{"id":4800,"date":"2008-09-13T22:08:52","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T05:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/09\/13\/baby-blogging-gender-and-baby-clothes\/"},"modified":"2008-09-13T22:08:52","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T05:28:40","slug":"baby-blogging-gender-and-baby-clothes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4800","title":{"rendered":"Baby Blogging: Gender and Baby Clothes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mark-smiling.JPG\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"eli-watching-tv.JPG\"\"<\/a>
\nThis is baby blogging, but it’s also a post about gender.\u00a0 As most of you know by know, I have two little boys, and one thing I really like to do is dress them in cute little outfits.\u00a0 Over the past few months, as I’ve perused the baby departments at numerous stores, I came to the conclusion that I like the clothes made for boys clothes better than I like the clothes made for girls.\u00a0 It’s not that I don’t like frilly dresses and ruffles.\u00a0 What I like about boys clothes is the bright primary colors that are more common in clothes marketed for\u00a0infant and toddler\u00a0boys and the themes used in both boy clothing and gender neutral clothing.\u00a0 My favorite themes are usually animal themed clothes, and above all else I like ducks and frogs–probably because yellow and green are my favorite colors.\u00a0 In my view frogs and ducks are generally androgynous, but many animal themed clothes are marketed for boys.\u00a0 For example, dogs, dinosaurs, lizards, bugs, and turtles are often found in boys clothing.\u00a0I’ve also noticed two other common sets of themes that I like in baby boys clothing–occupational themes and activity themes.\u00a0 As I was looking through my little guys clothes, I noticed several outfits that had themes related to\u00a0predominantly male (and mostly working class) occupations.\u00a0 The outfits they are wearing\u00a0above are firemen themed.\u00a0 In the first picture, Mark’s shirt has a firetruck on it, and in the second picture Eli’s shirt says, “Chief Fire Dog to the Rescue.”\u00a0 I’ve also see baby boy clothes with policemen, construction worker, mechanic, pilot, and soldier themes.\u00a0 Activity themes involve clothes the promote going on safaris, hunting, fishing, eating, playing sports, and\u00a0one outfit\u00a0my little guys\u00a0have promotes making robots (which could also be construed as an engineer’s outfit).\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u00a0strikes me about baby boys clothes is how much they promote activity and paid labor force work.\u00a0 Even as infants, we start to socialize baby boys into occupations.\u00a0 You rarely find occupation themed clothes for girls.\u00a0 Little girls clothes often have flowers, frills, and some animals (i.e. butterflies), but they don’t have occupational themes.\u00a0 They also rarely have activity themes outside of shopping or cheerleading.\u00a0 In fact, to me the worst subset of little girls clothes are those that say princess or diva.\u00a0 Diva is oftten used in a derisive way to indicate that the girl is overly demanding, and unlike the fireman or construction worker a princess doesn’t earn her title–she’s born with it or marries into it.\u00a0 Princess themed clothes also seem to play up baby girls looks–looking like a princess means looking pretty.\u00a0 I’ve seen a few shirts that have messages about boys being handsome or cute, but those are much less common.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that baby clothes are so strongly gendered is that babies themselves are often androgynous.\u00a0 If\u00a0you put them only in a diaper, it’s often hard to tell what sex the\u00a0baby is, but that androgyny doesn’t fit well into our gender polarized society, so this is where the clothes come in.\u00a0 Those clothes have underlying and blatant messages.\u00a0 Baby boy clothes have subtle and not so subtle messages.\u00a0 They say–be active, be bold, enjoy the outdoors, and get a paid job.\u00a0 It doesn’t seem that baby\u00a0girls clothing has similar messages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-kid-blogging","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}