Nothing says Christmas like gender stereotypes!
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I have forgotten how to shop. Living on a tight budget for a few years has made spending money on anything other than food and the occasional book/movie/play terrifying. Wandering through a crowded mall on a Saturday looking for shoes or pants or whatever I happen to need becomes an angst-ridden nightmare where the bag-clutching masses text rather than speak to the friends with whom they are shopping, ignoring the techno or muzak (depending on the shop) which must be aiming to inspire spending rather than fleeing (which is what I usually find myself doing).
All of this is made exponentially more traumatizing during the holiday season (the entire merit of which is lambasted by Christopher Hitchens at slate.com), where it is virtually impossible to justify the purchase of whatever gifts one feels obligated to purchase to show love and appreciation that might otherwise go unspoken (or un-demostrated-via-materialist-means), and where, chances are, one will overspend or forever be burdened with guilt, chastising oneself as a miser.
I do like giving my friends and family gifts, but the pressure, particularly when one has no 'perfect' gift in mind, is extreme. And so, like many mildly agoraphobic people, I turn to the internet for cheap shopping, and ideas, and am promptly met by a wall of age and gender stereotyping.
Many shopping sites have "suggestions" for those, like myself, who are out of ideas (I can always think of a book or three, but they have a nasty habit of going out of print). And to help with navigation, the lists are organized by sex, relationship (mom/dad/girlfriend/etc), like on amazon.com, or star sign - (what cancerian wouldn't want family tree software?) still divided by sex, by the way (apparently male cancers prefer barbecues to lingerie).
Judging from amazon's lists, your boyfriend/husband probably likes music, video games, sports, power tools, and titanium jewelry. Yes, specifically titanium. Your girlfriend, on the other hand, likes lingerie, bracelets, handbags, chick lit, chick flicks (both of which I would normally put in quotation marks, because I don't consider 'chick' a genre), and decorative boxes.
Moms appear to be interested in cooking, gardening, and wearing pajama sets while enjoying a foot massager. Dads have more intellectual pursuits, like documentaries, history, exotic meat and game, and prefer back massagers.
Siblings, friends, and coworkers are nowhere to be found - perhaps amazon assumes that people will check the closest appropriate age/gender category and go from there.
This kind of stereotyping is obviously blatantly sexist. Men cook, women watch documentaries, either partner in a relationship might be interested in power tools, but while amazon recommendations software uses your specific purchasing history (and that of the rest of its clients - probably with a heavy dose of publisher-generated, and paid for, genre-association - Oprah counts as a genre) to make suggestions based on what you, individually, actually like, the gift lists resort to very basic gender stereotyping - a logic that assumes the stereotype is a "safe assumption", and that more people fit in those broad categories than not.
I'd love to see a site that sells as much variety of product as amazon make truly helpful, individualized recommendations - have a form where I can enter magazine titles, book titles, dvds, electronic items, etc - and make me a list based on that. Don't give me some advertiser-generated short list of 'moms do chores! men like meat!' dimension.
At least in the mall a barbecue is just a barbecue, surrounded by other large cooking implements and outdoorsy furniture. Of course, it's probably also surrounded by the endless chorus of "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart/The very next day, you gave it away".