Gender and Toys 1.

Basically you can agree with the threadstarter that the advertising of toys does indeed occur along carefully constructed gendered lines. You can raise the interesting point of, if a transgression occurs, which is seen as more worrying and would raise more eyebrows? Boys playing with dolls, or girls playing with toy cars? 2. Secondly, you can go on to talk about how much of a factor would playing with certain toys shape the development of a child. Will playing with dolls inevitably confer female characteristics on male children? Likewise would playing with toy cars grant female children male traits? Gender, as mentioned, is a social construct, and is perhaps a plural construct. Playing with toys associated with the other gender could be counterbalanced by other factors to make a male child more male and a female child more female. 3. Also, you can pose a question are there androgynous toys? Toys which would be okay for both genders to play with. (maybe something like jigsaw puzzles?) How are these androgynous toys received by parents? Is it more likely that even these androgynous toys are not preferred to toys which firmly establish a childs gender identity? 4. Also, you can say how it would probably be expected that firms which manufacture toys would want to cross the gender divide and advertise their dolls to boys and toy cars to females, using the rational logic of firms being profit maximising. However, the fact is that they dont. Why is this the case? It is probably because the negative hype surrounding a controversial advertisement encouraging gender transgressions (by playing with a toy which is the binary opposite of what is expected) would probably hurt the firms reputation, with people keen to brand it as a firm which destroys conservative values of society. 5. Lastly, you can then conclude by challenging the assumption in the ideology that girls should play with girly toys and boys with boyish toys. The assumption is that it is best for both genders to stick with their assigned toys, and by implication, roles in society. Girls should play with dolls because they should be good mothers and playing with dolls inculcate the docile, tender quality in them. Boys should be adventurous and by playing with toy cars and action figures, the sense of adventure would somehow manifest itself in boys when they grow up. However, if children pick up traits of the opposite gender, is it really that bad? The tendency towards violence in young adolescent males can be neutered or at least mitigated if they played with dolls and learnt a little about being caring? Likewise, all the playing with toy cars and action figures may move a girl, especially during early adolescent years, away from the strict dogma that looks and grooming are the most important by giving them something else to think about, and some other trait to neutralize the sense of vanity that would be very likely to occur in teenage girls if they played with nice, pretty Barbie dolls all their childhood years.