Much like most of my articles about sexism and gender inequality, this one begins with a question from my little sister. She asked me, “Emily, have you ever noticed that there are no girls on the front of cereal boxes?” I hadn’t. Up until the moment she brought it up, it never crossed my mind.

I took to our pantry to investigate and, lo and behold, there was Buzz the Bee for Honey Nut Cheerios, CinnaMon and Apple for Apple Jacks, Snap, Crackle, and Pop for Rice Krispies, and Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes. She was right. There was no female representation on our cereal boxes. Just in case we’d just been buying cereal with predominantly male mascots all these years, I decided to Google female cereal mascots. We weren’t, there just aren’t any.

The closest thing I could find was Disney’s "Hannah Montana," "High School Musical," and "Princess" cereals, where the main purpose isn’t to sell the cereal itself, but Disney’s movies and television shows. Even Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles, named after the female "Flintstones" character, is almost exclusively represented by Fred and Barney.

I was shocked, but also not at all at the same time, that sexism has permeated into advertising for children’s breakfast cereal. However, while this is sexist, it’s also hypocritical. Women’s bodies are used in advertisements every day to sell everything from beer, hamburgers, cologne, and cars, and it works. The phrase “sex sells” is a popular one because of how often it is used in the media. However, female frogs, birds, cats, or whatever other anthropomorphic creatures are used to sell cereal, are apparently incapable of doing just that. This suggests that the only thing that women are good at selling is sex and that's a horrible concept for little kids to learn.

Sex won’t sell cereal because the target audience of cereal is children. However, why is it that advertising teams across the country think that that’s the only thing women can sell? Maybe it’s because only three percent of creative directors in advertising are women. Maybe it's because of the social constructs that we’ve been conditioned to believe about men and women have worried advertisers that if they make a female cereal mascot that little boys wouldn’t want it because it was too girly for them, but they knew that little girls would still eat cereal represented by boys. In our country “male” is the norm and being "girly" is almost always an insult.

Sure, it is just a cereal box. Sure, it isn’t the end of the world. However, it’s not usually one big lie that tricks us into believing something, it’s the hundreds of small, little ones that are told over and over that slowly convince us.

So, it’s not really just a cereal box. It’s all of the little lies combined together that make little girls, little boys, teenagers, and grown men and women believe that being “male” is the norm and that the only thing women can sell is sex. It’s the words like “mankind,” enforcing of dress codes for female students, selling cleaning and baby toys in only pink for girls and trucks and doctor kits in blue for boys. It’s all of the small lies, repeated over and over again, that trick us. It's just a little food for thought.