My family went to Target last weekend to buy sandals and underwear. Specifically, sandals and underwear for my four-year-old son, who doesn’t seem to want to stop growing. After some negotiations with our son, we were able to decide on some plain brown sandals — and Star Wars underwear — which were the compromise for not buying light-up, Avengers sandals.
Unfortunately, a trip to Target usually means we end up wandering around browsing the entire store before we end up buying 10 other things we don’t need, and that’s exactly what we did on this trip. Along the way, I noticed several items of merchandise for the Nickelodeon cartoon PAW Patrol, and pointed them out to my son, who is a big fan.
https://youtu.be/BHXBPkhcg2o
PAW Patrol is about a pack of pups from Adventure City who carry out a seemingly endless amount of rescue missions with the help of their friend Ryder. Each pup has their own speciality, from a pilot to a firedog, which helps Ryder select which pups will team up for each mission.
The PAW Patrol team includes two female pups, Skye and Everest, and they were both strangely missing from almost all of the merchandise we saw at Target. They were missing from several boys shirts that included all the other members of the team, in addition to a jacket, a baseball cap, and a watering can. A. Watering. Can.
Now, to be fair, Everest is a new member introduced this season, but the only item that wasn’t an action figure of Skye which I found either of the female pups on was a single girls shirt of Skye. For some reason, girls shirts are cut differently than boys shirts even for four- and five-year-old kids which is kind of weird in and of itself.
The most obvious problem with this is that Skye and Everest are members of the team. They’re not neighbors, friends, or classmates — they are actually on the PAW Patrol team. They both go out and rescue the same small group of people who continually need rescuing in Adventure Bay alongside their male teammates.
Another issue is that kids notice this type of stuff. Don’t believe me? Search #IncludetheGirls on Twitter, and you’ll see a pretty lengthy timeline of tweets from parents of sons and daughters who are asking why some of their favorite characters are missing from the merchandise they see in stores, or receive as gifts.
Skye and Everest aren’t alone in being forgotten. The merchandise for the upcoming The Avengers: Age of Ultron is lacking in Black Widow or Scarlet Witch merchandise, which has led to an onslaught of bad press from pretty much every comic book and pop culture website. This led to the following tweet from The Hulk himself, Mark Ruffalo:
.@Marvel we need more #BlackWidow merchandise for my daughters and nieces. Pretty please.
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 29, 2015
You could argue that not having Scarlet Witch on a shirt may have to do with her being a new character, and also not wanting to possibly reveal plotlines from the film. But Black Widow has been kicking ass since Iron Man 2. It should also be noted that Hawkeye doesn’t appear on a lot of the Avengers merchandise either, but that might be because he’s Hawkeye.
Gamora was missing from merchandising for Guardians of the Galaxy, Wonder Woman has been struggling to appear on Justice League merchandise with Batman and Superman since forever it seems, and pretty much any girl from any blockbuster movie or hit show is absent from that movie or show’s merchandise.
Why don’t merchandisers and publishers understand that parents want to teach inclusion, not exclusion? When item after item removes the female characters from “boys” products, it just strengthens the notion that girls don’t matter, that they’re secondary characters not only in movies or television, but in real life. That’s a terrible thing to teach children, but as long as companies believe this stupid idea that “boys don’t want girls on their shirts” then we’ll have this problem.
Oddly, some of these companies, and comic book publishers in particular, have been trying for some time to reach out to girls in an effort to add them as new fans. Initiatives such as DC Super Hero Girls are directly aimed at girls, but have also included adding new characters — as Marvel Comics has with Ms. Marvel, Spider-Gwen and Silk — or having female-centric storylines, which means the boys are also included in this effort.
If these companies really wanted to include and engage girls, they should also start making products that don’t exclude characters, and that anyone can purchase. While some strides have been made, we need more merchandise and apparel that includes a property’s female characters, and we need to continue to be vocal as parents in wanting this for the material we purchase for our children.
