At a
young age children are taught, through play, how to interact with others and
how to identify with your gender. Gender stereotypes are enforced in early
childhood through toys. In the video, “Toy Ads and Learning Gender”, the speaker discusses
how gendered commercials are for children's toys. In commercials directed for
boys, they encourage and advertise fighting, violence, and competition.
However, in the commercials directed for girls, they encourage domestic work,
and prioritizes self image. The options boys and girls have for toys are vastly
different. Girls are advertised dolls, easy bake ovens, and glittery things.
Whereas, boys are advertised guns, shields, and legos. Boy toys are aimed
towards creativity and higher level thinking. Toys for little girls teach
popularity, homemaking and beauty. Girl toys only teach them how to change
diapers and bake a cake. How do these toys help teach and shape their futures?
Boys are taught through toys to be violent and fight. Girls are taught to
nurture and be obsessed with self image.
Toys
and advertising enforce gender scripts on children. Males are supposed to be
more tough, and athletic. Girls are taught to be soft, and maternal. The toys
that are available to boys and girls enforce these same gender scripts. The
video “Tough Guise” further
explains how enforcing such strong gender roles can corrupt a whole society.
The video is directly mainly towards the effect of pushing gender roles on men
but it also affects females. The media encourages men to be tough and violent.
Thus implying females should be soft and vulnerable. Toys in today's culture
also express this same idea. We give little boys swords and guns but we give little
girls dresses and a baby doll to nurture.
In my
picture I depicted exactly what kinds of toys we give boys and girls. I put the
boys toys on a higher surface to show that they are the main focus of the
photo. Also, I used a ridiculously large toy gun and had it take up most of the
space of the picture. The gun symbolizes toxic masculinity that is encouraged
through these toys. I put the girl toys on the ground and slightly cropped them
out of the picture to symbolize how sexist and unrealistic girls dolls are. The
stuffed dolls in the picture symbolize the cultures beauty norms for women, the
dolls have thin waists, makeup, and tight short dresses on. Lastly, I angled
the picture downward to show that as a society we should take a bigger stance
to try and stop enforcing these strong gender roles on children, we are adults
and can make a change.
1 comment:
From: Alexander
Your photo and essay were well done and spoke to me. I remember growing up always wanting legos and nerf guns and how my brother and I would wrestle to win the ‘championship belt’. When my little sister had her first girl toy given to her by mom, she wondered why her toys were so different than ours and wanted to play with them. You make good points when you talked about how girls' toys were for homemaking whereas boys' toys encourage creativity and higher-level thinking. The fact that legos are also are meant for boys can possibly explain why there are so many men engineers and architects. Your photo and essay really make me think about what toys we should encourage children to play with and we should try to eliminate the gender roles amongst toys. I thought you did a good job making the nerf gun standout as the most ‘powerful’ toy amongst the bunch. In your essay you said that the nerf gun symbolizes toxic masculinity which I think you did a good job letting that come across in your photo. The way you positioned the toys also made the boy’s toys look stronger and the girls’ toys look weak or ‘girly’ as society would say. The way you took the photo from an upper angle did a good job of showing that we should be bigger than toys and stop using such small items as guidelines to teach our children how they should stick to their gender roles. Another way I felt you use the angle well was the way it made the boys toys pop out even more and look more powerful than the smaller dolls. You did a good job getting your point across and I hope that people see that we should not force gender roles through our toys.
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