Brainwashing children into thinking that they must favour certain colours, activities or role-models just because of their gender is a special pet peeve of mine. Not only am I routinely angered to no end by the strict dichotomy that exists between "boys' " and "girls' " toys. You know, that poorly disguised and one-direction-only attempt to direct girls straight into the pink-and-pink doll, beauty and house appliances department, and boys to the red-and-blue realm of action heros, scientific games and cars - all while pretending that cultural stereotypes and society have never played any role at all, and hiding all the number of girls and boys that don't especially like their assigned toys and activities when it comes to lying to people with statistics: Because it's all genetics, folks! As a girl, I was born with the special gene designed to appreciate pink and dolls over anything else! Biological determinists with some serious sexist brainwashing ftw!
Well, now it seems that I should be worried, and angered, about the food as well. Because boys and girls need this kind of gender bias brainwashing to feel enticed into buying and eating chocolate. Obviously. It's quite clear that girls need that pale pink incentive ridden with hearts and Disney princesses in all their artificial beauty in order to enjoy their chocolate, while boys need that red-and-blue packaging with, in this case, planes (but superheroes or cars would also do). Because even when wanting chocolate, children (and adults as well), need some gender bias in their lives to keep them interesting.
I remember seeing this in a local supermarket a couple of months ago, flipping out, and thinking about the number of parents who, brainwashed themselves by the societal gender stereotypes, will choose the 'correct' wrapping according to their children's sex without any second thoughts. Perhaps you will think - But this is fun and colourful, and children can choose whichever they like! Yep, same way girls nearly always choose pink and Barbie and boys nearly always choose blue and planes. because they've seen and they've been taught all these gender bias BS since the day they were born. But no worries, people will scream at you when you mention the phrase "cultural impact" and proceed to explain it all by referencing their innate biology and falsifying statistical surveys that have the nerve to call themselves 'scientific'.
And if you think that is hardly an important issue, think about how far society goes in order to manipulate and brainwash people into accepting unnecessary and non-existent 'innate' differences in likes, aspirations and abilities between women and men. This chocolate brand took the time, effort and money to create two separate wrappings in order to make girls and boys believe they must like and choose different things just because of their gender. And that, frankly, scares me. And it also scares me that it doesn't scare you.
This topic also preoccupies me, and god knows I'm always bemoaning about how advertisements, comercial interests, not only influence people, but impose a set of ideas/rules on the female population (and in the males too), in order to make profits...
ReplyDeleteWhen I was little, I liked dolls too, but I had a passion for dinossaurs :D I could name several, and I would draw them...:D
Hello, long time, no see :D!!
DeleteI agree wholeheartedly with you! I think this is a really important and worrying issue, given the way it can manipulate and influence people into readily accepting all sorts of gender bias without even batting an eye :/
I liked dolls too when I was little, but I disliked pink and practically everything had to be pink in the doll era (I also grew to dislike any kind of baby and house appliances we girls were supposed to play with). Apart from dolls, I favoured reading and drawing over most 'girly' toys, and had a special passion for swords and adventuring since I was 5, which was actually thought as strange "for my sex" :/ (not by my parents, fortunately)
There's even a whole Tumblr dedicated to unnecesarily gendered products: http://unnecessarilygenderedproducts.tumblr.com
ReplyDeleteYou could submit this one :P
I remember reading about a company that created a bit of a buzz on the internet by giving a very poor response to a complaint about their gendering of toys. I wish I could remember exactly which one it was, I haven't been able to find it now. But the gist of it was that they had performed some marketing studies and found that sales were higher when they did the gendering, and therefore delegated all kinds of responsibility on the clients and parents who bought them, because their goal was basically just to make money and they weren't going to do something that would report them lower profits. I think they might have also added something about how boys and girls are different because genetics and such things, I'm not sure at the moment. But even if those marketing studies were reliable, it consists of a vicious circle! Everyone else does gendered marketing, therefore kids (and new parents when they were kids) are influenced by it and prefer to choose gendered toys, therefore companies do gendered marketing, and so on :-/ The change must start somewhere…
I'm glad the campaign Let Toys Be Toys is achieving things in this front at least in the UK, and I hope companies see an increase in revenue as a result of reducing gendered marketing, because it could truly lead to a change in the way of doing things. But there's also a different reason for segmenting the market in this manner, and it's the way it increases sales by making it harder for parents to pass down items between siblings of a different gender (by sending the messages "this object is for this particular gender" and "liking things meant for the other gender is wrong"). Let's hope this effect is not so big as to become an anchor…
And in the case of the chocolate you show here, I think it might be the consequence of trying to appeal to kids by associating the product to Disney films they might like, and then feeling that the most effective way would be to make two different packagings because the marketing of the Disney films themselves was already gendered. Or it could also make parents have to buy two chocolate bars instead of one to share, if they have children of different genders already influenced this way.
Maybe this use of society's stereotypes in marketing designed for children is driven mostly by greed, with a disregard for the consequences it could later have in society as a whole by influencing kids at such a young age, rather than an active effort with the main goal of perpetuating those stereotypes. But this might be even more scary than if it was just a matter of sexism, because it means things could be even harder to change. After all, greed with disregard for the consequences has driven the whole planet into global warming…
Thanks for your comment!
DeleteAnd yay for that Tumblr page, thanks for the info (submitted!)
Yes, I had a similar experience when I wrote to the Disney Store online suggestion box, and when I mentioned this issue in some local stores as well - I either get no response or the response that 'they make more money if they gender their products', 'things work like that', and 'boys and girls like specific stuff, it is a natural and biological thing'. Their responses make me so mad I stopped making complaints after a while... I'm glad initiatives such as 'Let Toys Be Toys' is seemingly making some small progress, at least :)
"But even if those marketing studies were reliable, it consists of a vicious circle! Everyone else does gendered marketing, therefore kids (and new parents when they were kids) are influenced by it and prefer to choose gendered toys, therefore companies do gendered marketing, and so on :-/ The change must start somewhere…"
I wholeheartedly agree! I hate those deterministic arguments because they nearly always consist of a vicious circle. It's the same as saying "most geeky stuff is male/boy-oriented because girls don't like it" - and not because the geeky industry is pretty sexist and doesn't take women into account. Of course marketing industries don't want to make a difference between 'biological impact' and 'cultural impact'. Biological determinism is so dangerous because it relies on unchangeable facts that they don't have to justify - Making people believe that "boys/girls are born like this and liking this and behaving like this and thinking like this" mean they don't have to justify or carry the weight of doing any wrong by promoting and perpetuating sexism and inequality (plus by influencing people that 'this is the way of things', the people themselves will support these gendered assumptions and products, and it will truly become 'the way of life' for many - thus, most studies that claim that biological determinism is the way to go are biased from the start). All this suits marketing industries, whose main aim is to make money and generally don't care about equality, but it also suits all the people who want to keep discriminating people based on their sex on any level and in any context. It's quite scary, actually :/
Agreeing about the potential reasons why they gendered the chocolate. Quite clever, actually, makes parents buy more if they have both boys and girls and promotes Disney's own gendered bias in a sure way (one of the main things I hate about Disney and the like are the way they generally promote unhealthy stereotypes and gendered behaviour). Because most children want chocolate, so it's sick but logical (to these people) that they should target sweets.
I hate any kind of promotion of gendered behaviour and stereotypes, but I think I have a special place in my Book of Grudges for gendered marketing strategies for children - because children are so much easier to manipulate and it's the sure way to ensure that they grow up with lots and lots of gendered expectations and acquired behaviour and thinking (greed takes an important part in the industries' reasons to do this, but I think some must have seen that it's also a powerful tool in order to manipulate people into inequality...After all, people are fed sterotypes mainly through marketing and advertisement industries, apart from the media :/ ).
I agree that greed and money are very important (and worrying) reasons as well, though. The world would be a better place (regarding the environment, inequality in society and so many other things) if so many people were not so greedy and if money wasn't just so damn important. Many people prefer to ruin the Planet or support inequality and any set of amoral thinking and behaviour than lose money, and it is frankly very worrying.
And when I see things like this I get a terrible urge to ask biological determinists if they still think cultural impact has no influence at all: http://insert-url-here-probably.tumblr.com/post/111574102441/fucknosexistcostumes-shanxonian-you-cant-be-a
DeleteUgh… that last link makes me so angry :(
DeleteI think when I wrote that part about greed last night I might've been trying to see if it was possible that those stereotypes weren't so actively instilled into children. To see if this was more a byproduct of greed and carelessness rather than a conscious enforcement of gender roles, trying to retain a bit of hope in humanity in a bit of a twisted way. But now I think it was more a kind of wishful thinking than anything else.
Greed must play a role at least in part, but… maybe I should've focused on some recent events in gendered marketing that don't make much sense economically and start delving into stupid territory. You have the absence of female characters in Marvel merchandise, Warner Bros. Animation executives unwilling to potentially double the audience on their shows or, as one of the latest moves, watching the effort Lucasfilm is putting lately into increasing the diversity of their characters being hampered by the marketing people deciding Star Wars is only for boys, or Hasbro deciding they have plenty of Star Wars characters released already while putting male characters instead of women in sets where the latter would fit better.
So you were absolutely right, and I think I was not. Let's hope they realize people want to give them money for these things, dammit. Why wouldn't they try to get more profit from this is beyond me.
I'm not sure why didn't I include any of this in my previous comment, though. I think I decided it wasn't exactly the topic of the post since it was more an absence of products rather than an artificial division of the existing ones into "for boys" and "for girls" categories, but it's still part of the general problem. Very worrying indeed…
I agree 100% with your comment (and with your former one as well). It's definitely a very worrying and frustrating problem indeed, and more so when you see that so many people think it's not a big deal - either because they somehow think it's a 'small' problem compared to others (I think it's a pretty big one), or because they have grown so accustomed to seeing these stereotypes, they think they're the way things are (there are so many examples of people actively promoting gender stereotypes, like parents and teachers, and not only the commercial industries).
DeleteI've always thought that the commercial industries could be actually losing money by not catering to the real needs of the female population as well. Regarding the geek industry, for example, there are hardly any T-shirts and any other clothing in female sizes (unless it's pink), especially in local stores. And, like you mentioned, the complete or nearly complete absence of female characters in geeky merchandise, plus the fact that many female characters - characters with realistic attire and empowered role models for women and girls, not some fake 'strong woman' in a chainmail bikini and high heels to turn the immature male readers and viewers on - are absent in the first place, in comics, films and other media. I know from experience that if I there were more female characters like that, I would watch the films, buy the comics and buy the merchandising. I would also buy T-shirts in my size if there were more (or any), or merchandising related to existing and interesting female characters that is practically inexistent. And I don't think I'm the only woman who'd do that, so in that case, sexist brainwashing is actually making the industries lose money (not that money is the No. 1 priority, but you gt my point). So money does play a part in the promotion of these unequal stereotypes, but there is something more, I think, and sometimes I believe people promote inequality because it gives them more power in the long run. Maybe some industries are losing money by not offering 'geek girls' the products they want, but they're also gaining power and money in other contexts (such as the wage gap) by promoting such strong binary gender sterotypes since people are born.
I completely agree with you, Sword woman Riona Bandraioi and DarkSapiens.
ReplyDeleteThanks, glad you do :) Thanks for commenting :) :)
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