Category Archives: Most stereotyping *SSS*

It’s not your 5 yr old son, it’s you

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Parents, please: enough with the “we’re just giving kids what they want.” Children learn through play. Segregated toys are inhibiting kids’ brain development by severely limiting their experiences. Children’s brains have more plasticity than at any other time in life, that’s why they can learn languages rapidly. Once those synapses make connections or shut down, its harder for brains to grow later. Read more about all that here. And here. And here.

What can you do? Resist marketing. It’s messing with your kid’s brain. You are the parent. You’re the shopper, the one with the wallet. Buy wisely.

How?

Get your daughters out of the monochromatic world of pink. Or any monochromatic world. Your kid may resist. This may be a challenge for her because kids love routine. But, still, challenge your kid with toy choice the way you would with any other learning activity. Help them to branch out and encourage them to try new things. Get excited about the toy. Play with it with them. Most of all, they want your attention.

Schedule play dates with kids of the opposite sex. If your kid’s preschool tends to segregate by gender, or allows them to self-segregate, talk to teachers and the head of school about mixing it up. Kids learn when they move out of their comfort zone.

Read your sons books where the main characters are girls.

Show your sons and daughters animation where the main characters are female (Miyazaki is a great choice.) After we all see “Tintin” or “Lord of the Rings” or “Arthur Christmas” on the screen, the posters all over town, and then the video games that follow and the toys derived from the movies, all practically without females, it seems normal that there are so few girls represented everywhere except for the pink ghetto. The annihilation of girls passes us by unnoticed. Girls are half of the kid population, yet children’s movies today normalize an imaginary reality where females hardly exist at all. Then we all literally buy into it. How do you think that makes girls feel? What does it make kids think? What are kids learning about which gender is more important?

Let stores and toy companies know how you feel about their relentless drive to segment toys by gender in order to sell products. Write to the companies directly. Blog about them. Tell your friends about it on Facebook.

SPARK has just initiated the Toy Aisle Action Project.

We are SPARKing this movement armed with Post-It notes and cameras in the blue and pink aisles. (Seriously, some stores have actually have colored their toy aisles pink and blue! When will it end?) With your Post-Its, make a note using slogans like “Where My Girls At?” in the blue aisle, “Your Girl Needs Joe, too” on a GI Joe, “This Is An Option For Everybody” and “What About Dads?” on the baby dolls.

SPARK advises to use statistics:

women make up only 13% of architects (I wonder why LEGO?), 14% of active US military (Where is G.I. Jane?), and 4% of executive chefs — so, why are all the kitchen gadgets pink when so many chefs are men?

I’ve thought about these kinds of stats a lot, and it comes down to this: if it’s low status, its assigned as “feminine” (cooking), and women dominate; but if its high status, all of a sudden it becomes “masculine” (being a chef) and men dominate. This bait and switch applies to the whole stereotype that boys like action while girls are more literary, good with words, and artsy. Unless we’re talking about the Pulitzer Prize or the latest exhibition at the MOMA, in which case, all of a sudden men rule the roost.

A department store in London, Hamley’s, decided to break out of the current trend and organize its toys by toy type instead of by the gender of the kid: arts and crafts, building toys, outdoor toys etc. Congrats to Hamley’s. Let’s hope the land of the free and the brave and its Targets and Walmarts learn something. In the meantime, parents need to shop carefully.

Racist stereotypes get disclaimer, sexist ones still funny in kids cartoons

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If you watch “Tom and Jerry” on DVD, before the cartoon begins, a disclaimer appears on the screen informing the viewer that while some episodes show racial stereotypes, they haven’t been censored because editing them out would be denying the racism ever happened which is worse than showing it. There is also an introduction by Whoopi Goldberg, which does not come on automatically but can be selected on the menu, essentially explaining the same thing.

The racism in “Tom and Jerry” is often shown when a character gets too close to an explosive, it goes off, and he turns up in blackface. Ha ha ha.

I know this because I have three daughters ages 2 – 8. A while ago we saw a “Tom and Jerry” episode on TV (no racism in that one.) They loved it, and I enjoyed it as well.  I liked the old fashioned, no bells and whistles animation, and I thought the classical music accompaniment along with the minimal dialogue was pretty cool. So I bought them a couple of DVDs full of cartoons.

But as we watched them together, not only was there some racism, but in all of the episodes, there were practically no female characters. If one did finally saunter onto the screen, she was so sexualized with her bow-red lips curling and spidery eyelashes incessantly batting as Tom and Jerry competed over her, I wanted to put my hands over my daughters’ eyes.

The non-sexualized female in Tom and Jerry? That would be the African-American one, Mammy Two-Shoes, most often shown headless with a pink ruffled apron snugly tied below her large breasts.

So why is there no disclaimer that appears on the screen about the female stereotypes in “Tom and Jerry?” Where is the introduction from Gloria Steinem explaining the historical relevance of this distorted gender stereotyping as a product of its time?

Unfortunately, the reason that there’s no disclaimer and no introduction is because sexist stereotypes in kids’ cartoons are just as accepted in 2012 as they were sixty years ago.  Sexist jokes in animation are, apparently, still hilarious. In fact, if you go to theater right now, you’ll be treated to two of them prominently featured in previews for upcoming films: one about how girls can’t fight in Madagascar 3 and an ugly woman joke in The Lorax.

Keep in mind that these movies are made for kids. Parents, do you really want to pay $10 a pop so your sons and daughters can be taught to laugh because girls supposedly can’t toss a pillow or aren’t skinny enough to be pretty?

What can you do about the rampant sexism in animation? That girls have basically gone missing from kids’ films? If you’re in a theater and you see one of these sexist jokes, start with calling out: NOT FUNNY. Do it for your kids.

Update: I’ve gotten a couple comments on SFGate about how in her foreward, Whoopi Goldberg refers to “women.”

It’s clear that the emphasis of her intro is race. She talks about the how “racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in the name of entertainment” and how people were made fun of “especially when it came to racial and ethnic groups.” She talks quite a bit about Mammy Two Shoes and the talent of the actress who voices her as well as the artist who drew her. She never refers to the sexualization of women and girls. I never get the impression that this is the kind of stereotyping that she is referring to. Because the racism in “Tom and Jerry” is worse, more blatant, and less accepted today, just as with Tintin, it gets called out while most of sexism is allowed to pass unnoticed. The same kind of sexism is rarely called out when it appears, as it often does, in animated films today. You can watch Goldberg’s intro here.

When Hollywood stops excluding girls, Lego sets will include more ladyfigs

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The Journal Inquirer reports  that brand  new Legos are coming out in 2012: “The Lego Group has inked a deal with Warner Bros. Consumer Products to create building sets based on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movie trilogy and two new films based on ‘The Hobbit,’ scheduled for release in 2012.”

Lord of the Rings. Hmmm. How many females were in that high grossing, Academy Award winning series? How many males?

Check out the link from the Journal Inquirer that pictures Lego’s new toy. It won’t let me copy the photo, but the Legos pictured are so much cooler than the Friends for girls and guess what– all male.

Other best-selling Lego sets are based on the Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies.

Do you see the sexism chain reaction here? When girl characters are excluded from movies, they’re left out of toys and branding on all kinds of kids clothing and products as well. Please take a look at Reel Girl’s Gallery of Girls Gone Missing from Kids’ Movies in 2011. These movies predominantly star males, feature multiple males in the cast, and have names of males in the movie titles. Whereas in 2010, Disney switched a movie title from “Rapunzel” to “Tangled” just to downplay the female. This kind of blatant sexism repeatedly teaches kids that boys are more important than girls, and that’s a horrible lesson for both genders to learn.

Of course The Hobbit was a book long before it was a movie. J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic came out in 1937. But it’s Hollywood’s appropriation of the story that makes it massively popular with a new generation, grounding it in pop culture and inciting the creation of a slew of toys timed to hit stores around the same  time the movie hits theaters.

On Dec 16 PRNewsWire reported on the new Legos and the upcoming movie’s cast:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be released beginning December 14, 2012.  The second film, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, is slated for release the following year, beginning December 13, 2013.

Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf the Grey, the character he played in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Martin Freeman in the central role of Bilbo Baggins.  Also reprising their roles from “The Lord of the Rings” movies are: Cate Blanchett as Galadriel; Ian Holm as the elder Bilbo; Christopher Lee as Saruman; Hugo Weaving as Elrond; Elijah Wood as Frodo; Orlando Bloom as Legolas; and Andy Serkis as Gollum.  The ensemble cast also includes (in alphabetical order) Richard Armitage, John Bell, Jed Brophy, Adam Brown, John Callen, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, Ryan Gage, Mark Hadlow, Peter Hambleton, Barry Humphries, Stephen Hunter, William Kircher, Evangeline Lilly, Sylvester McCoy, Bret McKenzie, Graham McTavish, Mike Mizrahi, James Nesbitt, Dean O’Gorman, Lee Pace, Mikael Persbrandt, Conan Stevens, Ken Stott, Jeffrey Thomas, and Aidan Turner.

Do you think the 2 females listed above will make it into the Lego set?

As long as Hollywood keeps girl characters out of its films, it’s going to be challenging to convince toy companies to represent heroic females in their toys. It’s asking them to use a lot more imagination. Of course, toy companies should be imaginative. Isn’t that the point of a toy? Especially a toy company like Lego that claims to be a learning toy “fostering creative play?” But instead, Lego prefers to spend its time and money “researching” the best way to copy Disney.

On its Facebook page, Lego keeps responding to hundreds of people upset about the “for girls” sets, that there are many other Legos out there to choose from. But Lego isn’t aggressively marketing those sets to girls. On its own FB welcome page, Lego has two boys pictured flying a Lego airplane. Will Lego be marketing the new “Lord of the Rings” set to girls? How?

If you go into any mega chain like Target or Walmart or Pottery Barn, all of them have “boy aisles” and “girl aisles.” The “Lord of the Rings” sets and the other  building sets mostly show boys pictured on the boxes and contain multiple male figs inside of those boxes. Where do you think the “Lord of the Rings” set will be? Where will the Kim Kardashian wannabe Friends Lego set be found? How’s a girl going to feel being dragged by her mother into the “boy aisle” where all the photos are telling her she’s in the wrong place? If a highly paid researcher was studying this girl’s behavior, what do you think he would record?

Maybe Target should stop with the boy and girl aisles. (The London toy store Hamley’s has done just that, giving up gender segregation for sections on arts and crafts, outdoor toys, building toys, soft toys etc.) Maybe Hollywood should make more movies with multiple girl roles and put females front and center. Maybe parents should demand more of those movies and get upset when girls remain invisible.

Hollywood shows our kids animals who talk, rats who cook, toys who come to life, and singing lions who befriend warthogs. Is it too much to ask to see imaginary worlds where girls and boys are treated equally? How long do we have to wait?

Anyone see “Arthur Christmas” this year?

Reel Girl’s letter to Lego

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This letter was inspired by Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals. You can read her letter here. Please write to Lego as well.

Here’s an ad for Legos from 1981:

Here’s a photo of the new Friends Legos created in 2011:



 
 
LEGO Systems, Inc.
555 Taylor Road
P.O. Box 1138
Enfield, CT 06083-1138

Dear Lego,

Legos were special. They were unique and creative and helped kids to build. Legos inspired kids’ imaginations. Boys and girls could play Legos together. But with your new product, Lego Friends created for girls, I can no longer tell the difference between Lego toys and the ubiquitous Disney princess products or Barbies. Is that the point? Because if it is, your copy cat strategy abandons the very qualities that made your toy great.

I have a blog Reel Girl where I rate kids’ media and products. Toys can get 1 – 3 Ss for stereotyping and 1 – 3 Gs for Girlpower. So recently I went to hear women architects talk about the new Architect Barbie. I have three daughters ages 2 – 8, and I asked the architects if I should buy this new Barbie for my kids. They all emphatically said no. Buy them blocks, they said. Buy them Legos. The architects loved Legos as kids. I blogged about their advice and spoke about it, I put it out it on Facebook and Twitter. I am sad and surprised to say that now Reel Girl gives Legos new Friends for girls an SSS rating.

I know Lego didn’t start all this gender stereotyping in kids’ toys. I get that you’re jumping on the bandwagon because you need to sell products. You’re worried because sales are down. But you’re making a mistake.

I know you spent a lot of money on market research. But all you’ve really researched is the effect that mass marketing has on kids. Look at your 1981 girl and your 2011 Kim Kardashian wannabe lounging in her hot tub with a drink. All that you’ve researched is how to help turn our daughters from the beautiful kid into the plastic one. Lego is better than this. That’s why we love your toy. That’s why we buy it. But now, instead of helping kids grow, you’re stunting them.

We’ve all moved beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Now we understand babies brains come into the world full of potential. The experiences they have help to determine how those brains develop. For example, babies are born able to mimic and make all kinds of sounds, but as they learn a particular language, their brains start to wire up to produce particular intonations; they lose their ability to make many other sounds. Kids who learn to speak other languages early retain that ability to make different sounds for a lifetime. Limiting kids’ early experiences limits their brain growth. That’s why gender stereotyping is so dangerous.

Pink is just one color. Girls are not born with a pink gene. Pink used to be a boy color, the pastel version of red. Blue was for girls, the color of the Virgin Mary. Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella wore blue. Sleeping Beauty was switched to pink to differentiate her from Cinderella. This kind of information is what you should be spending your market research budget on because paying experts to ‘observe’ that girls choose pink is only studying the effects of multinational companies. Or maybe that is what you want to know?

The more you split kids and adults into tiny categories, the easier it is to market and sell products. The concept of ‘toddler’ was developed by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s as a stepping stone between infants and older kids to sell clothing. ‘Tween’ was coined in the 1980s.

I know asking you not to mimic what’s out there is challenging. Some of your best selling Lego sets ‘for boys’ like Star Wars and Indiana Jones come from million dollar movies franchises that don’t exactly have many females in them. But I wish you would use your research and marketing money to figure out how to help develop kids brains, the way Lego used to do.

Please consider bringing back the 1981 ad and creating the kinds of toys that the cool kid in the picture would love.

Thank you.

Margot Magowan

Reel Girl blog

Update: People are going to Lego’s Facebook page and posting the 1981 pic asking them to bring beautiful back. If you agree and want to post it, go to Lego’s FB page, click like, and then you can post the pic.

Is Harry Potter ‘feisty?’

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It starts when we’re little.

I’m making a list of words that are mostly used only to apply to girls and women. I’m starting this list because when I point out the lack of female characters in kids’ films, “feisty” is a term that always comes up in response. People name a token strong female who has a supporting role in a male dominated kids’ film and say: “You’d like her, she’s feisty.” Film critics also commonly use “feisty” to describe female characters.

I started to wonder: What if, for example, Astrid in “How to Train Your Dragon” was described as “strong” instead of “feisty?” “Feisty” is a cute word, it’s said with a smile. “Feisty” ends the conversation. Whereas “strong” is a serious word. It takes the issue seriously and implies concern. “Strong” begins the conversation.

Of course, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to use “strong” either. No one would say: “Harry Potter is a strong character.” It’s obvious, redundant. “Heroic” would be better.

In the list below, I put the “male” equivalent in parentheses. Please send me your words for this list and also your idea of the “male” word that corresponds.

I’m especially interested in the gendered terms we use for kids and for artists. It is this intersection that affects how we talk about kids’ media. Try practicing using the gender switch in real life.

Feisty (strong, heroic) Another male equivalent could be “jaunty” but no one uses “jaunty.” Word origin: a commenter writes that “feist” mean “mutt-bitch.” I just Googled it and got “small dog” and “breaking wind.” I will continue my research. Fascinating.

Sassy What do you think this means? My 8 year old uses it to describe other girls, she learned at school, but I can’t tell the meaning.

Plucky (brave)

Bossy (assertive) Common use: “Those girls are so bossy.” Not sure people use assertive to describe male children. Ideas? “Dominating?”

(I’m starting to wonder: do people even use “assertive” for men anymore is it just a given? Along with “brave” and “strong” for male characters?)

Strident (passionate, driven) “Bossy” girls grow up to be “strident” women i.e. “Hillary Clinton is so strident.” Try it out for a male: “Mitt Romney is strident.” “Chris Mathews is strident.” If people dislike Romney or Mathews, and wish to communicate that in a word, maybe they use “tenacious?” “Arrogant?” What do you think?

Promiscuous (Player?) I’m not going to put “whore, slut” etc on this list because they’re so obvious, but “promiscuous” is a word I frequently hear used to describe females or gay men and I don’t think people realize they’re being sexist when they use it. It’s the nice way to say “slut.”  People rarely, if ever, call straight men promiscuous. Ideas for male equivalent?

Nag (controlling?)

Catfight (duel? brawl? feud? debate?)

Hysterical (Angry? Upset?) If “hysterical” is used to mean funny, it is gender neutral but of course, men are funnier than women. Word origin: hyster mean “womb;” the implication being women are crazy because they have wombs.

Cougar (man) Cut and pasted from commeter: “cougar: older woman dating younger man. Reference to a clawed, hunting animal that I believe disembowels its prey. Male equivalent for an older man dating younger woman would be “man”.

Homewrecker (?)

Homemaker (stay at home dad?)

Words used to describe artists who are women and the work they create:

Confessional (first person, autbiographical fiction)

Chick lit (literature)

Chick flick (movie, film)

Chick rock (rock)

Kids’ films of 2011 feature 20 with male star; 2 with female star

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When girls in children’s movies are continuously relegated to supporting roles, both genders learn early on that girls are less important than boys. Is this the message we want to send to our kids when they turn on the TV, go to a movie, see a commercial, or buy a toy?

I’ve updated the Reel Girl’s Gallery of Girls Gone Missing From Kids Films in 2011 to include posters of movies not yet released when I originally put up the Gallery in July. The Gallery includes movies ‘appropriate’ for young kids. My three daughters are ages 2 – 8.

You can see the updated Gallery here.

Free order of sexism with that Happy Meal?

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When you ask for a Happy Meal, as every non-vegan parent knows, your McDonald’s server always asks: “Is this Happy Meal for a boy or girl?”

“Why?” I asked, my first time, a new parent, totally confused.

“So we know which toy to give the child.”

The whole toy with your Happy Meal is, in itself, gross and disturbing. And in spite being a carnivore, I’ve only subjected my family to the experience a couple times usually because my kids got a glimpse of McDonald’s plastic playground from the freeway by our house. As depicted and deconstructed in the film “Supersize Me” Happy Meal toys are relentlessly marketed to kids during any cartoon they happen to be watching not on  PBS. That’s right– you’re up against Hollywood, the fast food industry, and TV.

But nutrition aside, if you go to McDonald’s right now and you are lucky enough to be a boy, your server will offer you 15 choices from which you can pick your toy. If you are a girl– one. You don’t get a choice.

If a brother and sister– or God forbid, a boy and a girl who actually hang out together in spite of being told by the universe they are radically different species– go to McDonald’s together, what are these little kids learning about who is important, who has options as far as her identity and who doesn’t?

This image via Hoyden About Town/ thesocietypages.org

WSJ reports Disney to create more animated series for boys

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Disney is about to launch a major new line up of boy based animated programming. And all this time, I thought kids needed to see more animated female characters. Wow, I was totally wrong.

The WSJ reports:

This summer, kids TV programmers are a little boy crazy. That’s because boys watch more animated series than girls and represent a lucrative sales opportunity for videogames, toys and sports merchandise.

OK, lets stop there. I have a question not addressed here or in any depth anywhere in this article. Why do “boys watch more animated series than girls”?

I’m going to go out a limb here and suggest the reason is because animated series, and the movies derived from them, continually and relentlessly leave girl characters out. When “The Smurfs” (adapted from the TV series) hits movie theaters at the end of the month, kids will see one girl Smurf (Smurfette) among nine boy Smurfs (Brainy, Jokey, Chef, Handy etc.) This boy/girl ratio is so ubiquitous in kids’ cartoons that twenty years ago, Katha Pollitt coined the term “the Smurfette principle” to describe it. Did you get that part about twenty years ago? That’s right, no advances for gender equality in Smurfville for two decades.

So here’s a marketing proposal for Disney: instead of putting out the message that girls somehow “age out” of animation, why not, instead, create some cooler cartoon characters that represent half of the kid population besides princesses or long-eyelashed sidekicks? Girls don’t need less programming, they need more. Concluding that girls lose interest in cartoons after the slim pickings offered to them is a like serving a vegetarian a bacon cheeseburger and then deciding she doesn’t like food.

Later in the article, the idea that girls just grow out of animation is repeated when Ron Geraci, head of research at Viacom, is quoted saying: “Girls migrate out of animation more quickly than boys.”

But again, there are no statistics or mention at all about the lack of female leads in animation. There are only references to the non-animated Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato. EW.com recently reported that when Pixar releases Brave in 2012 audiences will see the studio’s first animated film featuring a female lead in its 25 year history. Twenty-five years! Yet Disney somehow sees the need to create more animated programming for boys. And what about “Family Guy,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park”– all popular cartoons for grown-ups. Note to Disney: No one “ages out” of cartoons.

Continuing…

Starting Sept. 1, Perry will make a guest appearance on some four million packages of Nesquik, replacing Nestle/ Nesquik bunny. And he is the focal point of a promotional tour of a 4,000-pound Airstream trailer converted into a “platy-bus”; fans can climb aboard and play 3-D videogames set for release with the Aug. 5 premiere of Disney’s TV movie “Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension.

Thank you to the WSJ for laying out here how the Disney marketing machine works. (1) Create programs for boys about boys (2) Put images of boys on every space available on products marketed to kids– cereal boxes, diapers, chocolate milk (3) Create video games based on the boy cartoons (4) Conclude only boys like video games

Here’s the unreported side effect: When girls go missing from kids programming, kids of both genders learn that girls are less important than boys.

Now a quote from Disney’s Senior VP:

“We definitely set out to create a boy’s franchise. That was our goal. That group was underserved,” says Adam Sanderson, senior vice president, franchise management, at Disney-ABC Television Group.

Underserved? What?

But here’s my favorite part of the article:

Some time after viewers hit age 6, story lines that appeal to girls-about friendship, romance, gossiping-start to make boys cringe. Boys like TV shows about robots and action. They prefer shows with male leads.

Ok, we are talking about 6 – 11 year old girls here. Romance? Gossip? I guess the boy version of ‘friendship’ would be a ‘buddy movie, kind of like how dolls for boys are called ‘action figures.’ But instead of ignoring these inane gender stereotypes, Disney perpetuates them, working hard to segregate the sexes. For those choices made by high up Disney Execs, girls suffer.

Animation is better than live action when it comes to boy-friendly story lines, says Stuart Snyder, president and chief operating officer of the Time Warner unit that includes Cartoon Network. “You can’t always do the most adventurous things in real life,” he says.

Tragically, if you happen to be a girl, you can’t do the most adventurous things in the animated world either. Hopefully, you’re into gossip and romance.

Girls gone missing: kids’ movie posters in 2011

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The year is 2011. You are a seven year old girl looking out the back seat car window. Unless you catch a glimpse of ‘Hoodwinked 2’ or ‘Judy Moody’ these are the pictures you see. In your world, boys are front and center. You are a sidekick or just not there at all.

Update: I’ve updated Reel Girl’s Gallery of Girls Gone Missing From Kids Films in 2011 to include posters that had not been released over the summer when I initially posted the gallery.

I also, sadly, added Harry Potter. I love Harry Potter and love Hermione, but it is true, as commenters pointed out, the movie is clearly Harry’s quest, Harry is the star. The newly added “Hugo” also has a strong girl character, but token strong girls are not enough. Harry Potter and Hugo are also both titled for the male star, whereas Disney execs famously switched the title of Rapunzel to Tangled specifically not to highlight the female star. It’s amazing to me that this blatant sexism goes on in media marketed to little kids.

When kids see, again and again and again, that girls are relegated to supporting roles, both genders learn that girls are less important than boys. This is a terrible lesson for a new generation of children to be learning.

Movies included in the Gallery are ‘appropriate’ for little kids. My three daughters are ages 2 – 8.

 Disney's Winnie the Pooh movie poster