How toys create ideas about gender roles
| Subject: | 👩🏼🤝👩🏽 Gender Studies |
| Type: | Argumentative Essay |
| Pages: | 3 |
| Word count: | 772 |
| Topics: | ⚧️ Gender Roles, Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Gender Stereotypes |
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Companies perceive that they will sell more toys if they market to a specific demographic nevertheless that generates greater social concerns for children who want to play with a toy advertised to the opposite sex. Toy retailers and manufacturers are inspired by the notion that boys have different skills, hobbies and passions as opposed to girls. Without doubt, there are some distinctive characteristic differences between the two genders. Basing these statistics Toy companies indicate that they are on a case study that has found variances between what girls and boys want (Blakemore and Centers, 620). This essay discusses how toys create ideas about gender roles.
From a case study done by neuroscientists dictate that girls are more verbally fluent while boys have superior spatial awareness. Meanwhile, companies such as Lego has established and advertised a line of toys precisely to girls after studying for years how to attract girls to play with the bricks toy. Toys designed for girls often stressed beauty, romance, domesticity, and nurturing while boy’s toys appeared to stress on action, excitement and aggression. Nevertheless, these types of sex messages are obvious to different degrees throughout the modern decades, they appear to be intensified. A contemporary research indicated that both genders are still being hindered by the outdated stereotypes (Blakemore and Centers, 623).
The archetypal stereotype of a boy toy is that it will be flamboyant or an action toy. When you spot toys portraying a male action superhero, the publicizing message on the box will be that of a minor boy playing with the toy and not a girl. For the boy’s toys, the wrapper indicates the action figure as more “human-like” than the doll inside. In the case of a girl’s toy, it will be colorful and in most instances pink, and if it is a doll it will be in a dress. The package for girl’s dolls reveal actual girls grooming, holding, or gazing at the dolls playing with. This is also evident in how a site such as ESPN.com would separate women’s from men’s sports. Another instance is how the DisneyStore.com separates boy’s and girl’s toys (Blakemore and Centers, 623).
Conversely, in later years, several companies have apprehended that, if they place less stress on the sex aspect of toys, they could advertise to everybody. A renowned example of how publicizing has functioned to stereotype girl toys is a Barbie doll. Almost a decade after the initial Barbie doll advertisement, another Barbie doll advertisement was released publicizing Talking Barbie.
This advertisement also included Ken, the male doll projected to be Barbie’s love interest. The saleable features in the two sentences in which the Barbie mentions are “Would you like to go shopping?” and “I love being a fashion model.” Growing up gendered. N.p. n d. Web 14 Oct. 2015 <http://growingupgendered.weebly.com/toys-and-advertising.html> (Blakemore and Centers, 624). The second sentence is fascinating bearing in mind the presence of Ken. The present gender stereotype, shopping is idolized by women, is revealed in this advertisement focusing young girls. This stereotype that girls are designed to be attractive is revealed in this short advertisement. It may not have been deliberate, nevertheless the advertisement appeals a relationship between attracting a member of the opposite sex and being a fashion model.
One conceivable explanation for this stereotype is that as women have increased political and social power, toys have come to symbolize a conceptual counter attack to this evolvement. As the duty of women and men become more alike in the bigger social order, there is a bigger need to differentiate between femininity and masculinity within the society, and to stress that the out-dated characteristics of gender roles have not been abandoned.
Toys serve a serious function in teaching children about their gender and what it means to be feminine and masculine. The escalation of gender in the toys dominion appears challenging. How do children come to comprehend that men can be caring and can cook and take care of the home at the same time that women can be competent, adventurous, and assertive (Blakemore and Centers, 626). When the concepts they watch encrypted in their toys are so conflicting with what is really happened tend to confuse them.
Finally, statistics regarding individual within gender unevenness are also possible to effect nurture debases versus nature. For instance, pattern of high variability may show different primary biological mechanisms than are revealed by designs of low variability. The extent to which children’s gender type toy plays is flexible, which impact the ability of interventions intended to decrease children’s gender-typed manners (Blakemore and Centers, 626). Behaviors revealing high variability, for instance, be more encouraging to involvement prompted change than are behaviors revealing low variability.
- Blakemore, Judith E. Owen and Renee E. Centers. “Characteristics Of Boys’ And Girls Toys.” Sex Roles 53.9-10 (2005): 619-633. Web. 14 Oct. 2015.
Offered for reference purposes only.