Packaging Girlhood

"Packaging Girlhood looks at the way girlhood is marketed from infancy on. They did in-depth research into what girls wear, what they read, what they watch and what they play with. And they boil down psychological research about girls into digestible form. It was really influential for me. Brown and Lamb offer a lot of different ideas that I talk about in Cinderella Ate My Daughter . One idea that really stuck with me is that girls are presented with two options by the culture that surrounds them: Being for the boys or being one of the boys. They suggest scripts for parents, to give ideas for how to talk to your daughter in a way that is respectful and helps her decode the cultural messages she’s getting without lecturing her. Whenever you group people into smaller categories, you sell more. One of the best ways to do that is by age. So they keep slicing smaller and smaller segments of childhood. Toddler was a marketing category before it became a developmental one. The other way to segment a market is by sex. Baby clothing was white until modern markets realised they could increase sales by assigning different colours to different genders. Pink was initially assigned to boys because it was seen as a shade of red, which was associated with masculinity. Blue was assigned to girls because it was associated with the virtue of the Virgin Mary. It’s not clear when that switched. But I can say that in the mid-1980s business began to refocus on market segmentation and that since then there’s been a magnification of gender differences. For instance, Fisher-Price made their brightly coloured telephone with wheels, which everybody had when they were little, in pink. They made a pink version of a popcorn popper, a pink version of the classic Little People Bus. At the Toy Fair in New York the Fisher-Price exhibit was broken into two rooms. The girls’ room had a pink banner over it that said, “Pretty, Colorful, Beautiful”. The boys’ room banner said “Power, Energy, Heroes”. So there you had stark segmentation and the creation of differences where they didn’t need to exist. There’s a real profit motive for heavily marketing gender difference. The idea is if you have a baby boy first you buy him a multicoloured set of toys and then when you have a daughter you buy everything again in pink or vice versa. Either way, you double your sales. For girls, market segmentation intensifies the focus on appearance. You get spa parties for preschoolers, make-up lines for eight-year-olds and the Kardashianisation of adolescents. [ Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a reality television show about five super-sexualised sisters.] All of that stems from marketers telling girls that, whatever their stage of life, there is a particular way that they’re supposed to look and define themselves. It’s very narrow, it’s generally unattainable but you can try to buy it for a price."