By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 10 years ago

Photo of the Day: “I Only Date Heroes” pajamas for girls

Those new “Training to be Batman’s Wife” tees from DC Comics are hardly the only superhero gear to send the message that boys can be heroes, while the best girls can aspire to is dating them. A shopper at a Target in Ontario snapped a photo of this pair of onsies for kids: “Future Man of Steel” for the boys and “I Only Date Heroes” for the girls.

dateheroes 2

As Aimée Morrison, the University of Waterloo professor who tweeted the photo, explained, “One is, ‘I can grow up to be somebody powerful,’ and the other one is ‘I can grow up to date somebody powerful.’ When you put the two together, it actually says a lot about how we socialize boys and girls to think of what their future holds for them, where they get their power in  the world.” And given that these are onsies for children, for whom the whole concept of dating doesn’t mean much yet, I have a hard time believing little girls are eagerly clamoring for them. Which begs the question: What kind of terrible parents are buying this retrograde crap for their daughters in 2014?

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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