agree with you regarding the offensive tshirts. As the father of an eleven year old girl I have long been put off by the mean spirited portrayals of “tweens” on TV shows on the Disney Network and Nickolodeon. There is a snarky, smarmy, irony employed that strips these characters of any innocence — In fact, the adults are often the foils. Although it is meant to funny, to me it is extremely off-putting.
Madison Avenue is only too happy to exploit our children in this way, whether it is through television shows, or tshirts with vile messages.
And this exploitation really is worse for girls than for boys. You see wisecracking boys that offer a lousy role model, but boys are not pushed to sexualize themselves. I’ve seen girls aged 8 or 9 imitating the moves they’e seen on MTV and Disney, and it is just really inappropriate – I don’t care if you’re progressive, conservative, or in between. The trashification of childhood ought to be a unifying issue that we can all agree upon.
Instead, someone out there in the world is purchasing not only this T-shirt but the Hooters shirts for toddler girls and boys.
Disgust with all that was the real energy behind the obsession with Jon Benet Ramsey.
Pseudo-sassy is the exactly right word for this schlock.
Disgust, yes, but also a strain of prurience, I fear. I’d like to think otherwise, but there are so many forms of child abuse that are worse than dressing your child up as a mini-beauty queen, and yet this particular case drew attention like none other.
All of you who have daughters, you are really navigating a tough field. I whine that half the boys’ clothes are camo and the other half are adorned with skulls, but the amount of crapitude is even worse for the girls.
There was a big uproar about this shirt from parents of all political and ideological stripes. I’m sure somebody somewhere bought it, but I don’t think you have to be a card-carrying feminist to see this one as really effed up.
What keith said. God, I hate those shows! Thanks for explaining why. I just hate the hipster put-downs they specialize in, a whole tutorial for kids in up-to-the-minutes coolness. And yes, lots of product placement with the clothes.
Ugh.
This shirt: more ugh. But it does make me think of what they’d wear on those shows!
I used to think Nickleodeon pioneered this crap because that’s where I frst saw it when my daughter was a tween – and she’s 30 now. But now I think that’s just when I forst started noticing it.
This smug, half-witted meme goes at east as far back as Mark Twain. Look at the school room scenes in Tom Sawyer, and then look at the rest of the whole book.