Raised in the Gaze

Childhood, Boundaries, and the Cultural Reckoning Now Reaching the Law

As of Valentine’s Day, my husband and I had been parents for one hundred days. In the months pre- and postpartum, I’ve purchased more FridaBaby and FridaMom products than I can easily count: a cradle cap system, saline kits, a baby bathtub, thermometers, a nebulizer, postpartum recovery supplies. I wasn’t shopping as a cultural critic. I was a tired new mother looking for what worked. The packaging was modern, the reviews were solid, and I needed the product so I ordered it.

I barely noticed what was printed on the boxes.

Then, Valentine’s Day weekend, screenshots began circulating online: sexual innuendo embedded in marketing for infant products. “This is the closest your husband’s gonna get to a threesome,” read one caption beside a thermometer. “How about a quickie?” appeared on another box. “I get turned on easily,” said a humidifier panel. An older post resurfaced showing a baby with nasal discharge and the line, “What happens when you pull out too early.”

The reactions were predictable and divided. Some parents found it inappropriate; others defended it as irreverent humor for exhausted adults. The brand has long positioned itself as candid about motherhood, and to many the tone felt consistent.

What struck me was not outrage. It was recognition. The tone felt familiar…not shocking, but continuous. Part of a cultural register millennial women absorbed long before we had language for it.

Those of us who came of age in the 2000s grew up in a retail environment saturated with sexual suggestion packaged as empowerment. Limited Too and Victoria’s Secret PINK were fixtures of adolescence. Tween girls pooled allowances to buy lingerie framed as confidence and self-expression. It was marketed as edgy, playful, grown-up. It was a joke.

Years later, we learned more about the power structures surrounding those industries. Lex Wexner, whose empire included Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret, had extensive ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The exposure of Epstein’s crimes revealed how easily commerce, celebrity, and predation could intertwine. Not every executive was implicated in criminality, but early sexualization of girls existed within systems that rewarded blurred boundaries and protected power.

For millennial women, girlhood unfolded inside that atmosphere. Sexual suggestion was ambient. Humor and irony made it palatable. When discomfort surfaced, it was reframed as prudishness. We learned to laugh.

Now we are the parents.

The FridaBaby controversy is not equivalent to tween lingerie marketing, nor does it mirror the crimes exposed in the Epstein files. The comparison is tonal, not literal. What persists is the register: adult-coded innuendo positioned as harmless and clever in spaces centered on children.

Some parents welcome that humor because it lightens the intensity of early motherhood. There may be truth in that. Identity narrows in these first months. But it is worth asking why adult selfhood is so often reasserted through sexual humor in contexts involving infants. Why is that the reflex?

The answer may be less conspiratorial than cultural…it is a tone we were formed inside. Sexualized wit has long functioned as background noise, and familiarity rarely invites scrutiny.

Yet familiarity does not make something neutral.

We are living through what increasingly feels like a boundary era—a period in which questions about childhood are being renegotiated across institutions. In commerce, we debate tone and messaging. In medicine and law, we debate intervention and identity.

Earlier this year, as the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in cases testing whether Title IX’s protections for girls remain sex-based, I wrote about the cost of maternal silence. That legal fight, too, turns on whether boundaries rooted in material reality are treated as protective or discriminatory. The venue is different; the underlying question is not. In both instances, the pressure runs in one direction: toward expanding adult claims and narrowing female-specific space.

In Georgia this session, lawmakers moved to restrict certain medical treatments for minors experiencing gender dysphoria, arguing that childhood warrants firmer limits; critics argued that such restrictions overreach. Strip away the party labels, and what remains is the same philosophical tension: how permeable should the boundary between childhood and adult frameworks be?

These debates are not interchangeable and they should not be collapsed into one another, but they converge on stewardship. They ask whether childhood is a stage to be insulated and guarded, or a space to be rapidly integrated into adult concerns.

Looking back, many millennial women now recognize that what was marketed as empowerment often carried an undercurrent of commodification. Our precociousness was profitable. Adult-coded messaging reached us because it worked. The fact that we did not fully grasp it at the time does not render it harmless in retrospect.

Humor was part of that mechanism. It lowered defenses and reframed critique as humorlessness. “It’s just a joke” dissolved discomfort before it could solidify into boundary.

Today’s cultural and legislative conflicts feel intense because they revolve around the same underlying issue: who exercises caution on behalf of children, and whether restraint is viewed as regression or responsibility.

Millennial women are now raising children in the aftermath of revelations about institutional complicity and corporate excess that we did not have language for when we were young. We understand more now about how systems protect power and how tone normalizes what once would have been questioned.

That knowledge does not require panic. It requires resolve.

We did not choose the atmosphere that shaped our girlhood. We were formed by it before we could evaluate it. As parents, we are no longer passive recipients. We decide what becomes background in our homes and what does not.

The question is not whether one marketing line deserves boycott or whether one bill settles a national debate. It is whether we recognize patterns that feel familiar because they shaped us—and whether we are willing to draw lines even when doing so feels unfashionable. Restraint is not repression. It is responsibility.

We grew up in the gaze, but our children do not have to.