Wednesday 10 December 2008

Girlfruit

Me: These dresses with scratch and sniff fruit are great. Are there any scratch and sniff clothes for boys?
Shop Assistant: No, I'm not sure what you'd do scratch and sniff for a boy.
Me: ...
Shop Assistant: Hmmmm, maybe apples? They might be gender neutral.
Me: Ah, yeah, apples. I'll just take the dress thanks.

This is not a story in which I come up with an undeniably witty, yet subtly consciousness-raising, retort. I thought about writing it that way, but that would be lying. Like most mortals, I think of the right thing to say several hours after the right time to say it has passed.

But I'm intrigued by this attitude that there is girlfruit. Strawberries and grapes are apparently sternly in the girlfruit camp, as they were the two options for the scratch and sniff dresses, all of which came in girly pastel shades (a mid purple was the manliest option).

Apples, as already mentioned, may be gender neutral. I'm not sure whether all apples are androgynous, or just the green ones, seeing as how on a previous occasion, at a different children's clothing store, I was informed that red socks were without doubt girlclothes.

Perhaps I'm thinking about this all wrong. Maybe all fruit is girlfruit, but all vegetables are boyveg? I mean really, when you consider it; courgettes, celery, carrots, parsnips, marrows and silverbeet are all a little, well, phallic, don't you think?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's always Huckleberry Pie :-)

Anonymous said...

And some shop assistants have very firm ideas about what you can buy for whom. I had a woman at the swimming pool refuse to even show my toddler son the pink goggles for fear he would choose them over the blue ones.

Anonymous said...

Bizarre - just bizarre. Following hungrymamas theory - banana maybe?

DPF:TLDR said...

Well, never mind the shape - given that fruits contain the seeds of a plant, a strong case can be made that it's all male.

Anonymous said...

Just being pedantic, but no, seeds are the result of the flower being fertilised/pollinated, so they're actually more comparable to a zygote (fertilised ovum).

DPF:TLDR said...

So what's the plant's male bit? The flower?

Lucy said...

@hugh: depending on the plant, there can be either male flowers (with stamens only) or, more usually, your regular flowers with stamens (pollen producing, "male") and anthers (pollen receiving, "female".) However, most plants with specifically male flowers are trees without flowers as most people recognise them (petals, colour, etcetera.) The sperm equivalent for plants is pollen. What that says about hayfever season, I'm not sure.

< / infodump >

DPF:TLDR said...

That's right, I do remember a fellow hayfever sufferer referring to being bukakke-d by a bunch of cottonwood trees...

blue milk said...

Cr-cr-crazy.

Violet said...

I don't know about preteen boys, but for older boys maybe they'd like to scratch'n'sniff beer, pizza, girls' armpits.