Even the Pickles Have a Gender Now. Jesus Christ.

Eleanna Liaskou

2 minutes ago

4 min read

Hot girl pickles. Man Cereal. Beer Girl. Somehow, even the most ordinary things we consume started developing a gender identity. It is easy to dismiss this as another quirk of internet culture.

Of course a pickle company wants to call its product something with ‘hot girl’ in the name. Of course a cereal brand wants to appeal specifically to men. We live in an era where everything needs a personality before it can become content. But the sudden return of aggressively gendered products is more interesting than a few pink packages and masculine fonts suggest.

Because we have been here before.

To understand why brands are once again so interested in telling us which products belong to which gender, we need to look at the work of sociologist Elizabeth Sweet. Her research into the history of gendered toy marketing suggests that gendered consumption does not simply become more progressive over time. Instead, it behaves more like a pendulum, responding to the cultural anxieties of each era.

And right now, the pendulum appears to be swinging again.

We Used to Be Less Obsessed With Gendering Everything

Sweet's research found that in the 1970s, fewer than 2 per cent of toys in the Sears catalogue were explicitly marketed to boys or girls. At a moment when second-wave feminism was challenging traditional ideas about women's roles in the home, children's advertising became surprisingly less gendered. Toys were increasingly presented according to what they did rather than who was supposedly meant to play with them.

Then came the backlash.

By the 1980s, cultural attitudes began shifting. Conservative ideas about family and gender regained prominence, while marketers discovered something extremely useful: difference could be profitable. If boys and girls could be persuaded to want different versions of essentially the same thing, families could no longer rely as easily on shared products or hand-me-downs. One market became two.

A product no longer needs to solve a different problem. It only needs to make the consumer believe it was designed for a different kind of person.

The Gender Pendulum Is Swinging Again

That history makes the current explosion of gendered products feel less random. We are living through another period of intense anxiety about what men and women are supposed to be. Online, looksmaxxing communities turn masculinity into something that can supposedly be optimised through jawlines, muscle mass and rigid routines. At the other end of the algorithm, tradwife content transforms traditional femininity into an aesthetic of homemade bread, immaculate kitchens and domestic devotion.

Being a man or a woman is no longer simply something you are within these subcultures. It is something you demonstrate, improve and perform. There are routines to follow, aesthetics to master and, conveniently, products to buy.

A jar of pickles marketed to ‘hot girls’ is not really suggesting that women require biologically different cucumbers. Beer does not become meaningfully different because the packaging has been designed to signal femininity. The point is recognition. The product tells you that it understands which cultural category you belong to, or perhaps which one you would like to belong to.

We Are Not Buying Products Anymore. We Are Buying Membership.

Gender is only one part of a much bigger shift in the way products are marketed. Some of the most culturally powerful brands today are remarkably good at turning ordinary purchases into evidence that you belong to a particular kind of person. A Stanley cup is technically a container for water, yet it became a status symbol among younger consumers. Drunk Elephant transformed skincare into something Gen Alpha could collect and display long before many of its customers actually needed an elaborate skincare routine.

The same thing happens beyond age and gender. Lemme supplements exist within a wellness culture where health is increasingly aestheticised, while HYROX has transformed a fitness competition into an identity recognisable through training routines, clothing and social media posts. Wellness itself is becoming a class signifier: the right supplements, workouts, sleep trackers and protein products communicate that you are someone who invests in optimising your future body.

This is particularly powerful in a culture that feels increasingly fragmented. When social expectations are constantly being debated and traditional categories feel unstable, consumption provides an unusually simple way to locate yourself. You can become the hot girl, the wellness girl, the HYROX person, the longevity obsessive, the hyperfeminine homemaker or the optimised man simply by learning the codes and purchasing the appropriate objects.

The identities may look wildly different, but economically they accomplish the same thing. They create more markets.

Your Grocery Basket Has Become a Personality Test

This is ultimately what makes the return of gendered products so fascinating. The marketing may be dressed in the language of identity and self-expression, but underneath it sits an extremely old business strategy: divide the market so you can sell more units, often at higher prices.

Brands no longer have to tell every woman that she needs the pink version and every man that he needs the black one. They can divide us into increasingly specific identities, each with its own aesthetic, vocabulary and shopping list. Gender is simply one particularly powerful shortcut because the cultural conversation around it is already so emotionally charged.

We still pick up the product, recognise ourselves in the language and perhaps pay a little more for the pleasure of feeling like it was made specifically for us. The smartest form of segmentation is the one that feels less like being marketed to and more like being understood.

And if even the most commodified items on our grocery lists have become statements about who we are, perhaps the more interesting question is not why brands keep giving products identities. It is how much of our own identity they have managed to sell back to us.