I'm too pretty to...

This first tee shirt was featured in a blog post on the Beauty is Inside blog. I agreed with the post that wearing a shirt like this gives not only a highly-sexualized image of young girls, but it also makes them seem untrustworthy. The author found this shirt in the juniors department, which seems way too young to be flaunting your man-stealing prowess.

Upon reading this post, I was reminded of a similar controversy involving a girl’s tee shirts sold at JCPenney (click here to read about it). The following shirt was pulled after complaints poured into JCPenney.

What bothers me the most about all these tee shirts is that they reinforce sexism and sexualize girls at a very young age. Here words and appearance come together to teach young girls that math is only for ugly girls, and judging by the shirt design, we are also telling 7 or 8 year old girls to use their bodies and not their brains to get things done. As a high school senior in my second year of AP math classes, I find it offensive that we still market smart girls as ugly, weird, or nerdy. I am not an ultra-feminist, but these shirts are only a few examples of tons of sexist shirts on the market (click here for more examples).

Another thought that bothered me was that there are parents that let their children wear shirts with messages like this, or worse parents that buy these shirts for their kids. It’s disturbing when parents are actively involved in the premature sexualization of their own children. I’ll be honest, Toddler and Tiaras on TLC is one of my guilty pleasure shows, but beauty pageants are one of the most concrete examples of such a phenomenon. All of these subtle forms of sexism and sexualization of girls keep all females stuck in traditional gender roles.