Where’s My Snoopy Hoodie? The Gendering of Geek Culture in Retail

Last week I bought a Snoopy hoodie from Macy’s. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t simple at all — because I didn’t find it by browsing the women’s section. I found it the way I always find things like it: by doing a broad, general search and hoping something surfaces, because retailers have decided that animation and comic book merchandise lives in the men’s department.

And I have to ask — why?

I grew up watching the same cartoons the boys did. I read the same comics. Snoopy, Spider-Man, Looney Tunes, Garfield — these weren’t handed to me with a pink bow and a disclaimer. They were just culture. Shared culture. The Saturday morning lineup didn’t check your gender before the theme song played.

So at what point did retail decide that the merchandise inspired by that shared culture belongs to men?

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a quiet but consistent message that says women are guests in these fandoms — welcome to watch, maybe, but not quite welcome enough to shop. When a Peanuts hoodie is filed under menswear, the assumption baked into that decision is that the person who wants it is a man. That women who love these characters are an afterthought, an anomaly, or simply not considered at all.

The irony is that women are an enormous consumer base for exactly this kind of merchandise. We buy it. We wear it. We love it. We have always loved it. The market data supports this — licensed apparel and nostalgia-driven merchandise consistently perform well among women in their 30s and 40s, the exact demographic that grew up in the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons and peak comic book culture.

So this isn’t about inventory. It’s about imagination — specifically, the failure of retail buyers and merchandisers to imagine us as customers.

The fix is straightforward: categorize themed and licensed merchandise in both men’s and women’s sections. Better yet, make it its own category entirely — because fandoms are not gendered, even if the industry keeps pretending they are.

I shouldn’t have to do a workaround search just to find a Snoopy hoodie in my size. I shouldn’t be shopping in the men’s department for merchandise tied to characters I’ve loved my entire life.

Good grief, indeed.