My patriarchy-and-capitalism-blaming spidey sense went a-tingling this morning, and when I opened up my email, I saw why. Before I get into this, though, I should clarify that while I think the patriarchy is a bad thing that needs to go, I don’t think capitalism is necessarily evil. I think that capitalism, in controlled circumstances that allow for a genuine free market to flourish, is a great thing. If mixed in with socialist elements like public ownership of certain markets that do better under public control, and held in check with regulation and pro-labor policies, as well as high marginal tax rates that encourage long term investment over short term scorched earth investing, I think there’s a place for capitalist markets that can encourage creativity and wealth creation. Unfortunately, the capitalism we have now is increasingly geared towards making a quick buck rather than long-term investment, and that has resulted in all sorts of bad, including the mortgage crisis and the way we’d rather start wars to get at oil than make the long term investment into energy independence.
I also blame that mentality for this bit of weirdness.
ONE recent rainy afternoon, Eleanor LaFauci, 7, sat with her feet in open-toed foam slippers, admiring her toenails, freshly painted watermelon pink.
“Look, we’re reading an adult magazine,” Eleanor told her mother, gleefully waving a copy of People with a desultory-looking Britney Spears on its cover.
Eleanor was in the bubble-gum-colored pedicure lounge of Dashing Diva, the Upper West Side franchise of the international nail spa, with her 3 ½-year-old sister and a half-dozen or so friends. The girls were celebrating her birthday with mani’s, pedi’s and mini-makeovers with light makeup and body art — glitter-applied stars, lightning bolts and, of course, hearts.
The article is about how the beauty industry is turning more and more of its attention towards recruiting the elementary school-age customer set. They’ve already got the junior high squad, so it’s time to go even younger.
But today, cosmetic companies and retailers increasingly aim their sophisticated products and service packages squarely at 6- to 9-year-olds, who are being transformed into savvy beauty consumers before they’re out of elementary school….
Sweet & Sassy, a salon and party destination based in Texas for girls 5 to 11, includes pink limo service as a party add-on, which starts at $150 a ride. And Dashing Diva franchises often offer virgin Cosmos in martini glasses along with their extra-virgin nail polish, free of a group of chemicals called phthalates, for a round of services for a birthday girl and her friends.
At Club Libby Lu, a mall-based chain and the most mainstream of the primping party outlets, girls of any age can mix their own lip gloss and live out their pop idol fantasies. Last year, the chain did about a million makeovers in its 90 stores nationwide, said Ari Goldsmith, the director of advertising and marketing.
The TV show “Hannah Montana” is the official motivator here, so we really are talking the pre-teen set, girls that should be too busy climbing trees and playing hopscotch to bother with the self esteem-sucking beauty industry. It’s the natural result of the whole Disney Princess phenomenon. I’m not sure if the mix of girls that are wannabe beauty queens vs. the tomboys has changed, but it seems the former are becoming a cash cow for certain industries. And the alarm being raised about it amuses me—when I was a kid, the struggle with my mother was because I never wanted to wear skirts or have my hair curled. Now you’re much more likely to hear the opposite concern, that this is all some girls want to do.
It’s a point that vexes Rosalind Wiseman, the author of “Queen Bees & Wannabes” (Three Rivers Press, 2003). “Mothers and fathers do really crazy things with the best of intentions,” she said. “I don’t care how it’s couched, if you’re permitting this with your daughter, you are hyper-sexualizing her. It’s one thing to have them play around with makeup at home within the bubble of the family. But once it shifts to another context, you are taking away the play and creating a consumer, and frankly, you run the risk of having one more person who feels she’s not good enough if she’s not buying the stuff.”
The self esteem concerns are paramount, I’d agree. But I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that there’s some vague “hyper-sexualization” behind this. It’s less about turn girls into fuckable women, but turning them into women-as-consumers. It’s market expansion in our age of short term capitalism. Instead of the slow burn money-maker of innovation (say, invent a nifty new MP3 player that sells because it’s so damn useful), what we have hear is trying to monkey open new markets to the same products with a marketing blitz. It makes a lot of money for the people who pull it off initially, but the problem here is that once you tap out the elementary school consumers, you’re basically out of new markets. What next? Selling to fetuses?
Of course, this entire article that’s basically a press release from Victoria’s Secret is a hoot.
“I feel so strongly about us getting back to our heritage and really thinking in terms of ultra feminine and not just the word sexy and becoming much more relevant to our customer,” Turney said Thursday.
Turney said Victoria’s Secret has gotten younger with a strong focus on its successful Pink line of lingerie and loungewear created for college-age women, and has tried to chase those customers
Turney said Victoria’s Secret wants to increase its level of sophistication.
“We will also reinvent the sleepwear business and focus on product quality,” she said. “Our assortment will return to an ultra feminine lingerie brand to meet her needs and expectation.”
Victoria’s Secret shows the downside to the expanding-market model. They started out aimed at the over-25 set, and then expanded to the high school set. I don’t think they can legitimately go any lower in age, really. Already, it seems that selling PJs to virgins has hurt their reputation with older women. But all it really takes is a dive in discretionary spending in their working-middle class customer base to hurt them, and they have nowhere to go. You can’t just keep growing. There’s a top limit there.
Fuck ‘em, though. Victoria’s Secret is the worst of everything. It’s sexist, weird, nothing fits normal women, badly made, and overpriced. I’m sort of amazed they’ve managed to stay afloat for so long with such a shoddy product. Maybe they’re losing money because the need to have sexual play dumbed down for the mall shopping set has diminished.
60 Responses to “Surely, they can keep getting younger”
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I guess they don’t have dictionaries at the NY Times anymore if they think that makes any sense.
It sounds like Victoria’s Secret is having the same kind of problems that almost ran the Gap into bankruptcy. It was a combination of things, but IIRC it was essentially that they gave up making staple wardrobe items and started chasing fashion, and they just couldn’t keep up with the cheaper chains like Forever 21 in terms of costs while keeping up some kind of quality. Once people decide that the Gap and Forever 21 are basically the same thing, why would they pay more for stuff from the Gap?
I used to feel strongly that girly pursuits were somehow sexist and dehumanizing. I rejected them when I was young a lot of the time and liked to call myself a tomboy.
Now I feel differently, because I have a daugher and she loved Barbie and the color pink and gets excited about the idea of a manicure. She’s eight. She loves Hannah Montana. When she was a toddler and I wanted to steer her away from the whole princess thing, I suddenly felt like I was telling her that what she liked and found important was bad…because it’s girly. And then I began to slowly re-think the whole thing.
Girls want to e like their moms. Moms paint their nails. Yet if girls pain their nails, it somehow taints their childhood. Do boys childhoods get tainted by imitating their dads? By watching sports or whatever? I know that beauty contests and maybe violent video games and things of the sort probably really DO taint childhood, but a sparkly dress? A manicure on her b-day?
She fishes, plays outside, will hunt when she’s of age. She plays sports. Why do I get a whiff of misogyny when even feminists start criticizing little girls liking the girly stuff?
My mother was boggled to get into a conversation the other day with women my age (35-50) who were talking about how they bring their kids to the mall to teach them to shop. As a really important learning experience, you understand.
My mom called me up to ask me if I’d ever done that, and I said ” … No.” Although I was sad to see FAO Schwartz go out of business, because their catalog was a very important teaching tool for my kids as pre-schoolers: it was how we introduced the key concepts “Costs too much” and “Not worth it”.
My mother was boggled to get into a conversation the other day with women my age (35-50) who were talking about how they bring their kids to the mall to teach them to shop. As a really important learning experience, you understand.
I actually understand that, though I’m thinking more of “teach kids how to comparison shop for the best price and how to check the quality of an item before you buy it” than “make sure they buy the right label.” It can be an important consumer skill to discover how much they mark things down at Macy’s when they get really desperate.
When I was a pre-teen in the 1970s, there was a line of cosmetics called “Tinkerbell,” definitely aimed at the pre-teen set. Bubble baths, perfume sprays, powder compacts, very pale lipsticks. They were much-coveted birthday gifts.
We didn’t have whole organized parties to teach us to put them on, though.
hmmm. I wonder if anyone is informing these girls of the nail bed infections they can get from “mani’s and pedi’s”. I’m sure they’d really love having all their nails fall off and have to take some semi-expensive meds for 3-6 months.
Sometimes when I read these articles, I get the feeling that part of the real objection to “creating consumers” out of girls (but never boys, even though a great deal of highly dubious marketing is aimed at them) is that they will want too many things for themselves and fail to grow up into the self-denying women we need to hold everything together. I mean, a girl trying makeup by herself at home is okay but trying it with her friends at a birthday party is hypersexualizing? Seems like a really tenuous distinction.
You know that you’re too old for this (in all senses) when you think little made-up girl kids look like JonBenet.
They probably go “Who was JonBenet?”
I am a girl scout leader and we took our troop to a salon where they had their hair done, manicures and light makeup applied before we took them to a nearby restaurant for dinner. While girls were waiting their turn to have their hair done we talked to them about caring for their bodies (teeth, hygiene, etc) and positive self-image (ie, model bodies being unrealistic, appreciating your beauty). We had a great time, the girls all felt and looked beautiful, and not one of them is clamoring for or wearing makeup on a regular basis since then. They are all 10 or 11 year olds. I agree with Kinara, some of this is play-acting being like their moms and other adult women, and is not necessarily sexist as long as they are also told not just at the party but consistently that they are valued for themselves as a whole.
I see this sort of sentiment from non-econ lefty types a lot:
“I think there’s a place for capitalist markets that can encourage creativity and wealth creation.”
This is a point that has become conventional wisdom for political reasons. It’s mostly false.
I’m pro-capitalism, at least for a leftist, but I have to point out that one of capitalism’s key flaws is that it undervalues long-term technological innovation. Bob Kuttner did a nice job explaining this in “Everything for Sale” some years ago (not his idea originally, of course.)
The people whose job it is to repeat the line that “capitalism is a great engine of innovation” are usually pushing that line as a tactic in a larger effort to get various elements of the state-controlled innovative sector to steer money toward their clients and benefactors. That’s Reagan-style “free market economics.” Confusing, yes, but understanding this point of propaganda is a key to understanding political economics in the last 50 years.
Capitalism is a great engine of growth. Growth is different from creativity or innovation. Capitalism is bad good at the first, and bad at the other two. That’s why we have the Pentagon, NIH, CDC, etc. We need big multibillion dollar economic actors that value technological innovation for its own sake.
“Wealth creation” is a thornier topic, but in short I’d say that it’s important to always recall that a good bit of the wealth that capitalism “creates” actually comes out of the ground.
I think the author thought “desultory” was some extra-special kind of “sultry.” You know, like “penultimate” is a super-duper “ultimate?”
freida, I have to say that doing things like that — having makeup and beauty lessons in Girl Scouts — was part of what drove me away from Girl Scouts by early high school. My brother was learning awesome wilderness camping and survival skills in Boy Scouts, and I was learning about how to be decorative for guys?
Somehow, I feel there is a big difference between putting on little kiddie nail polish and going to a salon to have adult professionals do a full-on pedicure. It’s just excessive. Kids used to play like grown up, but there was a clear difference between dress up clothes and costume jewelry and real kind that mom used. Just like there was a difference between a real woman and a little girl playing dress up. We are blurring that difference when see young girls as consumers just as potent as their parents. Also, in my childhood there was a sense in which we were delaying gratification. There were certain pleasures one would get when they were older, but not now. There is something here almost as creepy as purity balls. We’re putting our kids in a grown-up milleau and they don’t belong there.
One more thing — I have a real problem with over the top birthday parties. How much would something like this cost? What sort of families can afford that? How many million better choices are there for that money? How would the little girl feel whose family could only afford a cake and ice cream? Maybe those kids exist in a different world….
I second what Caroline said
I was ok with the fact that being a Girl Scout in upper elementary was considered nerdy, since I was a nerd. But it was when my younger brother started cub scouts and got to do all sorts of cool stuff - like make wooden cars and race them - while we pretty much just did crafts that I could do at home by myself, that I decided that I was being gypped and left the scouts.
This is exploiting the natural tendency of children to want to “grow up” as fast as possible. It’s why kids tend to identify strongly with siblings and others who are two to five years older. You see this tendency used in marketing to children all the time: For instance, the target readership of Seventeen magazine is girls about 12 to 15. Real 17-year-olds usually move to women’s mags like Glamour or (God help us) Cosmopolitan.
A New Yorker piece on Bratz dolls said that one of the standing marketing rules was to use “sassy” as a euphemism for “sexy,” which is why I find the name of that Sweet & Sassy salon slightly annoying.
Is this the part where one mentions, snootily, Daniel Bell?
Why do I get a whiff of misogyny when even feminists start criticizing little girls liking the girly stuff?
I don’t think that is what Amanda is doing, nor is that what the article is about. As above, the article is about “how the beauty industry is turning more and more of its attention towards recruiting the elementary school-age customer set.”
I know several moms who are total nature-girl hippie types (I live in Eugene, OR, so that’s the norm) who would never wear pink or paint their toenails or be girly, and their 5 and 6 year old daughters are still totally caught up in princess-culture, way more that I was when I was a kid.
I mean sure, I sometimes loved to play dress-up and put on my mom’s blush and try to walk in her high heels. And my southern grandma got us each makeup kits as soon as we could possibly be old enough. But I really do think it’s different now. That was just kids playing, this is kids being marketed to. I don’t think it taints a girl’s childhood to be girly. I think it taints a girl’s childhood to have the entire advertising engine of America tell her she should be girly, and that being girly is the most fun she can have.
But I really do think it’s different now.
I do too. I turn 30 this year, and yes, when I was a kid we had Tinkerbell products and all that, but we did not have multiple chains aimed at five-year-olds, and I don’t recall any mani-pedi spa birthday parties, let alone the virgin Cosmos or whatever. I can’t imagine the pressure to change yourself being worse now than it was then, but I have to conclude that it is.
unrelated but,
Av0gadro
Is it true that Eugene is where hippies go to heaven, or is that just a misconception that I have? As I am just stunningly jealous of you right now.
I don’t know about the kids getting manicure things - maybe it’s different in NY than in Philly, but at the salon I go to, the kids that get pedicures are really just getting their nails painted while Mom gets a real pedi. It’s actually kind of cute.
Which isn’t to say I wasn’t a little surprised when I first saw an 8 year old at the salon - I didn’t have my first pedicure until I was 25 or so - but there weren’t nail salons on every corner when I was growing up. Just Wet ‘n Wild and Bonnebelle.
Merriam-Webster Online
Des*ul*to*ry:
“marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose ”
I see what you mean, but it’s not that bad, since Spears is certainly marked by something.
So, Ape-man, if it ain’t capitalism, what IS driving those companies that do innovate?
++
Eugene OR is where folks with fashion sense go to Hell.
You should check the comments thread regarding this article on the NYTimes site.
Some posters are tapping into the difference between a couple of young girls painting each others nails (or getting our moms to do it) when we were young, and taking young girls to a nail salon and paying an adult, usually non-English speaking Asian woman to literally act as your personal “body servant”.
Seems a little to late-Empire for me.
I understand the argument for not equating “girly” with “bad”, for allowing kids to explore their interests (even if their interest is in pedicures), and all that, but that picture still makes me want to take my kid out to roll in the mud and get nice and messy. Ick! (Yeah, I know, the kid’ll probably turn out to be Miss America 2020 just to annoy me.)
“paying an adult, usually non-English speaking Asian woman to literally act as your personal body servant. Seems a little to late-Empire for me.”
Doing nails is an honest living, though, right? Would kids getting pedicures be less weird to you if the people doing the pedicures were white?
“Doing nails is an honest living, though, right? Would kids getting pedicures be less weird to you if the people doing the pedicures were white?”
Not at all. Having adults performing body services for children is very bizarre. However, the explosion of salons and “spas” on nearly corner, particularly in the NYC area, is driven by the availability of immigrant women to perform these jobs.
Being against this stuff is pretty much a lost battle at this point. It may seem very weird to those of us who grew up in the unisex 1970s, but almost all kids’ toys are gendered now, even things like computers and blocks. This is what we as a society have decided to value in our female children. At this point I’m just hoping the pendulum will swing the other way when these kids hit puberty and they will all be sick of the beauty culture.
There is a huge difference between kids playing and pretending to be adults, and adults creating an environment where adults direct children in play where they pretend to be adults.
In other words, it is one thing to mess with mom’s lipstick when you are eight, or pretend to play spa and take turns pretending to manicure and pedicure each other and puff on fake cigarettes - and quite another to have adults directing the activity, giving real manicures and pedicures, and mixing the faux drinks. The former involves intensive imagination and some resourcefulness and role play. The latter is just adults who need to get a life.
My brother was learning awesome wilderness camping and survival skills in Boy Scouts, and I was learning about how to be decorative for guys?
But hey, she said they all “looked and felt beautiful,” and that’s what Scouting’s all about. Not doing and learning, but how you look and how you feel about how you look.
Also note: it looks like this is yet another way that adults who have brown people serve them are getting their children accustomed to being served by brown people. Most of the manicure/pedicure folks in the northeast are either Brazillian or Hmong.
But I really do think it’s different now.
Amen. The gangs of six-to-eight-year old girls whose around whose outer limits I orbited circa 1968 to ‘70 were made up of youngsters who wouldn’t have been willing to sit down for hours, demure as pie, in a kiddie makeover joint to wait for a mani and wait for a pedi and absorb propaganda about the desirability of Just Being Britney. Not hardly. They’d have trashed the place—and the beauty-queen wannabes, superior in popularity and self-confidence to the other girls, would have led the charge.
I often hear complaints from people who concern themselves with men’s issues—by which I don’t strictly mean MRA’s, but yeah, them too—that the up-and-coming generation of young boys seems creepily deficient in vigor.* Which strikes me as odd, because there are things about the up-and-coming generation of young girls which impress me as indicating a similar lack of fortitude. This Princess Diva Tweener business is one of them. It isn’t that I don’t think it’s OK for girls to act girly—it’s just that I think it’s weird that the very girls who can look forward, as adults, to some level of participation in the real world should suddenly develop a compulsion to act out a bastardized 21st-century version of what is basically a 19th-century Tennysonian dream. How’d that come about? What’s up with that?
*As we all know, one version of this narrative lays the responsibility for this at the feet of the Evil Women who have managed, who knows how, to unman the unlucky lads in the bassinet. Of course that’s not the version I accept, but it looks like it’s the one that’s current.
I think you’re right about the new wave of “You too need and want someone to screw around with your feet!” for the single-digiteers is preparing them for a life of expenditures they mightn’t have had otherwise. I personally am teenaged, and many people my age spend a cool $60 a week on (as an example) eyebrow, parrafin, etc. waxings. Now, maybe there really is something horribly wrong with their eyebrows and the smoothness of their skin, but if there is, I can’t see it. (Of course that might be because I’m pretty much too ugly to be seen in public, so I know shit-all about making people look pretty). I have no issue with waxing as a concept, if someone feels the burning desire for it, but I guess I don’t think that we (aka people I know) would feel such an urge to have hair ripped out of ourselves if we hadn’t been trained like cute puppies when we were wee.
I do love that the little girl closest to the camera looks bored out of her gourd.
Eric:
The desire to innovate.
The idea that innovation can only occur in a captialist environment is quite a bizarre one. Demonstrably false, too.
Sorry, I just think taking girl scouts to a beauty salon is fucking dumb. When I was a brownie and a “junior” girl scout, it was about camping and crafts, and mostly, for me at least, a way to have a structured group activity with other girls my age outside of school. I really don’t see where learning to look pretty and primping has any value. They’re girls - they’re going to learn about makeup and clothing and doing their hair without their troop leader’s help. They already know that looking pretty is the one thing that will give them the most positive attention and popularity. We figure this out around first grade. I don’t buy the idea that a trip to the beauty salon is a wonderful self-esteem builder.
Apparently the beauty industry skipped me, because I know bunk about makeup. I feel like an idiot whenever I try to wear it. I shudder to recall that I used to wear it every day in middle school.
Also, I hate the window display at VS. The mannequins are always so much thinner than any woman could be and… still be alive. It’s disgusting.
I did, however, buy one piece of lingerie there once with a former boyfriend in which I looked incredible. It was a rare find, though. Nothing else appealed to me or ever has there. Unfortunately, when that relationship ended I got rid of it.
Amanda: “I’m not sure if the mix of girls that are wannabe beauty queens vs. the tomboys has changed, but it seems the former are becoming a cash cow for certain industries.”
And the latter isn’t? There are definitely more tents, hiking boots, athletic shoes, outdoors gear, rock-climbing gear, snowpants, snowboards, high-end skates, high-end bicycles, and athletic clothing for “tomboyish” girls and young women today. All types of girls are being marketed by many more industries than before. I rarely saw “baby doll” or even “women’s” t-shirts at rock concerts when I was younger, but they are standard fare at stores and shows today.
Tomboys are an important market, since right now any market is an important market. The Gap may have forsaken them to some extent, but its subsidiary Old Navy has them pretty well covered. As do a thousand other companies. Cargo pants for teenage girls aren’t exploitative unless there’s a flower on them, I guess.
Kids used to play like grown up, but there was a clear difference between dress up clothes and costume jewelry and real kind that mom used. Just like there was a difference between a real woman and a little girl playing dress up.
Here’s the thing, though. Think of your own closet. Would playing dress-up from your closet for your (hypothetical?) daughter be dresses and high heels, or would it be t-shirts and jeans not too different than the one she herself wears?
A lot of people don’t realize that we’ve gone through a fashion change where once again adults and children are dressing essentially the same. If you look at pictures of families in the 17th century where children wear smaller versions of the adult clothes, and then look at a modern family portrait where adults wear larger version of children’s clothes, you’ll see that we’ve come full circle.
I think Ms Kate hits the nub:
There is a huge difference between kids playing and pretending to be adults, and adults creating an environment where adults direct children in play where they pretend to be adults.
In many ways, it’s yet another attempt by middle-class and upper-class adults to extend their childhood as long as possible and live through their children. The children are basically being treated like little puppets and doing things their parents enjoy so the parents can watch their little mini-mes be just like them.
As far as the salons themselves go, the ones out here in Los Angeles are actually owned by the immigrants who work in them. It’s kind of hard for me to say that the people running the manicure/pedicure stores are being treated as servants, but restaurant owners or mini-mart owners are not. That starts to get into deciding that because women mostly get manicures, that means they must be frivolous, and because manicures are frivolous, that means that the stores that do them are frivolous and the people who work in those stores are seen as servants, unlike the very important and solemn liquor store employees.
It’s one of those things that can skate on the edge of deciding that if it’s something that women do, it must be worthless. Especially since, again here in LA, most of the owners of these places are, yes, women.
desultory = (should be) sultry.
>hmmm. I wonder if anyone is informing these girls of the nail bed infections they can get from “mani’s and pedi’s”. I’m sure they’d really love having all their nails fall off and have to take some semi-expensive meds for 3-6 months.
this is exactly why every time I even consider getting one I quickly stop considering it.
eech.
But squickiness aside,
I’m with the commenters about over the top birthday parties for small children. It smacks of parental guilt and it sets up this ridiculous standard and alos sets up a clear line between the rich and poor kids. Get em used to “the way the real world is ” early in many ways then I guess.
I’m also one of those who dropped out of the girl scouts when I realized that they had no intention of teaching us all the awesome stuff my little brother got to learn in the boy scouts at a much younger age.
I’ll take basic wilderness survival skills and being ACTIVE rather than passive over sitting about while other people do work for/on you to make you a pretty object and applying freaking eyeliner any damn day of the week. this is why society’s way of “turning girls into women” is a bloody disgrace.
I am ashamed to admit, that at 18 months-ish, I knew where all the makeup went (eyeshadow on eyes, lipstick on lips, etc) when I got into my nana’s stuff (none of this kiddie-painting-face-with-lipstick stuff). But that was because my crib was in her walk-in closet, and I used to watch her put it on every morning.
Does that mean I /understood/ it? No.
I realize this may be a function of growing up in NYC in the 80s/90s, but I can recall going to at least two salon birthday parties before the age of ten.
It was great–they styled our hair and did our makeup.
I don’t recall much else–this was at least 15 years ago now, but I remember enjoying it.
I think the crucial distinction really is the fact that this is now a market unto itself. I’m even okay with Dashing Diva having a kids’ line, but it’s Sweet & Sassy that raises my hackles. It’s one thing to play in the adults’ sandbox, it’s another to have the sandbox repackaged and marketed to the kids.
If you think little girls aren’t being primed for hyper-sexualization, you must not have a Libby Lu store in your mall. Google it. You’ll be horrified.
Amanda: “I’m not sure if the mix of girls that are wannabe beauty queens vs. the tomboys has changed, but it seems the former are becoming a cash cow for certain industries.”
And the latter isn’t? There are definitely more tents, hiking boots, athletic shoes, outdoors gear, rock-climbing gear, snowpants, snowboards, high-end skates, high-end bicycles, and athletic clothing for “tomboyish” girls and young women today. All types of girls are being marketed by many more industries than before. I rarely saw “baby doll” or even “women’s” t-shirts at rock concerts when I was younger, but they are standard fare at stores and shows today.
Tomboys are an important market, since right now any market is an important market. The Gap may have forsaken them to some extent, but its subsidiary Old Navy has them pretty well covered. As do a thousand other companies. Cargo pants for teenage girls aren’t exploitative unless there’s a flower on them, I guess.
I was in Sweet and Sassy yesterday! It didn’t seem all that evil…just not practical. I was surprised that it seems to be a successful franchise, though less surprised when I saw it was based in Texas.
Just had the one year old with me, who ended up getting a funny rubber ball that lights up when you bounce it. They had lots of overpriced but cute grosgrain ribbon barrettes and headbands and seriously overpriced crocheted baby hats. Cute picture frames. Those ubiquitous stuffed animals that come in their own little purses (and mini versions of the same! Hadn’t seen that yet–I think the smaller versions exist to push up the price on the larger ones).
There were 5 white women desperate for a chance to cut the baby’s hair. Baby liked the woman with the blue and pink hair.
There’s a runway in there, so you can come out and be a rock star (after being appropriately made up to look like a rock star).
Looking at the brochure, it’s “mini manis” and “mini pedis” and I couldn’t find out what that meant, except I guess it’s just putting on nailpolish. And up-dos! They are all about the up-dos!
They have braiding parties to teach girls how to braid each other’s hair.
Some sports themed party, too. End result being fake “magazine cover shot” pictures for everyone.
I didn’t see the limo, but party prices start at $29.99/person (min.
and go up to $65+ per person for the ultimate package which includes: mini-mani, mini-pedi, makeup, the up-do!, a runway show/concert performance/awards show/red carpet act photographed and placed in a ‘magazine cover’ on DVD for every one.
I think I would have been bored out of my mind as a child.
I bought a fake hair ponytail holder with lots of braids and curls in neon green for the preschooler. Neon green is her favorite color, and St. Patrick’s day is coming up. It was cheaper and nicer than the same thing at Claire’s or Walgreens.
It really just seemed like KidSnips with parties. KidSnips is where we get the boy’s overpriced haircuts b/c he was evil, and the chance to play video games while having it done made all the difference. It’s pricey b/c we always end up getting toys (and overpriced grosgrain ribbon bow for the sisters) along with the haircut, but there’s no screaming.
Now he’s old enough to behave, but he still likes to jam into the police car/barber chair and play games. And we like his ’stylist’.
So, even though we got cards at the Sweet and Sassy, I think the girls will go to KidSnips–that is if they ever get real haircuts. Right now I can do bangs and trim ends and braid and ponytail, so they don’t need ‘real’ haircuts.
Sometimes when I read these articles, I get the feeling that part of the real objection to “creating consumers” out of girls (but never boys, even though a great deal of highly dubious marketing is aimed at them) is that they will want too many things for themselves and fail to grow up into the self-denying women we need to hold everything together. I mean, a girl trying makeup by herself at home is okay but trying it with her friends at a birthday party is hypersexualizing? Seems like a really tenuous distinction.
I find it to feed the anti-woman culture to describe “spoiling yourself” strictly as things done to be aesthetically pleasing to others. While it was fun to get pedicures, it was still a relief to quit doing it, and to spend my time and money doing stuff that’s really for me and not just to look pretty for others.
The mannequins are always so much thinner than any woman could be and… still be alive. It’s disgusting.
That’s industry standard. I’ve noticed a lot of store have started using this big clamps to yank the clothes into place on the mannequins, because they don’t actually have any clothes small enough to fit them. And because a few safety pins aren’t going to gather up enough cloth to get the clothes down to non-human skinny-with-big-breastness.
But they do it for a reason. Aspirational skinniness—even to the degree that it’s not human—sells more clothes. I suspect women feel guilty about not conforming to the non-human thinness and that makes them buy clothes to feel better about themselves.
Girl Scouts was a massive disappointment.
Jon- that’s not true for this tomboy. The amount of “tomboy” stuff compared to “girlie” stuff is pitifully small. They’re nowheres near as heavily marketed towards young girls as the princessy things are. Because traditional tomboys will buy boy’s/men’s clothes when they can’t find what they want in the girl’s/women’s section, advertisers and marketers don’t spend much time courting them. And the amount of girlie or metro stuff for young boys is almost totally nonexistent. (And that phenomena is just as much a result of the push for Girlieness as the absence of a significant tomboy marketing push is.)
Finally, a lot of the traditional tomboy activities and clothes have become the norm for women and girls everywhere. That’s a great thing! But a lot of the marketing aimed at female consumers is still made to be girlie. When marketers think about getting female consumers, they turn shit pink or slap some meaningless “Girl Power!” slogan on it instead of treating female consumers as seriously as their male counterparts. (See gaming magazine Cerise for a good example of what real female gamers care about, and then compare it with industry attempts to reach female gamers.) And baby-doll tees are nice, but they’re often glittered up more than other tees, or used in the advertisements in order to sell more because of their sex appeal, while the sex appeal (and potential selling power) of an attractive male t-shirt model goes overlooked.
Tomboys might be a profitable market, but they are not cash cows the way that the princess/girlie girls are.
I quit girl scouts for the same kinds of reasons people describe above - not enough setting things on fire, getting dirty, etc and too much Mary Kay Party.
I’m still annoyed about that.
And don’t get me started about pink. It’s a lovely color, I wear it pretty regularly myself (because it’s more flattering on me than, say, orange or avocado green) but it’s not the only color in my closet, and it drives be absolutely batshit crazy that when there’s a product designed for kids, it invariably comes in three or four colors and Pink/Purple/White with Sparkles and Flowers/Butterflies FOR THE GIRLS.
Gah.
If I ever have daughters, this is going to make me crazy.
I just realized something, none of the kids in my family (or extended family) would let a stranger cut their hair until about age 10. (Thank goodness for Auntie Hairdresser.) Maybe we’re all phobic nut cases, but I can’t help but imagine 6-9 year olds having screaming fits over strangers touching them. You know that tantrum that starts with “No, no, no” and ends in piercing shrieks and crying? Probably puts a damper on a mini-pedi party quickly.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who ditched Girl Scouts because we never did a lot of cool survival stuff. I think some of it depends on the troop leader reaching for more active curricula, because I can remember a few instances of archery and canoing. We mostly had filler meetings that involved sewing and “grooming” in between cookie selling seasons. (Is it just me or have those damn cookies pretty much obliterated the rest of the scouting experience?)
I really do think it depends on the troop leader and/or the culture of the area you’re from. Because I loved Girl Scouts–I was in it from 1st grade to high school graduation and then involved with the troop back home when I was in college. Granted, I have always been pretty girlie and feminine, but we didn’t do much of that stuff at all in scouts. We did the cookie sales and service stuff (visiting nursing homes, handing out government cheese–not kidding–to poor people and the elderly, etc.), but we also did a lot of camping/canoing/archery/horseback riding/other outdoor stuff, along with learning things like basic cooking and sewing. There was some of the hair/makeup/crafts, but I remember it being rare–although we did have an overnight quilting bee and raffled off the quilt as a fundraiser one year. By junior high/high school, we did things like take overnight trips to radio stations, newspaper offices, factories, etc., to see how those places worked. We went to King’s Island and to COSI in Columbus one weekend every year for their Camp-In, that involved cool science activities and once we got too old to be participants, we went as volunteers to help with the programs for the younger girls. And all this was in a very small town in southern WV. I can’t even imagine that a troop in a more populated area with more access to cooler stuff wouldn’t have taken advantage of it.
But more on topic, girlie as I was, I would have probably been bored to death with a mani/pedi party as a kid too. Although I can totally see my five year old niece being in to it (and driving my complete tomboy sister crazy about it as well).
I present to all of you the Cinderella remote-controlled car.
And you can have your choice of Princesses! They also have Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, and Jasmine cars.
(I’ve also seen the full-size cars, but I can’t find them at the moment.)
I find it to feed the anti-woman culture to describe “spoiling yourself” strictly as things done to be aesthetically pleasing to others.>/i>
This was one of the ideas that started me really thinking about feminism.
For girl scouts (or boy scouts for that matter) to be about camping and survival skills and suchlike, you’d need most people in the country to be living in a very different set of locations. How far is the average kid from a city park, much less the kind of place where one could “safely” stay out for a couple days in a tent? (When I think how much time I spent as a preteen out in the local park, it’s hard for my grown-up perv-behind-every-tree sensibilities to comprehend.)
The pastoral/wilderness myth behind scouting back then seems to have been replaced by a different kind of myth, but then the whole makeup of scouting seems to have changed (at least from what it was in my neck of the woods). My troop was pretty much working-class, a way to get the kids out of the house and get them some interesting experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Now most of the stuff I read or hear about seems to peg it as ways for urban/suburban professionals to compete via their kids while indoctrinating them in the way they should live and work later in life.
Caroline (#12):
My brother was learning awesome wilderness camping and survival skills in Boy Scouts, and I was learning about how to be decorative for guys?
Caroline, don’t sweat it. The “awesome skills” your brother was learning mostly comprised: a) how to light a campfire really fast using a 1-gallon can of gasoline, b) lighting farts.
Trust me, you didn’t miss much.
Because traditional tomboys will buy boy’s/men’s clothes when they can’t find what they want in the girl’s/women’s section, advertisers and marketers don’t spend much time courting them. And the amount of girlie or metro stuff for young boys is almost totally nonexistent.
My son hangs out with a couple of young ladies who buy all their clothing from the boy’s section.
Their mothers couldn’t be happier about it, either - not because it is “better” per se, but because a lot of clothing that comes in their daughters’ sizes are absolutely inappropriate for a 12 year old.
All this talk of Girl Scouts is what makes me really glad that my sister and I were the first two of three girls initiated to the local Cub troop when they opened it up to girls finally (this would have been around 1991). Not because “omg yay, we get to be honourary boys!” but because my “tomboy” sister hadn’t liked Brownies/Girl Guides much and Cubs ended up being awesome in the adventure sense. In the US do they still have the two organisations segregated by sex or in parts of the country are they not?