We’re trying to get our inbox under control, so I decided it was time for another of my occasional round-ups of gendered kids’ items, so here you go. My favorite example was an ad from a flyer for Save On Foods in Victoria, Canada, sent in by Joanna M. The advertised products are boysz and girlsz inhalers, for all your gendered breathing needs. The boyz’ version is in green and gray with a graphic of a skateboarder, while the girlz’ inhaler is, of course pink, with a flower:

Amanda K.H. took this photo of 3 kid-sized Civil War hats for sale at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, IL. In addition to the Union blue and the Confederate gray, there was a pink version:

The Pragmatist let us know about onesies for sale at Mommy and Kids Allure Boutique. The onesies include lists of “ingredients” for boys and girls. What are boys made of? Love, energy, and dirt:

For girls, it’s love, beauty, and kindness:

Elliott M. noticed that the Garanimals website doesn’t just just divide the clothing into boys’ and girls’ sections, but uses gendered language to describe them. The boys’ clothing is described with active language (“ready, set, go!”), and they’ll look “cool”. Girls, on the other hand, are “sugar and spice, everything nice” and a “princess,” and they’ll be “looking great and feeling better,” “cute,” “eye catching,” and “adorable”:

An anonymous reader saw these sets of stickers, divided into themes for boys and girls:

What are boy themes? Space, travel/transportation, dinosaurs, sports, and pirates, among others. Girls, on the other hand, are associated with stars, flowers, butterflies, clothes, makeup, personal hygiene, cheerleading, and shopping. Since the reader was buying them to give out to a Girl Guide group (equivalent to Girl Scouts in the U.S.) for badges about science, being active, and personal hygiene, she had to buy both sets.

Finally, Sarah M. sent in a photo she took at Target of two toys that define boys by what they do and girls by what they are. The toys are those types of little sit-and-scoot toy cars kids push around with their feet. The boys’ version is red and is, appropriately, called a Lil’ Fire Truck Ride-On. The pink version, on the other hand, is the Lil’ Princess Ride-On — because apparently there’s no appropriate vehicle to define as “girly,” so the easiest way to gender the toy was just to call it a thing for princesses and be done with it:

UPDATE: Philip Cohen pointed out another example on his blog, Family Inequality. Baby blankets at Amazon were available in blue for the “little man” and pink for the “little cupcake,” in case your baked goods are cold:

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the website If It Were My Home. The site allows you to select two nations and then explains how your life would compare if you lived in each one in terms of rates of HIV/AIDS, employment, energy consumption, infant mortality, class inequality, and other factors (based on CIA data). As an example, Dmitriy chose to compare the U.S. and Ukraine, “the 2 greatest countries in the world, as determined by the poll conducted in my head”:

You can then choose one of the items for more details; I selected life expectancy:

The site is set up with the U.S. as one of the default comparisons, but at the top there’s a button that lets you select a non-U.S. comparison. (Note: Reader Parodie says it appears to detect whatever country you’re accessing the site from and set that as one of the default comparisons.) It’s a fun site that you can spend quite a bit of time playing around with.

UPDATE: Just a caution–a couple of readers seem to have found situations where the math doesn’t add up in the comparisons of some countries. And other readers noted that this does an enormous amount of averaging, which definitely hides the differences in quality of life in various countries, which are so extreme in some nations that “averages” might be nearly meaningless.

A number of celebrities, including Meghan McCain — daughter of Senator John McCain of Arizona — recently posed naked (visible from the shoulders up) in a skin cancer prevention awareness ad. Meghan’s father had to have melanoma removed from his face, prompting her interest in the issue. Here’s the ad:

Christie W. sent in a segment (via The Pragmatic Progressive Forum) from Glenn Beck’s radio show in which he reacts to the video, and particularly to the image of Meghan McCain in it…by pretending to throw up violently. In this 8-minute clip from his show (audio only), Beck repeatedly pretends to puke, and someone says, at about 5:28, “Has she thought about, like, a burqa, so she’s extra safe?” and “I’m not sure that covers enough, because you can get skin cancer of the eyeballs” (I can’t distinguish all the voices, so I’m not sure who is speaking). They say she looks like “John McCain with long blonde hair” and, at 6:35, mockingly refer to her as “luscious” repeatedly:

Criticizing Glenn Beck for being mean-spirited is really a pointless task — I might as well go yell at the tree in my yard for shedding leaves — so I’m not going to expend much energy on it. But it’s a good example of policing of women’s bodies and fat-shaming (when McCain is described as “luscious,” it clearly isn’t a compliment). Who cares about the message? Never mind about skin cancer! Those women are so gross they make me sick!

Sigh.

Over the weekend I came across an interesting video of Mike Rowe, creator and host of Dirty Jobs. Rowe recently testified before the U.S. Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. He made an impassioned case for the type of difficult but essential jobs he highlights on his show, as well as the vocational and other training programs that prepare workers for them — programs facing tremendous cuts due to state budget crises. While we hear a lot about the need to increase the level of 4-year college degree completion in the U.S., Rowe argues that skilled plumbers and welders are every bit as essential to our economic development, and that such jobs are worthy of respect and public support:

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times about differences in income between various religious groups in the U.S. This graph shows the percent of households earning more than $75,000 a year (the numbers along the side; and note that, somewhat counterintuitively, the shade of each color gets lighter as the percentage gets higher), as well as the percent of each group with a college degree (along the top). In order from least to most educated, we have Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, the unaffiliated, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, those who identify as secular, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Hindus. Not surprisingly, income is pretty strongly correlated with education:

The data come from a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey (which we’ve posted on before), though the NYT reports that they did smaller surveys in 2010 and 2011 and found similar patterns.

Also see our posts on the demographics of the non-religious and religion, income, and 2008 Presidential voting behavior.

Kristie V. let us know about a new item in Skechers’ Shape-Ups line of shoes. If you aren’t familiar with Shape-Ups, they’re the sneakers with the specially-shaped soles that supposedly firm your butt as you walk. Now Skechers has introduced a line of Shape-Ups targeted at tween girls (via Shine):

I was particularly struck by the scene at 23 seconds in, where the girl confidently bounces along in her Shape-Up, trailed by exhausted-looking boys dressed up as food:

Apparently Shape-Ups not only firm your butt, they give you the ability to reject food as well.

Though Skechers apparently claims to be targeting childhood obesity, at least two independent studies found that these types of shoes have no benefit in terms of fitness, whether measured by calories burned or level of muscle toning. But as Morning Gloria at Jezebel points out, girls are never too young to be socialized into buying products of questionable effectiveness — and avoiding food — in the hopes of “looking good and having fun,” as the ad put it.

When we talk about beauty standards on Soc Images, we’re usually discussing attempts to meet them, and impacts on those who can’t. But what about people who are considered quite attractive by other people? Katherine K. sent in the trailer for the documentary The Art of Seduction: Not Pretty, Really. In it, the director interviews men and women about the impacts of being generally defined as attractive. There are the perks, such as sometimes getting free stuff, but there are downsides, too: jealousy from others, the stereotype that attractive people (especially women) are dumb, and questioning the motives of friends:

Gregory S. sent in a video that highlights the way that social institutions, including the legal system, are often based on assumptions about gender that make it difficult for men and women who break gender norms. Five years ago, a couple in Nebraska got married and the husband chose to take the wife’s name. He wasn’t trying to make a feminist statement; he just didn’t want her son from a previous relationship to be the only member of the family to have a different last name, and the simplest solution was for the husband to change his instead.

This doesn’t appear to be a difficult change. They weren’t blending their last names to invent a new one; they weren’t even hyphenating both their names. This is exactly the type of change that the legal system allows when women get married and decide to take their husband’s name. But five years after their marriage, the state suddenly seems incapable of dealing with a reversal of the usual gender pattern in name changing.

[Ugh. You’ll have to watch it at KETV or YouTube because they’ve disabled the YouTube embedding. Sorry!]

What strikes me is that officials are pretty openly stating that the problem here is his gender. They admit that women who change their names after marriage are given an exception to the normal name-changing procedures. They don’t appear to dispute that this couple got married. Instead, they seem to be arguing that as a man, he doesn’t qualify for the spousal name-change loophole, and thus allowing him to take his wife’s name using that method was a “mistake.”

Yet it is a “mistake” only because he is a man. The system is set up to facilitate conforming to gender norms: there is (an apparently unofficial) loophole to make it easy for women, and only women, to assume their husbands’ names. That exception to procedure is now being denied, retroactively, to a couple whose use of it defies gender norms. And the fact that five years ago some government official apparently applied the name-change loophole in a gender-neutral manner and allowed Josh to change his name is seen as an incomprehensible error.