Sexist Much?

While wandering around Target last night, I came across this:

Yes, boys should be great and girls should be glamorous. Boys should be "Best at Everything" and girls should be "A Goddess." A Goddess, admittedly, is a step up from "princess" since goddesses presumably have power; but when this goddess is supposed to use her patriarchally approved beauty to gain power and very little else, well, that's not much of a change. From anything.

Fortunately, all was not lost for girls in the Target book section. Amid all of the stalker-fantasy vampire books -- or at least those packaged as stalker-fantasies since I must admit that I went through my vampire stage with Anne Rice, who was more about questions of power, immortality, and morality -- I found a book of hope. Look close, there in the center:Emily the Strange: Here is the description:

The transcription of the description: "13 years old. Able to leap tall building, probably, if she felt like it. More likely to be napping with her four black cats; or cobbling together a particle accelerator out of lint, lentils, and safety pins; or rocking out on drums/guitar/saxophone/zither; or painting a swirling feral sewer mural; or forcing someone to say 'swirling feral sewer mural' 13 times fast...and pointing and laughing."

Dark and grumpy in the way only a 13 year old girl can be, Emily does stuff other than try to look pretty and control people with her prettiness. Please please let more little girls drift to this rather than to the "Glamour" book!

Then, I heard someone from an aisle or two over shout, "hey, Mom! They have Glenn Beck books here!" He was not being ironic.

I needed solace. In the candy section. Where I found this:

Candy skeleton fingers for your martini!

Actually, what first caught my eye about these was that, when you turned them on their side, they looked like this: A row of skeletal birds. That's pretty much how I felt at that moment.

Then, I got some candy and felt much better.