Not only an exotic appearance, but one in which a single step would make you fall over.

Mermaids may be pretty, but they're awesome swimmers. I agree with your main point about gendering everything, but mermaids, like superheroes, are fantasy characters with cool, active powers.

Okay I think it's silly they have gendered beach towels but darnit, I adore that mermaid towel and when I was a kid I would have freaking LOVED to have it.

NGL, I think a towel that turns into a mermaid costume is pretty damn awesome. Way cooler than a cape - any towel can be a cape. Gendered in the way it's colored/photographed/advertised, but still awesome.

The mermaid towel does look fun, especially at the beach. I wonder if little boys would like to (be allowed to) pretend to be mermaids at the beach?

Is it bad that all i can think of is how utterly impractical it is to have a towel designed to drag on the beach? Gender issues aside the cape one is so much better as an actual practical towel, I can't imagine trying to dry off the girl after a hard day's swimming with her towel all full of sand

Yeah, the most striking part about this for me is that the boy's towel comes with the expectation of running around and having fun and the girl's towel comes with the expectation of inertly lying on the beach and looking pretty. Barf.

Does it say "girl towel" or "boy towel" anywhere? Because I would have loved both of those towels as a kid, regardless of the colors!

Hmm...so girls can be transhuman but boys only superhuman?

Suggestion to admin: instead of just using tags, why not create a separate page for just a collection of side-by-side images of gendered commercial products? The context alone could be the text.

This will sound harsher than intended, but you rehash the same concept in what seems like a new post every day, and yet the commentary is nearly always identical. It's not that the point isn't valid; certainly, it's a tendency that deserves our attention, and I found it really eye-opening the first 23,000 times you posted an entry like this. But as someone who enjoys your other, more unique and insightful entries, I'm convinced that there's not much more to add in text.

The young girl in me is desperate for that towel - I would have loved that thing. To me mermaids equal adventurous mythical beings who swam around in the beautiful and mysterious ocean. Yes, it doesn't make sense in a towel form. Likely I would have dragged that thing into the pool/ocean/bathtub to pretend I was a mermaid.

I'm not convinced that looking pretty and exotic is what 'playing mermaid' is all about. Watching Disney's The Little Mermaid as a kid made me want to pretend to be one because of all the adventures you could have underwater - exploring sunken ships, escaping barracudas, all that good stuff. There is a practical difficulty (which I did face) in pretending to be a creature that's immobilized on land, but it's just that... a practical difficulty. I had a long slinky green skirt that I used to get around that, which still allowed me to walk and required a bit more imagination. If this towel really does enclose the feet, it's going to fail as a product simply because the girls can't move wearing it, and will get bored VERY quickly. The green skirt with a tail-fin tacked on is much better product design.

Yes, these products are gendered, but saying that playing mermaid is about being pretty and exotic misses the point. The problem is that boys are barred from pretending to be mermen. Given the origins of the myth, it's not surprising. But mermaids supposedly inhabit a largely unknown part of our world, so 'playing mermaid' is as much about exploration and adventure as playing astronaut.

This is a clear demonstration of gender norms that market pushes upon children. Not that some girls would have liked the mermaid suit or boys that superhero outfit but that is not the issue here.

We are talking of extremely stereotypical gender norms pushed upon children for the sole purpose of making money. In the media ridden world of today no child can escape the effect ads such as this have. In fact children today learn a lot of what gender stands for from similar media portrayal and these stereotypes affect their understanding of themselves very deeply. Same goes for teenagers and other young people in general that are still actively searching and building their identity in the process of growing up. Is it right that some companies are allowed to tamper with these ideas and force feed their own nonsense to children? No, it is not and the fact that it is done in terms of business makes even more heinous practice.

And let's not forget the ever annoying color dichotomy: The boys' towel is mainly blue, while girls' towel is mainly pink.

I agree with a lot of the previous comments: back when I was a young girl I would have absolutely loved the mermaid towel. I was always trying to be a mermaid at the pool, trying to swim with my legs together like I had a mermaid tail. I also dressed up like a mermaid at home, though pictures prove that my "mermaid" costume was nothing but a bathing suit with a blanket wrapped around my legs, a shell necklace, and a tutu on my head. Probably the influence of Disney's The Little Mermaid, I loved that movie.

Still, even though I loved dressing up as a mermaid, a mermaid towel isn't a good idea; since you can't/shouldn't take it in the water (being a towel), you would be limited to just posing from a sedentary position pool or beach side, which would get tiresome after a while. And they could have not made it pink with polka dots, that doesn't look very mermaid like, and is really gendered so a boy would probably not want to wear it. Making a mermaid tail that you could swim with would be REALLY cool, when I was little I always dreamed of something that would give me a real mermaid tail to swim with. But maybe a product like that wouldn't be safe, since it would be binding up a child's legs underwater.

I also think the design of the super hero towel is lame, simply because it doesn't look like a cape, it looks like a towel that the boy is wearing like a cape. A super hero cape towel should have some kind of super hero emblem on it, not the word "superhero" and some buildings. So therefore both of these products are failures to me.

I would like to be a super hero mermaid, thank you very much.

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