children/youth

Kirsten D. sent us this link to a series of Playmobil families.  She notes how the families are all racially marked (using racial categories like “Asian” and “African” instead of nationality categories like “Japanese” and “Somalian”).  The “Mediterranean/Hispanic” category also points to the social construction of race and the way in which social construction varies across cultures (Playmobil are made in Germany).

They families are also racially homogeneous.  In the world of Playmobil (at least how it is sold, though not necessarily how it is played with) there are no interracial families and, therefore, no bi- or multi-racial people.  In this way the toys reify racial categories and naturalize racial matching in relationships.

African/African American Family:

Mediterranean/Hispanic Family:

Asian Family:

Native American Family:

Notice also that all of the families are in contemporary clothes except for the Native American family.  Ethnicized groups are often represented in “native” costume, but this is especially true for American Indians (at least in the U.S.).  It is as if, in the popular imagination, American Indians are extinct; as if there are no American Indians alive today walking around in Nikes (there are).

So, in the world of Playmobil, American Indians are, like Romans, a historical artifact:

Also, because it warrants pointing out, all the female and male children all have gender stereotypical toys.

I found this vintage outfit in an antique store the other day and bought it, despite having no children. I thought it was a great example of how our “only girls wear pink and only boys wear blue” rule is arbitrary and wasn’t always as strictly enforced as it is today.

Of course, you could also use it in a discussion of how girls are allowed to appropriate “masculine” things (i.e., a girl can wear blue) in a way boys can’t usually do with things coded feminine (a boy wearing pink, for instance).

I suppose the pink bows on the ducks were supposed to make it appropriate for a girl?

UPDATE: Ok, according to several commenters, this is a boys’ outfit. The woman at the store was adamant that it was for a girl. I’m guessing it was the ruffles and the cute little duckies. That could be another topic for discussion–what clues were she and I looking at to decide what gender this outfit was manufactured for? Thanks for the correction, readers!

I am not convinced that most people are as carefree about the colors their kids are dressed in as some of the commenters are, though. Yes, both boys and girls might wear orange…but they’ll usually be different shades of orange, mixed with different other colors, with very different patterns. Go to a store selling kids clothes right now and stand in the middle between the girls’ and boys’ sections and look back and forth at the clothes (I did this recently). I don’t think there will be very many items that are not clearly gendered–where you think “I have no idea whether this was manufactured for a boy or a girl. The colors give me no clue.” And most parents would not take kindly to you giving their kids clothes for the “other” gender…Believe me, I’ve been dumb enough to think it wouldn’t matter, and it most certainly does, apparently. You might get away with giving a girl a t-shirt with a dinosaur or firetruck on it, but you give someone’s son a lavender t-shirt with a dragonfly on it? Well…go try it and let me know how it goes.

Parents, feminists, and cultural critics often express dismay at Barbie, Bratz, and similar fashion-type dolls for girls that are often sexualized and have extremely unrealistic body proportions, leading many to argue that they provide bad models for children and may promote negative body image among girls.

As a result, every so often “anti-Barbie”-type dolls come out. They often have more realistic body proportions and aim to provide a wider range of images of women and girls in terms of activities, dress, and/or careers. One example of this was the Get Real Girl line that came out around 2001 in the U.S. (images found here):

Here’s a description from this website:

While other dolls teeter on feet formed for high-heels, Get Real Girls stand on their own two feet, have posable, fully-articulated bodies and display physical tone and definition for full-action play. The Girls’ faces have soft natural features and are dressed in authentic sports clothing.

And yet, as with so many of these types of dolls, as far as I can tell, these were short-lived. The website is basically defunct–you can go to it, but there are no working links to the supposedly interactive features. I couldn’t find any websites currently selling the dolls.

This brings up some interesting issues, particularly the fact that what parents want their kids to want and what kids actually want often do not coincide. As I’ve discussed before, kids often have their own ideas about toys and how to play with them and may reject the non-traditional toys their parents think they ought to be crazy about. They may shy away from these toys because they aren’t like the ones their friends are playing with or that they see on TV. Or they may come up against one major problem with creating new types of dolls for girls: if they have more realistic body proportions, they don’t fit into the wide array of clothing and shoes designed for dolls with Barbie’s proportions. There’s an inertia in the toy industry because of this–new, differently-shaped dolls don’t fit the clothes and accessories kids may already own and the range of outfits available to put on them is limited because the market for them is so new and small. However, this problem can apparently be overcome, since according to this website Barbie is bigger than the Bratz dolls and so can’t really wear clothing designed for them (the site also helpfully warns against over-brushing Bratz dolls’ hair), and yet they became wildly popular (to the dismay of many parents).

I just thought these might be interesting for a discussion of the toy industry generally, efforts to provide alternatives to Barbie-type dolls, and the difficulties of doing so due to the fact that kids just might not like them.

The video clip The Olsen Twins Walk Into a Bar might be useful for sparking a discussion of the way in which, once shrouded in humor, nearly anything is fair game.

Found here via Copyranter.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dubi K. sent in these two images (found here) and some commentary. This first image came from an ultra-orthodox Israeli newspaper:

Dubi says,

As you can easily see, it was heavily photoshopped – kids are
duplicated all over the place. Originally, the people who posted this
image on an Israeli forum thought that the publishers of the paper
were trying to make it look more crowded, as it was an event sponsored
by the paper.

But here is the original, non-photoshopped image:

Again, here’s Dubi:

A careful comparison will show that all duplicated children are there to hide girls…It’s commonplace in ultra-orthodox papers that pictures of women are not shown (including Israeli foreign minister Livni and US Secretary of State Rice), to prevent impure thoughts in the minds of the readers. Here they simply took this idea to its logical extreme. It’s the obverse case of the sexualizing of women that you normally discuss in your blog: rather than take women and present them as merely sexual beings, these “traditional” papers assume that women are merely sexual beings in the eyes of men, and so they completely eliminate them from view.

Awesome images and analysis, Dubi! And if you just happen to read Hebrew, you can read Dubi’s original post about this here.

I took these two photos of pacifiers for sale at a Babies-R-Us in upstate New York:

I hate the way we start labeling girls at a young age as high-maintenance divas who are vain, boy-crazy, and spend a lot of money. And we now start socializing infants into gendered stereotypes that portray girls in ways that, though superficially humorous, also imply that we expect girls and women to be self-centered, ridiculous people. For other examples of these types of messages, see here, here, and here.

NEW: Blanca M. took a picture of this sign for Little Divas, a store here in Vegas that provides a great example of the association between little girls and diva-hood:

Thanks, Blanca!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The presence of lead paint on toys made in China this year brought the threat of lead poisoning to the forefront of the American mind. Parents, pundits, and politicians called on the U.S. government to DO SOMETHING. But lead poisoning was a problem for low-income families long before the China toy scandal and there was little to no outcry in the popular press.

Lead poisoning in children can increase the risk of cognitive delay, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior. Many older homes and apartments available for rental in low-income neighborhoods still have lead paint and ingesting paint dust and paint chips is the most common way to get lead poisoning. Blood tests show that children living in poverty show much higher exposure to lead than other children.

According to William Ryan, if you are a landlord, renting out a residence with lead paint without making tenants aware of it is a crime. But, instead of enforcing compliance among landlords, the most common response to the threat of lead poisoning has been to warn mothers. Here is a representative poster:

Ryan writes that, while lead poisoning is often described as a problem involving negligent or ignorant mothers, it:

…is more accurately analyzed as the result of a systematic program of lawbreaking by one interest group in the community [landlords], with the toleration and encouragement of the public authority charged with enforcing that law.

So as long as the threat of lead poisoning was more-or-less restricted to the poor in the U.S., it was considered the problem of individuals (mothers) and the state refrained from doing much more than promoting individual responsibility. But, as soon as the lead poisoning threat affected middle class children through the toys from China, state intervention seemed appropriate.

Ryan again:

To ignore these continued and repeated law violations [by landlords who rent residences with lead paint], to ignore the fact that the supposed law enforcer actually cooperates in lawbreaking [by ignoring landlord infractions], and then to load a burden of guilt on the mother of a dead or dangerously ill child is an egregious distortion of reality. And to do so under the guise of public-spirited and humanitarian service to the community is intolerable.

CITATION: Ryan, William. 1998. Blaming the Victim. In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. See also his book.

Annie G. sent in this ad for the Baby Wee Wee doll, which was sold in the UK and Ireland for a while but was manufactured by a Spanish toy company (and is also called Piolin Pipi):

Notice that, although it’s girls who are shown playing with the doll, the parent they’re showing it to and playing with is the father, which is pretty unusual. Also, the doll is uncircumcised, which could be used for an interesting discussion of culture and representations of the body–if the doll had been manufactured in the U.S., it almost certainly would have been circumcised, and that’s the image of what penises look like that the kids playing with it would get. I find that more interesting than the gendered element of the ad–the way that the male body is being depicted, how that might be different depending on where the doll was manufactured, and how that reflects cultural norms about circumcision and what a “normal” penis looks like.

Of course, you could also discuss parenting styles and the types of parents who might find this appropriate, and why parents who might find the “girl-style” peeing dolls (i.e., those that “pee” through a hole between their legs) perfectly fine might still be offended by this doll (I’m just guessing that a lot of people would not want to buy this for their kid and might think it’s inappropriate for little girls to be playing with a doll with such a “lifelike” penis, but maybe I’m wrong). And there’s the whole issue of whether different viewers and/or regulators would find this ad appropriate for TV (I’m guessing it wouldn’t run in the U.S. Actually, I’m just gonna make a declarative statement: this ad would not run on TV in the U.S.).

Thanks, Annie!