product: toys/games

Caspian P. and his roommates sent us a link to the newest Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Playbook cover.  It seems it makes quite a departure from previous editions.  (D&D fans: I’m reconstructing this history from here, so let me know if I make any significant mistakes in my summary.)

Various versions of the D&D Playbook–e.g., regular or basic, advanced, and expert– have been published.  For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to treat them all equivalently.

The first D&D Playbook (1971):

1981:

Playbooks from the late 1980s:

You might have noticed that the covers include fantastical creatures and male warriors and wizards… but no women.

In 2000, ownership of the game changed hands and the new cover simply looked like this:

And then this (2003):

And then the Playbook went the way of the Evony ads:

Caspian wrote that he’s played D&D for years and always felt that it included great female characters.  So he was disappointed with the inclusion of a highly sexualized, part-naked woman on the recent cover, prompting him to send it to us.

Consider the new cover alongside our posts on Gossip Girl promotions, the New Beverly Hills 90210, the Burger King shower girl, this crazy post on hot horses and puppies, and the makeovers of Dora the Explorer, Holly Hobbie, Strawberry Shortcake, and the Sun Maid.

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.

Caroline P. sent in this stunning example of gendered socialization, gendered job segregation, and the social construction of skill.  Notice that the two photos below show an “electronic medical set” for a doctor and a nurse, with a photo of a boy and a girl, respectively.

Okay, so the jobs are gendered.  But more than that, notice that the sets contain essentially the same toys: a stethescope, pill bottle, syringe, thermometer, mirror, hot water bottle, clipboard, blood pressure thingy, and whatever that is in the bottom right corner.

So it’s more than just gendered jobs, it’s an acknowledgement that when boys and girls do the same job, it gets called something different and, more, better compensated when men do it.  We see this with other, real jobs that get split into gendered categories like janitor/maid.

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.

Leigh snapped this picture of a Toys ‘R Us catalog.  He noticed that, for both microscopes and telescopes, the version coded “girl” (i.e., the pink one) is the least powerful one (600x magnification vs. 900 or 1200x and 90x vs. 250 or 525x).  Coincidence?

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.

In this video, Brenda Laurel discusses her successful computer game for girls.  Detailing extensive research on what girls want, Laurel then shows us a some interviews with girls and a bit of the resulting video game, Rocket, which seems to focus heavily on navigating complicated high school relationships.  Laurel says that all critics love her game except the “male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be” and “a certain flavor of feminists who thinks they know what little girls ought to be.”

Laurel clearly sees herself as an advocate for girls and, at the very end of the video, mocks (that certain flavor of) feminist objection to the game.

In general, the video is a fascinating peek into the thinking of video game producers.  And it certainly raises the question of what a feminist video game could look like.

Start at 6:28 if you want to skip the details as to her companies and data collection:

See other posts on girls’ video games here, here, and here.

And, for evidence that the gaming world isn’t particularly welcoming to girls and women, see here, here, here, here, here, and here (NSFW).

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.

Consider this a catch-all post showing the many ways in which marketers use the excuse of gift-giving to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Exhibit One: Katrin sent along this example from Zazzle.  She writes:

The gift guide section is great… Men fish, hunt, are tech nerds, BBQ kings, and are in the military.  And, if you really have to, there is a “Metro Man gift” section as well. Women are animal lovers, spiritual, environmentalist, interior designers, teachers, brides, sorority members AND they “support the troops” as military wives. Of course THEY are NOT soldiers. Just like men cannot be married to and much less, support, a woman in the military.  The only thing men and women have in common?  The 80s.

Exhibit Two: Keely W. sent along this delightful gift suggestion. Moms, need a gift that costs just a little but seriously pays off? Buy your daughter these eyebrow tweezers! They’ll make for hours of wonderful mother-daughter time! Here’s to the intergenerational transfer of patriarchal beauty standards!

Exhibit Three: Maggie G. sent in these screen shots from the Lego website.  First, notice that, just as with the dinosaur website we posted about recently, legos are assumed to be for boys, unless they are specifically for girls.  The girls category in the bottom row makes all the other categories, by default, for boys:

If you click on girls, you get two options, Belville and Preschool:

Here’s what the Belville sets look like (all pink with horsies, puppies, and fairies!):

Legos aimed at younger kids are, I guess, gender-neutral… which is consistent with the increasingly pressure to gender-differentiate as kids get older:

Got any more gendered x-mas guides?  Send them in and I’ll start a post for next year.

See also this post on gendered gift-giving guides.

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.

My besties gave me a copy of the target toy catalog for 2009 and pointed out the front cover.

At first i thought it was just your typical run of the mill gender socialization propaganda…

White girl on the cover? Check.
Is she wearing pink? Check.
Is she wearing a tiara? Check.
Is she wearing a tutu? Check.
Is the tutu pink? Check.
Is she smiling? Check.
Is she playing with barbie? Check.
Is there a little boy in the image? Check.
Is he doing one of the following: making a mess, eating something or expressing anger? Check.

Ok, the basics are covered.

But upon further inspection, I realize that the barbie is holding Lego flowers…. and… wait a minute… are those church bells I see?!  …

Following up on a previous post about gendered gift giving guides at Lego and Toys R Us, I discovered something interesting.

I was intrigued by the Toys R Us guide because it asked the buyer to specify the gender of the child, but then tended to have more or less the same “personality” and “interests” options.  For example, below are the choices for girls and boys.  You’ll see that they are very similar.

Girl personalities:

Boy personalities (same, sans “Glamour Girl”):

Girl interests:

Boy interests:

So, why even ask about gender, I wondered?  I did a test.  For both boys and girls ages 12-14, I checked “techie” and “building” to see what I would get.

What I got was rather fascinating.  I can’t remember where I originally heard it, but someone somewhere observed that when it came to technology, there was a stereotype that men were  the engineers and designers and women were the consumers and users.  That is, both men and women might like technology, but men were active in producing technology and women just got to benefit from men’s hard, brainy work.

Well, that’s essentially what Toys R Us told me.  Remember, for both boys and girls, I checked “techie” and “building.”  Here is the top 24 gift suggestions for boys:

So that’s 13 building/engineering games (like Lego and KNEX), 3 ipod accessories, 4 portable DVD players, 2 MP3 players, and a few other things.

What do girls get?  Seven ipod accessories, 5 portable DVD players, 4 MP3 players, 3 laptop computers, 3 cameras, and one building/engineering game.  One.

Sure enough, Toys R Us confirms that girls may like technology, but boys build it.

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.

This 1959 ad for an airplane toy throws in girls as an afterthought in the final seconds (“Every boy wants a RemCo toy… and so do girls”). It’s easy to dismiss the ad as quaint and representative of a different time, but today’s advertising seems equally gendered, with girls thrown in as an afterthought (like in this dinosaur toy website) or neatly segregated (see here, here, and here).

Found at Vintage Ads.

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.