I'm too pretty to blog
So yesterday, there was a firestorm on the internets about a shirt JC Penney was selling. You can totally read about it here if you want to but I'll sum up.
The shirt, which was meant for little girls, read "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me."
A whole lot of folks, including myself, were pretty annoyed.
Now let me be clear here - I'm annoyed at JC Penney for marketing the shirt. They aren't really the problem, though. The problem is that we live in a society where someone would come up with that idea and wouldn't immediately dismiss it as a horrible message to send to young women.
I believe in free speech. Free speech means others have the freedom to say things that piss me off. The Westboro Baptist church has the right to say what they say. We don't have to like it but the alternative is that we don't get to say what we want to say and that is not a fair trade.
So if JC Penney or Mervyn's or Hot Topic want to market a shirt that says "I don't need an education because I'm going to marry a rich older man," they have every right to do so. Obviously I don't have to like it and I can voice my objection on Twitter and Facebook and every other social networking outlet I can find. I did, in fact.
And because I (and a lot of other people with more influence than me) got pissed off about it, JC Penney pulled the shirt. Woo-hoo. We got one thing that sends the wrong message to young girls off the market.
The message is still out there, however. Someone designed this shirt because they were relatively certain that they could sell it and the odds are good that they could and did. Hell, JC Penney bought it.
At least if the arrangement Penney's had with their supplier is like the arrangement most retailers have with their suppliers, they paid wholesale for the shirts and now have a bunch of 'em sitting around that they aren't going to sell.
So the company that created the shirt made money off of it. They probably won't be able to sell it to anyone else at this point but they are free to come up with new slogans that tell little girls that you can either be smart or pretty but lord knows you can't be both.
Or maybe they can branch out and sell a series of shirts marketed to little boys that will say "You have to hit smart bitches harder to keep them in line."
The problem here is that it is 2011. We shouldn't have to remind people that telling little girls this sort of thing isn't helpful. Penneys shouldn't have had to pull the shirt, they never should have bought the shirt. A whole lot of people had the opportunity to notice that this was a stupid thing to put on a shirt and none of them did.
Worse, some of them might have noticed but felt that they could not say anything because it could jeopardize their job. Or they did say something and nobody listened.
It took Drama on the Internet (TM) to figure out that the shirt was a really bad idea.
But if you think women still aren't being bombarded with the same message from the age of three to thirty, you aren't looking very hard. That message is still out there.
It is completely OK to be pretty. But if we continue to give young women the impression that they must choose between pretty and smart, we are failing them.
It isn't enough that this one shirt is no longer for sale. Until there is no longer a market for that kind of message, there will be other shirts that send the same message.
They sold this shirt because parents would buy them for their little girls and I'm betting some parents did buy them before they were pulled.
Free Speech is important and it means that companies can keep producing this kind of product - even if we don't like it. The only way to get them to stop is if we stop spending money on those products.