The internet has been on fire lately over a shirt on JCPenney’s website.  The shirt says “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”  I first learned about the shirt when a friend posted a link to it on her Facebook page with a fair amount of indignation.  Evidently the public’s reaction to the shirt was so swift and visceral that by the time I saw the posting and clicked on the link the shirt had already been taken down.  Today I read this blog post about it, which describes – and rather rightly so – how the shirt is a reflection of the stereotyping and typecasting and even indoctrination of young girls as nothing more than boy-hungry pretty faces. 

The author tries to illustrate a distinction between the messages you see for boys and the messages you see for girls in toy stores and clothing departments.  I agree that the message for boys is more rough-and-tumble than it is for girls.  But that issue cuts both ways.  Clothes for boys can be just as typecasting.  Every other shirt either depicts a piece of heavy equipment or has athletic-influenced styling.  Am I outraged that society, by way of clothing manufacturers, is trying to tell my boys that the only thing they’re good for is to be a dumb jock or a dump truck driver? 

I think you can look at the message of The Shirt two ways.  It could be campy and tongue-in-cheek and an actual way to poke fun at the same stereotyping and typecasting when it’s worn by a girl who is so clearly the antithesis of that message, kind of like when a 500-lb. man goes by the name “tiny.”  Or it could be looked at quite literally; maybe it was a really big hit with the Toddlers & Tiaras set.  But my problem with the hue and cry that has resulted from the T-shirt is that it makes us all sound like victims.  No one is making these girls wear that shirt.  And the (sad) fact of the matter is that stores stock what sells.  Let that sink in for just a minute.  Stores stock what we end up buying because we buy what they sell. 

People are decrying retailers here – JC Penney in particular - as if we’re prisoners to them.  When I walk into Toys R Us with my sons there isn’t anyone cattle-herding me in a specific direction and making me buy something… “Ma’am, you have to stay over here on the blue side and you must choose one toy that shoots and one that makes fart noises.”  I am just as free to cross over and buy them an E-Z-Bake oven as I am to buy them a remote-controlled car.  Or nothing at all.  The Shirt is definitely a social commentary on how young girls are viewed and some of them are being raised, but getting angry at JCPenney and retailers in general is a little like shooting the messenger. 

I control the message that my children get from the toys they play with and the clothes they wear.  If I don’t like the message that something sends, I don’t buy it.  Period.  End of story.  Yes, it annoys me when I go into a store and I can’t find a toy or a piece of clothing that I think is appropriate, because now I have to spend more time going someplace else.  But I don’t yell and carry on about it.  Instead I exercise my voice in the most powerful way I can:  I take my money and spend it elsewhere. 

We’re the ones with the power, not the retailers.  Don’t like the message that a toy or an article of clothing sends?  Make a deliberate choice to buy something else instead.  Then, pull a store manager aside and let him/her know why you’re buying the striped shirt instead of the one with the suggestive or offensive logo.  When and if enough people start feeling and acting that same way, eventually the tide will turn.