Jenna Lyons, You and J. Crew Wanted Your Son to Stop Being Such a Boy

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last spring, I told you that Jenna Lyons, J. Crew’s president and creative director, wasn’t just having a little, harmless fun with her son Beckett when she published a photograph of herself painting his toenails hot pink in a J. Crew catalogue—a catalogue distributed to millions of people.

The quote accompanying the image of Beckett read, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”

I said Lyons was making a cultural statement about masculinity no longer being important to boys—that she was, essentially, uncomfortable with his gender.

But I didn’t just think that. I thought Lyons was promoting a cultural agenda at her son’s expense—and at the expense of all our sons whose masculinity was being downplayed. Why else would you pick that photograph, decide for Beckett that it was a really good one with which to brand him in the minds of millions, and make sure that his hair was long and wavy for the photo shoot? Why spend tens of thousands of dollars (or a hundred thousand or more) to distribute that particular photo of Beckett to millions of us.
...
What it says is that my worry that Ms. Lyons’ might be expressing her own discomfort with masculinity and projecting it onto her son—and mine, and yours—seems to have been justified.'