This past summer my husband’s D&D group started a new campaign, and one day he sent me an Amazon link.  It led to this:

An over-the-head penguin mask.  My husband can be a living non sequitur sometimes, so I had to stop for a moment and think hard about why he would send me this horrifying and tacky item out of the blue.  Then I remembered that his character for the new campaign was a penguin.

I bought it for him, and I got to the page where Amazon shows you a list of things that other people who’ve looked at the item you’re buying also looked at.  The items were so bizarre I took a screenshot. 

A banana slicer, the book Where is Baby’s Belly Button?, and BIC Pens for Her.   My mind constructed a narrative based on these objects in about half a second: 

This penguin mask is typically bought by a stay-at-home mom with 3 kids.  The banana slicer will give her an extra two minutes in the morning, and she desperately needs them.  The faster she has banana slices, the faster she can convince the toddler to get in the high chair and stop screaming.  Those two minutes then feed into getting the other two children and her husband ready and out the door in time to catch the bus and carpool, respectively.  Once she has managed to settle the toddler, she sits down to read to him about belly buttons in a sing-songy voice, because babies don’t understand if you use your normal voice when reading books.  This woman has also been brainwashed enough by society to legitimately want mechanical pencils that are “trendy” and the “perfect accessory”, are comfortable for her delicate hands, and which are sold in colors appropriate to her gender and sprinkled with a fine dusting of sparkles.  She bought the penguin mask for her husband to wear to their neighbors’ Halloween party because they think it is ironic and they feel clever for being thrifty. 

This interpretation is, admittedly, low hanging fruit.  It is cruel and unfair at times.  Many of the choices my generic stay-at-home mother makes are based on negative stereotypes.  However, it is not the only interpretation: 

This mask was bought by a woman who owns her own catering business, and one of her desserts requires banana slices of consistent thickness.  Her brother recently had a baby and she bought the book Where is Baby’s Belly Button? for her new nephew.  She was annoyed at BIC’s gendered, misguided, and out-of-touch marketing campaign, and expressed her frustration by writing one of the hundreds of sarcastic reviews on Amazon.  She bought the penguin mask to go trick-or-treating with her niece, who had recently watched a documentary and wanted to have a whole family of penguins going through the neighborhood. 

This alternative narrative only came into being when I forced myself to think of other explanations.  Without any additional research, the alternative is just as likely as my original.  So why did I immediately jump to the first?  The answer is stereotypes.  Using stereotypes allows us to quickly simplify and process information.  The combination of these four items was so bizarre that my brain fell back on stereotypes to explain the grouping. 

However, stereotypes are rarely the best answer to anything.  In fact, I like my second narrative much better than the first.  I think it’s more creative and portrays the woman in a better light than the first (some of this will be my own biases asserting themselves, but that’s not the subject right now).  These two narratives are also definitely not the only interpretations.  Maybe the person buying this penguin mask is a man.  Maybe they’re retired.  Maybe they don’t live in the United States. 

In conclusion, I found a bizarre collection of random objects grouped together on Amazon, and my brain employed stereotypes to quickly explain the relationship between these items.  Only upon careful reflection of my initial narrative did I come up with the second.  I had to actively think out my second narrative, which required more time than my initial inspired narrative.  So, while stereotypes can be useful for quickly processing information, interpretations based on them are typically wrong and make you look like an uneducated, closed-minded jerk.