When given this assignment my mind instantly jumped to http://www.barbie.com/ because the internet is now accessible to everyone including children. This website is fully decked out in pink and sparkles, showing every child that plays with Barbies that it is a girls toy and girls like pink. The Barbie website is not part of Everything Girl (http://www.everythinggirl.com/)which is a site, that essentially advertises sites and products to girls alone. This just shows us how quickly we are gendering our children and how fast they can get sucked into gendered norms.
-princess consuela banana hammock
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This reminds me of that FRIENDS episode where Ross is distrot because his son is playing with a barbie. He tries and tries to get him interested in GI JOE instead. hahaha, but it turns out that as a boy he dressed up in his mother clothes and threw tea parties ("Iam Bea I drink tea"):)
ReplyDeleteIf a boy shows the slightest amount if interest in a barbie, it is a "fact" that he will be gay. It is sad how children are targeted at such a young age to adhere to these strict cultural norms. From a heterosexist point of view, wouldn't it make sense for a boy to be interested in a female doll? Wouldn't that show he has a early interest in the female form? (if so a whole new set of issues arise of course... because barbie as we know is a unrealistic image of a women) I think the binary lines are blurry.
Danger Powers
This truly is sad that such a mainstream and popular product is essentially geared towards girls ALONE, but there is a bigger picture to that. I mean, PROFIT...if boys and girl were playing Barbie then only a smaller amount of boys and girls would play with any of the other "less popular" toys (Fisher Price, Easy Bake, Cabbage Patch, Trucks, Tonka, etc.). But because these toys are gendered, we keep and define our children in a particular group and it allows them to grow with the most popular gendered toys to clothing (Hannah Montana, That's So Raven, Mary Kate & Ashley, Dora). It is very sad that I can hardly name any boy-gendered clothing lines or toys, because of the brainwashing of society, and I have five brothers. So, it is very good to bring up this issue because it occurs daily with children.
ReplyDeleteAaliyah Jasmine
Danger, I like that you mention Friends. There's a great episode where Freddie Prinze Jr. plays a male nanny to Ross and Rachel's daughter. Prinze Jr.'s character is great with kids and exceptional at his job, but Ross feels anxiety at having a caring nurturing male nanny. Prinze Jr.'s character is just "too nurturing" for his daughter. I think in the end it bothers him that the daughter could be raised by a feminized male. Would Emma grow up without a proper construction of patriarchy... LOL who knows!
ReplyDeleteMacho Muffin
I think that the early distinction between genders is remarkable. As our discussion in class pre-reading week, illuminated, even as infants gender is seen as important. Even though we're just little masses people are always eager to know if we are one or the other.
ReplyDeleteoops! Miss Frizz
ReplyDeleteAnd to add on to my post a little after our talk in class on Thursday, this website is very non-linear and involves a ton of link following which draws you into other products for girls such as myscene and bratz. This can also contribute to the genderization of this webpage
ReplyDelete-princess consuela banana hammock
Its crazy to think that the gendering process begins as soon as a child is born. I read your post and then looked around on the internet for ways in which babies are gendered and came across this site:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.babiestoday.com/articles/family-life/raising-boys-or-girls-167/
There are multiple articles on this website that discuss the ways in which babies are gendered. There are also articles on this site that help to perpetuate the gendering of babies. One example is the following article:
http://www.babiestoday.com/articles/behavior/differences-in-boy-and-girl-babies-6388/2/
Here is an excerpt from the above article:
Each sex has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. "Boy babies are better able to discern location, direction and speed of moving objects," says Parker. "Boys will typically prefer toys that move such as trains and trucks. By 2 months of age, boys are able to see greater distances than girls, but are less able to distinguish specific details. However, boys are better able to keep track of motion, and may prefer mechanical motion over human motion. Recent research supports that boys are able to figure out the laws of motion about two months faster than girls (if you roll a ball under a couch, it will appear on the other side)."
It's interesting how parents treat their male and female babies differently, and will assign them characteristics based on their sex, which shows that a person is subjected to gendering right from birth
Shadows Dreaming