I feel sorry for little girls. Perusing through the choice of games for the Nintendo DS in Gamestop, I was greeted by a queasy array of shite intended for their enjoyment.
Here are some examples:
It always amazes me flicking through the Argos catalogue and seeing how all the interesting, educational and scientific toys are marketed and presented towards the young male demographic, whilst the cailins get the pink saturated choice of makeup, cooking and vanity-training rubbish. Is it any wonder I find that a lot of girls are extremely irritating. People are being brainwashed by obese marketing executives into buying the same tired cliches and giving them to children.
I really do think that the key to making respected and intelligent women in the future is to stop all the poisonous marketing from infecting their brains when they are little. The amount of unintelligent young women I come across astounds me at times. They have no interest in reading, spelling properly or the general world around them. The most important agenda seems to be their hair or how many pushup bras they can get for twenty euro.
Of course there are a lot of stupid young males out there as well but I do think that with “tweens” as the Americans like to call them, and teenage girls, they are forced to consider their appearance, and their value to the opposite sex, a lot more significantly. It’s tiring to see that in the year 2009, idiots like Hannah Montana and Katie Price are so popular.
An interesting fact is that the colour pink was once designated for boys, and blue for girls.
“At one point pink was considered more of a boy’s color, (as a watered-down red, which is a fierce color) and blue was more for girls. The associate of pink with bold, dramatic red clearly affected its use for boys. An American newspaper in 1914 advised mothers, “If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” The Sunday Sentinal, March 29, 1914.
“There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Ladies Home Journal, June, 1918
I have nothing against the colour pink, in fact I quite like the searing fuschia variety, but in general it activates a sort of Pavlov’s dog-like response of exasperation when I see it adorning the various products on the shelves of toystores and what not.
One day I walked into a stationery store and saw they had Playboy themed stationery such as pencil cases, folders and sharpeners, ready for the end of summer rush back to school. I should have burned the place down. That retarded bunny has no place on things that are aimed at young girls.Talk about getting them while they are young, its nausea inducing. The same magazine that Dad (well very old Dads, because I don’t think anyone buys Playboy anymore) has hidden under the sofa, sells pencil cases that little Mary uses to hold her crayons for drawing her pictures in school.
American television and media is obsessed with sexual images and titillation, yet the thought of sex education and contraception for teenagers is something that the Christian Right-wing nuts foam at the mouth about, whenever the agenda is mentioned. So sexualisation is okay but sex education isn’t. Talk about warped values.
Take a look at these frankly fucked up photos, intended for submission into beauty pageants, so popular in certain parts of America.
Companies offer retouching services to make your child’s photos look that bit more “competitive” for the show.
Child beauty pageants, another wonderful thing America has given to the world.
This was the subject of a debate I was in recently; how women generally aren’t encouraged be as successful as men, rather they are encouraged to make themselves attractive to successful men.
And to be fair, it’s not just the American media which is obsessed with sexual images and titillation. Some would say it’s a mark of progress that in modern times this is the kind of inequality we have to complain about, as opposed to the injustices of the last century and backwards.
If that’s progress, then personally I can’t wait for the apocalypse to reset everyone’s ideas of sexuality, proper order and conditioning.
You’re absolutely right. Hopefully the apocalypse will arrive soon, I would dearly love to beat my credit card bill.