Aside from the ridiculous gendering: why are there feathers on baby clothes? I'm not great with babies but even I know that when they're at the age to wear onesies they are also at the age where they put everything in their mouths that they can get their hands on. Feathers can't be good for a baby to ingest.

I can't even begin to point out all of the effed-up-ness of these gendered things...Western society is so silly...truly silly. 

And tail feathers in the diaper, ooh ick!  Of course, that probably explains why they are on sale for 1/3 of their list price.

I understand that the multivitamin gummies are designed to market to specific genders, but if I were a kid taking a multivitamin (boooorrrrring!) it'd have to be shaped like something I like. Works out for girls who like Spiderman, boys who like princesses, etc.

i wonder, in addition to gendered marketing, there is a kind of marketing to a particular class as well. 

Those clothes aren't sold at The Children's Place. I do see them at Target, etc.

Not for kids, but this is pretty awful, too: http://www.yankeecandle.com/yankee-candles/man-candles

Two girls in a kitchen of their own would be too dykey - thank heaven for heteronormativity!

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the concepts of materialism, entitlement, anti-materialism...there really isn't an "anti-entitlement"; perhaps "using 'a critique of entitlement as a major piece of one's critical apparatus'"?

Anyway, it occurs to me that anyone who puts a "Born To Wear Diamonds" onesie on a little girl is not someone whose daughter will wear any significant amount of diamonds, much less someone whose daughter actually is born to wear them.  If you have hereditary diamonds coming to you, you're really unlikely to wear rhinestone-studded baby gear.   Indeed, if diamonds themselves strike you as intensely desirable - as a status marker more immediate than job title, second home, travel, degree from an Ivy, etc - then you're probably from a class which does not wear them.

Which puts a different spin on things, doesn't it - moves it over a bit from the crass to the sad? When you assert that your baby is born to wear diamonds, you're saying that you wish for her the finest future that you can imagine, a future of comfort and without want.   If Paris Hilton says she's born to shop, that's crass.  If a call-center employee living in a crumbling outer-ring suburb wishes her daughter could have unlimited shopping, that's something else.  It may be sad that the dream is so small, but it's just Maslow's hierarchy, eh?

And again, it's a small dream to hope that your daughter will successfully perform pink sparkly princessdom til she gets someone else to pick up her bills, but if you yourself have a difficult and shitty and probably profoundly gendered job (receptionist, cleaner, retail, low-level admin work)...well, your version of femininity has been all about exploitation, right?  Your way of being female is "women have to do the most boring and lowest-paid jobs plus clean the house and take care of the kids because that is women's lot, while trying to keep themselves pretty and well-dressed on a micro-budget in a society where women are primarily valued for their looks and youth".   Wouldn't you wish that your daughter would have a better femininity?  Again, it's a small dream, but it's not particularly crass or incomprehensible.

Working class people aren't dumb.  (And I think that many of these really violently sparkly-pink toys and clothes are for a working class market.) If you're in a shitty economic situation with no meaningful hope of getting out (and that's the case for most working class people in this society, especially right now), successful and rewarding "correct" gender performance sounds great.  If your choice is lousy, precarious employment and a perpetual anxiety about how on earth to pay for your home and your children versus being a Kardashian - well, I'm a butch queer woman who wouldn't wear a crystal tee-shirt if it came with a free pony, but I'd rather be Kim Kardashian than a call center operator, that's for sure.

Ah, but in "My Very Own Kitchen" the girl appears to be stirring food that is cooking on the stove while the boy stands by with a knife in hand, either ready to carve the roast or to eat.  Closer, but still gendered.   

My three-year-old son loves the Disney Princess vitamins... one of them is ostensibly shaped like a leaf, with a line down the middle of it, and he requests it every night because he thinks it's shaped like a butt. 

Spiderman pushing a baby carriage is the nicest thing I've seen all day.  I think I'll go to bed now, it's a nice image to fall asleep with.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a gender-neutral toy gets made in a pink version--like doctor's kits, which you can find in a green and red colour scheme or a pink and purple colour scheme at Toys R Us.  Why?  What possible argument is there for this?  I'm betting even the girliest girl would play with the green and red version.

I love that you included counter examples. If only as much focus was given to neutral or counter-gendered examples as was to gendered ones.

"Razor-sharp propellers", just what I'm looking for in a children's toy /sarcasm

Notice also that the Sky Racers writeup is very insistent that it can hold an *action figure*. Dolls are for girls, action figures are for boys...

My brother and his wife are about to have a little boy, I can't pretend I wasn't tempted to get him a bright pink (thus girl targeted) something or other and pretend to be unaware of what I had done.  I didn't though, I decided to go the gender neutral soft toy route instead.

What's the problem with the hamster mazes? Simply that they're in the ubiquitous gender-marked colors? They're right next to each other (instead of segregated sections as is often the case with toys) and there aren't pictures of children or labels to reinforce those gender-marked color choices. It looks to me like if a girl  wanting new hamster maze goes there then she's presented with a space theme or a princess theme. I'm not seeing anything there to really discourage the girl from getting the space theme. Now boys are generally discouraged from getting pink things, but that's more of a cultural problem then how that particular item is presented.