Lots of countries are influenced by the United States, and I’m not just discussing our foreign policy initiatives. We export our culture to other countries on a daily basis. On the optimistic side, we encourage both sexes to receive an education and to be valued as individuals. The less positive side is we also export our society’s beauty and its relation to self worth to other cultures. We focus more on a woman’s beauty than her intelligence or other attributes.
A reflection of our own society’s beliefs can be seen in what we market to our youngest generations. Boys have adventures, and girls play house. We’ve begun sexualizing girls earlier and earlier. Take a look at child beauty pageants and tell me you haven’t seen drag queens who wear less makeup. Spray tans, false eyelashes and fake hair shouldn’t come in kiddie versions.
An 8-year-old should be splashing her friends in the pool, not worrying if her bikini top has enough padding. Abercrombie isn’t the first company to market a padded bikini top to young girls. Last year a United Kingdom department store had padded bikini tops for purchase for girls as young as eight. Being eight can be hard enough in our society as it is. Children are going through puberty at much younger ages than before. Should we really be adding self esteem issues to the list of body image difficulties they will already be going through? Other companies are trying to cash in on young pocketbooks through making high heels for tweens.
If suggesting to young girls a natural face isn’t good enough just the way it is, let us venture to another large merchandiser. Geo Girl is a new tween makeup line by Walmart created to fill the space left by the Olsen twins’ beauty care line. A girl’s desire to play with makeup isn’t the issue I am trying to address. The marketing approach implying an 8-year-old, who is still growing and developing, isn’t naturally beautiful the way she is does trouble me.
Lip gloss, eye shadow and mascara are the top sellers in the tween makeup market’s $24 billion a year industry. Geo Girl’s line doesn’t end there though; it will also include exfoliates, eyebrow waxing and facial kits. What happened to washing your face with soap and water every day? Am I the only one who remembers the good old days when you had to have the blue Noxzema jar? Whether you used it or not, it was there signaling you were a teenager, slathering your face with the white goo to ensure clear skin.
Geo Girl plans to individualize its line through designing it to fit in a child’s hands and mistake proof formulas. A child’s face should not be color-by-number. Girls already see over 400 advertisements a day telling them how they should look. Anybody else wondering what the physical and mental health effects these products will have on them, aside from the obvious that we as a society are promoting outside appearance is more important than what is inside? I will give Geo Girl two things: the line is supposedly “green” and sunscreen is supposedly built in.
If we are going to influence other countries through our cultural norms, how about we influence them with more positive social norms and less negative norms? We should encourage more girls to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics and less girls to wear padded bikini tops. We could also consider encouraging more women to be politicians or doctors and less to be beauty queens. Boys could grow up to be elementary school teachers, librarians and mental health counselors without having their masculinity challenged. Children wouldn’t be walking dollar signs, but people going through stages of social development. Yes, I dare to dream.
Delilah Schmidt is a senior majoring in sociology. She can be contacted at [email protected].