Today I doing some shopping at the local Safeway, when I happened to stroll down the cereal aisle. I couldn't help but notice that most of the characters, human or animal, on the cereal boxes, were male. Well, one in particular - Cocoa Pebbles - gave me concern. Just look at the box cover:
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5347/8847923775_86a7504fe3_z.jpgIn this image, Bam Bam is striking a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles with a small club, creating quite a mess, while Pebbles looks on and smiles approvingly. This is clearly a case of Bam Bam asserting his hegemonic masculinity over Pebbles, while she is apparently complicit in her subjugation, both present and future, to Bam Bam. Even the aggressive smile on Bam Bam's face seems to reinforce his glee at his brutal expression of male dominance. This is obviously one of the many ways in which The Patriarchy seeks to brainwash young children through the consumption of cereals such as this into accepting stereotypical gender roles in which women and girls are subjugated to men.
And the other cereal boxes weren't much better. From Cap'n Crunch to the Trix rabbit, one mostly sees expressions of male dominance and female characters are either nowhere to be seen, or mere accessories to the male characters.
Clearly this outrage must be stopped! We must contact the advertisers behind the companies that produce these sexist cereal boxes and demand that they portray an equal number of empowered women and girls. Only then can children learn a more fair and balanced portrayal of female characters, and rise up against the male oppression that expresses itself everywhere, even on cereal boxes.
[Note: I was inspired to write this piece of satire by an earlier posting about an actual feminist that made a similar observation about cereal boxes. I just had to write it down while the idea was still fresh.]
