Feeling or thinking: Not funny, Target!
Nancy Carroll (she/her/hers)
Strategist/Writer/Designer | Connecting your message with your markets
I was in Target on Saturday doing household errands, and browsed through the Bullseye's Playground section full of cute, cheap, and clever. One aisle held a group of items for expectant families. I cropped the image above from a shot of a miniature blackboard seemingly aimed at integrating a new baby into a household with one or more children.
Apparently, Mommy doesn't think and Daddy doesn't feel.
Wonder what Mommy thinks about that?
How do we ever get past stereotypes if no one looks at this clever little doodad and thinks it's a bad idea?
The personal is the political, people, and nothing changes unless we change the reactive stuff we do without examining the biases beneath it.
And as surely as I'm saying this, someone's going to admonish me for over reacting. Am I really? I think not. Language is power. Ask yourself if this is any different from the old usage that said "Fireman" instead of "Firefighter"—and prompted kids to think all firefighters were men.
The intersection of government, law, science, technology and art. USF School of Public Affairs MPA program alumni.Documenting DOGE. Ex-board of directors, Confluence Ballet Co.
5 年This is a great article Nancy Carroll, I’m glad I read this. Happy Friday!
Executive Director, Talent Delivery at CACI International | "Time spent on hiring is time well spent."
5 年haha Jillian Burnett
Humility | Drive | Lead
5 年Having a 4 yo son and nearly 3 yo daughter, and living with someone who was basically pregnant and/or post-partum for 3 years straight... I did not see this sign in the reductive way this post portrays it. I see it as a relatable distillation of those times. My recollections are that my wife was "feeling" a ton of new things, many of them emotional, but also, just as many physical; and each pregnancy brought new experiences. So the interpretation that this is solely about emotion is in the eye of the beholder, as it were. Similarly, assigning "thinking" to the paternal figure, does not exclude emotion... I was thinking A LOT about things, including how it FELT to be an expectant father. These things do not need to be mutually exclusive, and perhaps a large part of disassembling those stereotypes is to stop seeing them in everything. To that end, one could make an argument that this post does more to perpetuate the stereotype, than does the object of its ire.
Good point! Target has done this in the past with graphic tees for girls that read "I'm too pretty to do my homework". They need to evaluate their "cute" ideas.
Retired Volunteer
5 年I doubt that Target's management thought very deeply? about this? (although I have the same feeling about most ad campaigns). Our son has always been as emotional as our daughter, and our daughter is no slouch in the logic department.