Follow your nose

Afriend and I were contemplating an age-old introspective question that everyone has to ask themselves at one point in life: If given the opportunity, which cereal cartoon mascot would you want to hook up with?\nFor me, it's Toucan Sam. The British accent gets me every time. But my fantasies were suddenly disrupted when my friend, being a heterosexual male, informed me that he had no potential lovers to choose from. All the cereal mascots, even the questionably effeminate Frankenberry, share an animated Y chromosome. It seems the cereal aisle at your local grocery store is a boy's club. Aside from the spunky granny who enjoys Golden Crisp, my friend was out of luck when looking for breakfast time love.\nI hit the grocery store to be certain. When walking down the cereal aisle, the question popped up. Where my girls at?\nBut there was hope. Perhaps the gender roles of breakfast weren't totally askew. It suddenly hit me like a ton of oats. There was a cereal company out there with the image of a strong female role model on all of its products. The face of former first lady Barbara Bush graces every container of Quaker Oats.\nOr so I thought until I checked up on some facts and realized it was impossible, unless Barbara found a rift in the delicate fabric of the space-time continuum.\nBelieve it or not, the likeness of the Quaker Oats man was established in 1877 and Barbara Bush wasn't even born until 1925. I regret to inform you that Mrs. Bush and the Quaker Oats man are actually different people altogether. Shockingly, good ol' Barbie doesn't endorse any breakfast products at all.\nThe lack of females in the cereal world inspired me to do some research. The sad thing is, I knew even before hitting Google that there would be at least one Web site, if not many, solely dedicated to cereal characters. The internet is a wondrous thing. Thanks, Al Gore.\nMy internet escapade led me to the shocking discovery that in the beginning of the 20th century, a girl named The Sweetheart of the Corn represented Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Today, the cereal's mascot is a rooster, not even a non-gender-specific chicken, but a rooster. Last time I checked, roosters are never female.\nMaybe the cereal aisle hasn't always been a total testosterone fest. Sure, females have made appearances over the years, but they've never been lasting front runners. \nWhy does breakfast need animated spokescharacters anyway? The answer is simple: The marketing ray gun is pointed at children. Both young boys and girls eat cereal represented by male characters. If a cereal had a female mascot, it might be viewed as a strictly girlie cereal.\nIt is possible that young girls relate more easily to both genders and cereal advertisers want to seduce as many children as they can. It is also possible that the birth of a cereal character is an artistic vision and its gender is beyond the control of its creator.\nFortunately, no one ever said cereal was an accurate representation of the real world. If it were, we'd be telling children that stealing is acceptable as long as you're stealing delicious cereal. It appears that the characters were never designed to be role models. I wouldn't want my child going "cuckoo for Coco Puffs" like some sort of coke fiend.\nWhen I was a little girl, was the lack of females at breakfast time a vehicle for sexism that subconsciously slanted my perception of my role in society? It's doubtful, but I'd sleep a lot easier if Barbara Bush had her own cereal.