Breakfast cereal mascots: sexist, like everything else!

Well, not actively sexist so much as completely male-dominated. I got a list of all breakfast cereals off of wikipedia, followed the links for every one that I’ve heard of, and got pictures of their mascots. My findings will probably not surprise you at all.

Notice anything? Well, yes, they’re all creatures one wouldn’t expect to be eating breakfast cereal, let alone talking in most cases. But they’re also all clearly male, if not on the boxes, then in the commercials. Every. Last. One.

There should be a word like “heteronormativity” that means “men are the default, women are the other.” Dude-eronormativity? I’d say it’s almost an example of manonormativity that there isn’t even a word for it yet!

But just as heteronormativity, a passive state of one’s environment, feeds homophobia, an active aggression, I fear that peninormativity feeds sexism. It’s just one of the many ways that we are indoctrinated into thinking that women are strange and less-than, that men are entitled, that “women’s rights” are somehow different from “human rights.”

It’s subtle, it’s everywhere, and it starts young. It’s even in our children’s cereal.

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