{"id":64952,"date":"2015-01-07T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-01-07T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=64952"},"modified":"2015-01-07T19:50:38","modified_gmt":"2015-01-08T00:50:38","slug":"were-not-opposite-sexes-but-this-ad-wants-you-to-think-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/01\/07\/were-not-opposite-sexes-but-this-ad-wants-you-to-think-we-are\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re Not “Opposite Sexes,” But This Ad Wants You To Think We Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this Farm Bureau Insurance ad, a father and son paint a room pink and commiserate about how their lives will be ruined by the arrival of a baby girl.<\/p>\n

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1. Essentialize gender. A girl is coming? That means playing with dolls and having tea parties. Girls are girls. Us, we’re boys, so automatically we…<\/p>\n

2. …belittle femininity. The stuff girls do is boring and trivial. Only girls<\/em> would want to do those things. Girls are such a drag!<\/p>\n

In short,\u00a0all girls are girly\u00a0and\u00a0girly stuff is dumb.<\/p>\n

I didn’t find it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt; maybe\u00a0they made the opposite commercial, too. One in which a mom and her daughter cringe over the idea of having to put up with booger-flinging and farting at the table.<\/p>\n

But that\u00a0would be equally bad. We don’t know a child’s personality just by anticipating the stuff between their legs.\u00a0And it’s not true that male and\u00a0female humans\u00a0are so different as to enjoy entirely\u00a0non-overlapping sets of things.<\/p>\n

In daily life, we recognize each other for the complex and varied people that we are. Think about it. Practically the only place we see stereotypes this retrograde are on TV and in the movies. We’re not\u00a0<\/em>“opposite sexes,” but we’re surrounded by the idea<\/em> that we are.<\/p>\n

Thanks to @DustinStoltz<\/a>\u00a0anyway!<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this Farm Bureau Insurance ad, a father and son paint a room pink and commiserate about how their lives will be ruined by the arrival of a baby girl. 1. Essentialize gender. A girl is coming? That means playing with dolls and having tea parties. Girls are girls. Us, we’re boys, so automatically we… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,15,373,55,2099,2096,2087,129,406,293,23622,2051],"class_list":["post-64952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-culture","tag-color","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-gender-femininity","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-media","tag-propaganda","tag-social-construction","tag-social-construction-symbols","tag-socialization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/01\/22.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64952"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64963,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64952\/revisions\/64963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}