October is Christmas list time in the Halliwell house. An immediate and extended family with a serious proclivity for knocking out the online shopping before Thanksgiving even rolls around means that last weekend saw me browsing t-shirt sites for links to pass along.

One site I was determined to avoid? DC’s merchandise website.

In a discussion aptly titled “This Is What DC thinks of Its Female Fans” on Jezebel, one groupthink contributor a little over a week ago pointed out the marketing of a licensed DC t-shirt in Walmart that read “Training to be Batman’s Wife.”

“Training to be thin enough, pretty enough for the likes of Bruce Wayne?” the contributor asked. “Or perhaps training on how to cook and clean for the caped crusader? … So ladies, the takeaway from this is that we can’t be superheroes but we can marry them… if we train ourselves to be good enough.”

Basically, instead of choosing to market to young women and girls using any of the female superheroes or villains in all of the DC universe, the marketing crew chose to play into the idea that the only way women can be involved in comics is as a romantic counterpart.

Few things are less likely to inspire feelings of jolliness in me, personally.

The Mary Sue pointed out a similarly misguided marketing ploy in another licensed men’s shirt, which reprints a romantic cover of Superman and Wonder Woman. Instead of the original image, though, the creators of the shirt deleted Wonder Woman’s lasso and added the text “Score! Superman does it again!”

Here the issue is that the editors of the image removed just about all of Wonder Woman’s autonomy in the image. As the Mary Sue wrote, “Why present a powerful female superhero using one of her trademark symbols as a marker of sexual agency when you can instead present her as a stiff, rigid board to be scored upon?”

This is especially disturbing given the rise in sites like Her Universe and manufacturers taking to Etsy and Redbubble to fill the gaps where major companies are failing to provide interesting, quality products for their female fans.

Although these sites indicate some movement forward, Marvel and DC can’t rely on outside organizations to pick up their slack.

A DC spokesperson told the Huffington Post that they would be taking a look at their marketing products to make sure that their products would reflect their “core values” of empowerment for both sexes, which is great. But as a 21st century female superhero fan, it’s a little too late to convince me to support them this soon.

Maybe next year, DC.

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