A Defense of Gift Guides
A short story about patriarchy, capitalism, and joy.
When I was growing up, the only gift guides I ever encountered were the ones in Seventeen Magazine or maybe, if I was feeling fancy, the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. My parents would get me some books, a couple of CDs, a piece of jewelry, and we would call the season complete.
This year, I think I’ve seen over 30 gift guides that include a seemingly-obscure silver fish-shaped clip. I have seen gift guides for puzzle nerds, women who camp, former horse girls, and women who dream of Hotel du Cap. Every identity, every pastime, every micro-aesthetic now gets its own curated shopping list.
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And why the proliferation of gift guides? Affiliate linking baby. We are all laboring under a capitalist commission structure in which any identity or life moment can be translated into dollars. (Yesterday, I posted a dog grooming tool guide, guilty as charged #dogmom.)
About a decade ago, Kate Kennedy (of the podcast Be There in Five) said something that has stayed with me. She said that the women we call mommy bloggers would be called marketing gurus if they were men. I think about that a lot. I also think a lot about a moment eight years ago, when I sat in a meeting with an influential man in Democratic politics, trying to convince him that Instagram was worth investing in for political comms. His response was, Isn’t that where women buy shoes? Influencer marketing is a thirty-three billion dollar industry that has upended traditional advertising. And with affiliate linking, anyone can jump in.
But the fact that the girlies are cashing in on holiday spending is not the core of my defense. A sidenote here. As the Trump-cession looms, surveys suggest people are planning to spend less this year, yet nearly half of those who expect to buy gifts or travel also expect to go into debt. The economics, the environmental impact, and the social contagion of shopping dopamine addiction are all critical parts of the story. But for this Substack, we are going to put those to the side and look at one angle of the cultural shift underneath all of this. The way gift guides reveal how women move through the world now. The way they quietly track our growing autonomy, our widening sense of permission, our ability to want things without shame.
Modern Christmas, the version we generally celebrate today, is surprisingly young. The decorated trees, the Santa mythology, and the chaotic morning rush of tearing open gifts only became mainstream during the Victorian era. Before that, many families gave gifts on New Year’s. But once the holiday became centered on the home and togetherness, the modern Christmas ritual slid into place.
As industrialization grew, so did the holiday economy. Mass production made it possible for middle-class families to buy more. Department stores and early advertising transformed Christmas shopping into an event.
But central to the Christmas magic has always been women. The planners, the cooks, the wrappers. We all know a woman who buys her own gifts so her husband has something to put under the tree. The moms who hold the whole season together through sheer force of will.
Gift guides are meant to help magic-makers, lightening a load during a season that relies on women’s invisible labor. Anything that reduces the unpaid mental load carried during the holidays has a feminist edge, even if it comes wrapped in a cozy throw full of microplastics and an affiliate code.
Early and mid-twentieth-century holiday ads often depicted women ecstatic to receive new household appliances as gifts. There’s a famous Hoover ad from 1953 that promises that “Christmas morning she’ll be happier with a Hoover.” And for women whose jobs included cleaning their homes, a washer could cut hours of daily chores. But these gifts also reflected the public narrative that women existed primarily as homemakers, not as full individuals with hobbies, passions, and pleasures that extended beyond care for others.
The rise of the self-care category today is tied up in our capitalistic hellscape, absolutely, but it is also a reflection of the evolving narrative about who women get to be. By the late twentieth century, a man who placed a vacuum under the tree risked getting a raised eyebrow instead of gratitude. It became a joke, shorthand for a spouse who simply does not get it.
It marks a cultural understanding that women’s happiness is a category of its own. Not something that has to be justified through service.
A lot of the TikTok gift guides I’m seeing right now feel less like gift inspiration and more like thinly veiled shopping lists (I’ve clicked). And part of cultural shift is that women’s economic independence is still astonishingly new. It has only been 51 years since women have had the legal right to open a credit card without a male co-signer. Fifty-one. That’s within one lifetime.
Consumerism can swallow anything, including feminism. A fifty-dollar face mask is not empowerment. But today’s gift guides reflect a massive shift in how society talks about women. Women can choose what they want. Women can spend their own money. Women can say yes to something that is only for them. By 2028, women will control 75% of household discretionary spending - we are the capitalism final bosses.
At their best, gift guides encourage people to talk about what they actually want. They make it easier for women to say, out loud, This would make me happy. For a gender trained to swallow its desires, that matters.
And if nothing else, a thoughtful gift guide reminds us that gifts are gestures that say I see you. Feminism has always argued that women deserve to be seen for more than what they do for others. The modern gift guide, in its very commercial way, agrees. It says her happiness counts. Her comfort counts. Her joy counts.
In the end, all this talk about gift guides and spending power circles back to something larger. Women’s economic influence is rising in ways our mothers and grandmothers could barely imagine. And I hope, with every bit of sincerity I have, that this economic power translates into political power. Because if women are steering industries, there is no reason we cannot steer the future too.
I always think of the Stanley 40 oz. cup as one of the absolute best marketing examples: Stanley has existed forever but they weren’t marketing to 50% of the population. Now there’s entire brands devoted to large capacity drink holders with straws and various features!
I also think of Her First 100k and her book which pointed out all the things women spend money on are “frivolous” but the hobbies of men are sacred. 🫠
Wow, you could honestly write a dissertation on this perspective and I'd read it. The intersection of consumerism, woman's role, patriarchy, and value is so interesting and really brings into question a lot of what is wrong with society today. Excellent piece!