Tide: Cargo Shorts are the New Pink

Recently, I’ve noticed a commercial airing for Tide laundry detergent. In it, a stereotypical suburban mother comments on her young daughter’s fashion choices – she likes to wear hoodies and cargo shorts instead of pink – and when the mother uses Tide to successfully remove crayon stains from her daughter’s clothes, she laments that “it’s really too bad.” When I first saw this commercial, I was really bothered by it. If the mother’s disapproval is any indication, the message the commercial appears to be sending is that all girls should like pink and play with dolls. And even more disturbing is the implication that girls who don’t wear pink and play with building blocks might become lesbians (and that if the child was to grow up to be gay, the mother would be disappointed about this).

And yet, the more I thought about, I began to actually like the commercial. I appreciated that the commercial doesn’t reproduce the stereotypes of young girls (and really, women in general) that perpetuate the media. Instead of the typical image of a little girl dressed up in a fairy princess costume, we see a different identity for young girls, one that would normally remain invisible. The mother is at the very least kind towards her daughter and compliments her talent, even if she wishes she was more feminine. The commercial also shows that gender roles are social constructions that are learned, not part of our inherent biology. If anything, the commercial sides with the daughter, because it is the mother who looks foolish for wanting her to fit into societal norms (and for not wanting the stains to wash out of her daughter's less-than-girly clothes). If only toy companies would follow suit and open up their marketing to young girls beyond Bratz dolls.

Of course, the effectiveness of the commercial is extremely limited. As several bloggers pointed out, if the commercial is supposed to be satirizing suburban values, then it doesn’t do a good job of getting it’s message across. And the daughter doesn’t speak up for herself, so we are essentially only getting the mother’s point-of-view. So while the message of the advertisement is ultimately undermined, and the execution is poor, I can at least respect it for attempting to produce something new.

Pan Am takes flight

From Pan Am's pilot ep. - Maggie (Christina Ricci) and Laura (Margot Robbie). (ABC)

It’s impossible to talk about the wave of retro television this season without mentioning the ABC series Pan Am. The pilot episode debuted to good ratings, but opinions are mixed about the show’s quality. I found that Pan Am has a lot of awkward dialogue and unnatural conversations. The first scene, featuring a Pan Am flight preparing for take-off, takes entirely too long to reach a conclusion, capping in at 12 minutes. And yet, I think Pan Am is doing a much better job of showcasing the historical period of social change than The Playboy Club is. Unlike The Playboy Club, Pan Am doesn’t credit the stewardesses with revolutionizing the place of women in the workplace, but simply recognizes them as one part of a bigger whole. Of course, this doesn’t stop the show from glorifying them. The iconic last shot of the pilot episode features the backs of the four main female characters, wearing their stewardess attire and waving, as a little girl flashes them a reverent smile. The Pan Am stewardesses represented a combination of the traditional perfect woman, and a new, glamorous ideal: the career woman.

At MSNBC.com’s Overhead Bin, former real-life Pan Am flight attendants tell their stories and critique the show’s mostly accurate depiction of the airline. Helen Davey, who worked as a Pan Am stewardess from 1965 to 1986, tells Overhead Bin, “…we all thought we had lucked into the best job in the world.” Within the show itself, a male pilot even states that the women of Pan Am were ahead of their time: "They don't know they're a new breed of woman. They just had an impulse to take flight." But if the Pan Am stewardesses were the prototypes of the ‘modern woman,’ they were members of an elite club – a very tightly controlled one. As reflected on the show, the women of Pan Am had to be 5’2, single, skinny, and were regularly checked to make sure their girdles were on properly. And, of course, only white women were able to step into the revered position. Thus, like The Playboy Club, the ticket to liberation for women was a pretty face.

But what stood out to me most is that I found the female characters to be so much more endearing than the leads in The Playboy Club. I really liked Laura, the newest stewardess who ran away from a marriage her mother was pushing her into (although, what’s with the ‘new girl’ in both this show and The Playboy Club being blonde? Is it supposed to add to their naïve ‘everygirl’ appeal?). Laura’s sister, Kate, is also a stewardess, and is using her position to work with the CIA. I really hope the series explores the relationship between the sisters, because Kate is the person who helped Laura decide not to get married and to live for herself. Despite this, their relationship is already being tested by Laura choosing to become a Pan Am stewardess, putting Kate’s secret mission in jeopardy. I also found Colette, a fellow stewardess with a funny French accent who has an affair with a married man, to be a very sympathetic character. And as an ensemble cast, the women of Pan Am are convincingly interesting. At the very least, Pan Am makes a fairer case for the women of the 1960s than The Playboy Club does: they were controlled, objectified and trivialized, but they were also learning how to take their destinies into their own very capable hands.

The All-American Girl

From a young age, I became interested in gender roles and how women are represented in media. When I was in the 8^th grade, I remember watching an episode of the MTV show Made. The premise of the episode was that a girly cheerleader, with blonde hair and blue eyes, wanted to be transformed into a skateboarder. When the show’s crew interviewed the girl’s mother, she said her daughter was ‘the all-American teenage girl.’ During this time, I had been learning about genetics in my science class. I had learned that having blonde hair and blue eyes were both recessive genes. As soon as I heard that comment, I thought ‘Then I guess there aren’t too many all-American girls.’ As someone who is both African-American and Hispanic, it was almost biologically impossible for me to be the ‘all-American’ girl. I thought about my female friends, who are all different ethnicities, and realized that though several had blonde hair and a few had blue eyes, none had both. I began to feel as though the girls on television and in magazines not only didn't represent me, they didn't represent anyone.

Celebrities Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon both appeal to the public as the 'girls next door.'

From that point onward I started to pay more attention to the casts of television shows, and I became increasingly disheartened to find that the majority of the leading female roles on television shows and in movies were blonde, even going all the way back to the 1960s (The Brady Bunch, anyone?). Of course, I've always known that blondes are considered a sex symbol in American culture, and seeing a blonde female, whether in real life or on-screen doesn't bother me at all. It's the disproportion of blondes in media in comparison to every other hair color that bothers me, since it's not reflective of real life.

It's funny that this is such a bothersome issue for me. There's obviously an underrepresentation of minorities in media; usually television shows and magazines will throw in a 'token black' to appeal to multicultural audiences (such as the inclusion of a black angel in the new Charlie's Angels). And I've never exactly been skinny, yet only seeing females who weigh far less than me on-screen doesn't bother me. But I think this issue of the 'all-American' female bothers me because it doesn't just offend me personally, it offends me as a female. It makes me think about all of the women out there who have come to believe they are not 'normal.' I think of all the young women who run out to buy the best hair dye and eye contacts they can afford, just so they can finally be 'regular.' I get angry at the media machine for creating an illusion that traps females. And I always hope that I'll never be one of those girls.