Blog Post 4: What These Toys are Really Telling Boys

When people buy toys for their children they rarely think about the implications the toys have on the development of their child’s outlook on life. Most people see toys as simply a means to an end; the toys will make the children happy and keep them occupied. This is true to an extent; however toys play a vital yet often overlooked role in the development of gender identity. This gender identity can stay with an individual throughout their entire life, causing that individual to identify with the ideals projected through advertisements targeting that particular gender identity. For girls the ideal identity projected through advertising and toys is one of constructed femininity that requires the girl to try and become unreasonably thin or pretty; for boys the ideal identity of constructed masculinity is one of strength, decisiveness, and competitiveness that is often represented through violence. Toys marketed towards boys tend to contain these features of constructed masculinity and serve to essentially indoctrinate young boys into a lifestyle that fits the needs of corporations geared to market products at this construction throughout the rest of the man’s life.

Toys have changed a lot in my lifetime. I remember walking through the aisles of Toys ‘R Us as a child in a state of awe, unable to comprehend the sheer quantity and variety of action figures and other playthings lining the shelves. At the age of 8 I was making $5 every two weeks for doing chores; this worked out quite well for me then because most action figures cost $4.99. Sure, more expensive toys such as Lego, Knex, water guns, Nerf guns, and Nerf footballs and bats existed, but those were usually given to me as gifts for Christmas or my birthday.

The last time I stepped into a Toys ‘R Us was over a year ago; what I saw upset me. The shelves that once held a diverse selection of action figures, Legos, Knex, and Nerf products had been replaced by fairly expensive intellectual property themed action figures. The generic themed action figures were replaced by “movie replica” Transformers or “video game replica” Halo toys. Even the Star Wars toys, which were once the most reasonably priced, had been replaced by crossover “Star Wars Transformers.” I couldn’t find a single action figure for less than $10. I left depressed and haven’t returned to this day. Today I opt to use Amazon.com for all of my shopping because I find it to be much more cost-efficient.

For the sake of this assignment, let’s say I’m shopping for a 10 year old boy named Paul K. Rugman. Paul is a normal 10 year old white boy from an upper middle class family. In this scenario Paul makes slightly more money for doing his chores than I did as a child: $10 every two weeks. I have a 13 year old brother, so I have recently seen the types of toys marketed at this demographic. Let’s see the types of toys that an average 10 year old white boy like Paul would want to buy.

The first toy someone like Paul would like is the Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 assault rifle. When I was a child my friends and I loved shooting each other with Nerf guns, as do my brother, his friends, and our cousins. Paul, being an average boy, would most likely be into the same types of things. This gun is huge and shoots a lot of darts very fast. The box features a boy aged around 10-14 shooting the gun with a look of bloodlust on his face. Boys who play with Nerf guns tend to fight each other with their guns, enacting some sort violent role play in which nobody is actually harmed. Nerf’s other line of non-gun toys are all sports related; Nerf projects athleticism, competitiveness, strength, and violence to young boys. With a manufacturers recommended age of 8-12 years old, they are clearly marketing this toy to someone like Paul. Unfortunately, the gun is listed at $49.99 MSRP, and while Amazon has it for $41.70 Paul would still have to wait at least 8 weeks to afford this toy.

My brother and his friends all love Lego Bionicle, so it’s probably safe to assume Paul would be into them as well. This particular Bionicle is named “Mata Nui”; Bionicle’s naming scheme is far too complicated for me as there are hundreds of them and they all have names like this, but my brother and all of his friends have them memorized, which seems to reflect their popularity more than anything. Mata Nui is a yellow robot-humanoid warrior with some sort of bladed shield on his left arm and a spiked mace on his right. On the box he stands triumphantly perched on a rock in front of a giant sun. The premise of these toys, as far as I understand, revolves around a violent conflict between certain factions of Bionicles. Again, these toys project violence as ideal and glorified to children between the recommended ages of 7-16. Mata Nui costs $20.79 on Amazon; toys sure have become expensive.

The third toy I picked for Paul is the Transformer Bumblebee. Transformers have wide appeal to young boys because they combine cars, robots, violence, and tinkering. Bumblebee is a yellow 2008 Camaro that transforms into a robot warrior. The premise here is once again a violent struggle between robot factions, again projecting an idealized form of violence to young children. The fact that the kid has to tinker with the toy to “transform” it between car and robot appeals to a boy’s assumed ability and interest in how things work. I am unaware of any girl toys that feature controlled transformation, so this trait could be possibly marketed exclusively to boys. Bumblebee costs $29.99 on Amazon with a recommended age of 5-12 years.

Paul probably needs a villain action figure to go with these others, so I picked out the World of Warcraft Ghoul named Rottingham to fight his heroes. Rottingham is a fairly grotesque undead corpse with bloody extremities, giant teeth, and exposed bones. He is, quite literally, a monster. This appeals to the assumed typical boyhood fantasy of good violently vanquishing evil, as it is hard for a child to identify with a bloody evil corpse. The MSRP for Rottingham is $23.99, but Amazon has it for $8.99. One thing about this that I thought was curious was the differences in recommended age; the manufacturer recommends ages 14 and up, while Amazon recommends ages 5 and up. It’s almost as if the manufacturer realizes that idealizing violence should be left for older, possibly more mature children, but then Amazon lowers the age to sell more.

The final toy I’m choosing for Paul is a Star Wars Chewbacca action figure. There’s a fairly large possibility that a 10 year old boy doesn’t know who Chewbacca is or even what Star Wars is, and while Star Wars glorifies violence and reinforces gender roles, I feel it played a large enough role in American film culture that Paul could benefit from knowing about it. Plus, Chewy is cheap: only $6.75. This is still more than the $4.99 I paid for mine 10 years ago, but at least it’s affordable. Chewbacca is a Wookie, a hairy humanoid incapable of human speech that carries a crossbow. In the films he follows Han Solo because Han Solo saved his life at one point; Wookie’s have something called a “life-debt” in which they must protect someone who saved their lives for the remainder of it. This reflects the classical imagery of honor and chivalry which has been associated with masculinity since the Middle Ages.

As mindless and fun these toys may seem to Paul, he is incapable of understanding the heteronormative depiction of masculinity these toys are planting within his own self identity. These toys are just another part of cultural hegemony. James Lull defines hegemony as “the power or dominance that one social group holds over others… hegemony is more than social power itself; it is a method for gaining and maintaining power.” (Lull 61) The power being exerted over boys in this situation is the power of gendered identity. Young boys are impressionable. By planting these ideas of violence, competition, and honor in the minds of young boys, corporations are able to appeal to these feelings later on in life through other advertisements. This all exists to make the child a lifetime consumer of products marketed towards this gender identity.

These toys all display violence as something that can be good, especially through competition or the just cause of war. In discussing the social construction of violence and masculinity, Jackson Katz writes: “For working-class males, who have less access to more abstract forms of masculinity-validating power (economic power, workplace authority), the physical body and its potential for violence provide a concrete means of achieving and asserting “manhood.” (Katz 351) If these toys all project the idea that violence is not only acceptable but expected, then Katz argues that later in life the boys who play with these toys will relate to marketing strategies that appeal to a man’s inherent sense of violence. This violence is not actually inherent; it is placed in the minds of children through depictions of violence and toys such as the ones listed above.

In actuality, Paul should have nothing in common with any of these toys.  Guns clearly aren't toys, yet Paul would probably want the Nerf gun to role play violence with his friends and their guns.  Paul isn't a robot, so Bumblebee and Mata Nui should not be able to relate to them.  Chewbacca is a hairy creature and Rottingham is a zombie.  None of these toys resemble anything Paul could possibly look like.  Yet he still would want them because advertisers tell him he wants them.  And even if his parents didn't let him watch television, his friends in school would tell him that he wants them.  In today's climate it seems that gender identities may be unavoidable.

Works Cited

Katz, Jackson. "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 349-58. Print.

Lull, James. "Hegemony." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 61-66. Print.

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/images/%5CAUTOIMAGES%5CHNR64979lg.jpg

http://bttw.com.au/legoshop/images/8989%20Mata%20Nui.jpg

http://guidestobuy.com/images/actionfigure/upload/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515u69gB6GL.jpg

http://images.comiccollectorlive.com/covers/87d/87dfb082-4ed8-4892-a37f-8e0e76bc4f7a.jpg

http://di1.shopping.com/images1/pi/f5/72/57/35563786-260x260-0-0_Hasbro_Star_Wars_Power_of_the_force_Chewbacca_Red_.jpg

Blog Post 3: Axe's Use of Women to get a Man's Money

            Advertisements for personal hygiene products lead the consumer to believe that these products are used for a variety of reasons.  Some ads lead the consumer to believe that soaps or deodorants are meant to be used to maintain personal hygiene through washing or masking odors.  Other ads, like those for Axe Body Spray and Axe Body wash, lead the target consumer to believe that use of these products will result in the individual being more attractive to women.  To put it bluntly, Axe markets itself as a product that men need if they want to have women literally willing to do anything for them, be it fight over them or get crapped on by birds.  Axe appeals to male gender identity by essentially portraying itself as a product used to make all women, regardless of their position of power, sexually subservient to men.

            Most Axe ads portray women as over-sexualized fantasy objects; ultimately perpetuating the sex object gender role for women.  Sut Jhally writes, “As Erving Goffman has shown, ads draw heavily upon the domain of gender display—not the way that men and women actually behave but the ways which we think men and women behave…gender (especially for women) is defined almost exclusively along the lines of sexuality.” (Jhally 253)  This display of sexuality is perfectly exemplified through Axe’s advertising: women are shown as being either partially-clothed or as displaying their large-breasted cleavage.  The images of women used by Axe either feature the women lying seductively or attacking a man with a form of primal sexual wrath that the man happens to be enjoying, as if it were his dream scenario.  These advertisements are an example of what Jhally describes as “a culture that is more and more defined erotically through commodities.” (Jhally 253)

            These particular Axe ads feature women being humiliated.  The one woman drew glasses and a mustache on her face, another has words written all over her arm and breasts in marker, another cleans up a mess while leaning forward to display cleavage, while another lays seductively while getting crapped on by birds.  The slogan used by Axe in these ads is “Any excuse to get DIRTY,” hinting quite blatantly at the idea that if the male consumer uses this product women will use any opportunity to “get dirty” with the man.  These ads are run in magazines such as Esquire, which have long portrayed women as sexual objects to be toyed with by men.  Kenon Breazeale writes, “Misogyny existed in popular culture long before Esquire; what Esquire demonstrated was that woman-trashing as such could be packaged and sold to a large, prosperous bourgeois audience.” (Breazeale 240)  Axe shows that no woman is safe from this “woman-trashing” by portraying Hilary Rodham Clinton’s endorsement of Barack Obama as influenced by Obama’s use of Axe.  Apparently Unilever, Axe’s parent company, wants us to believe that Clinton’s decision to endorse her opponent at the time was influenced by Axe products.  Unilever is projecting the idea that any woman, regardless of power, will ultimately be put in their place by a man, especially if that man uses Axe Body Spray.

Works Cited

"Axe Ads." Web. http://www.adsneeze.com/advert/axe-ads

Breazeale, Kenon. "In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 230-43. Print.

Jhally, Sut. "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 249-57. Print.

Blog Post 2: Constructs of Femininity in Glade's Advertising

            Ever since television became a common household item it has served not only the purpose of providing entertainment, but it has also existed as an effective vessel for advertisement.  In order for advertisements to be effective they have to reach a target demographic that responds by buying the product being advertised.  Television allows advertisers to reach out to consumers in their own homes to pitch a product.  In attempting to reach these demographics at home, advertisers must project the product in a manner relatable to consumers; effective advertisements are successful because they reflect constructed views of society that are accepted by the consumers.  In this regard, advertisements effectively tell us something about society simply by existing.  The recent advertising campaign for Glade Scented Candles targets women as the prospective consumer demographic; in doing this Glade perpetuates the idea that femininity is represented best through the catty antics of a happy housewife.

            This Glade Scented Candles commercial provides what the advertisers believe to be relatable experience for women by displaying a conversation between two women at home.  The women in the commercial are dressed to display what the advertisers believe is an effective and relatable representation of femininity: one woman is wearing a dress with a pink jacket, high heels, and countless necklaces while the other is wearing a fancy patterned blouse with a white jacket, giant earrings, and high heels.  The first line in the ad is one woman saying to the other, “Why haven’t you lit this candle?”  The actress’s tone of voice, in addition to her follow-up line in which she states that her house always smells fresh because of Glade Scented Candles, implies that the other woman has failed as a housekeeper and a woman because her house does not smell fresh because she is not using Glade Scented Candles.  The advertisement ends with the women walking out to buy some Glade Scented Candles and the first woman stating “now, about those shoes,” implying that the second woman’s sense of fashion is flawed, further projecting her as an inadequate woman.  In less than thirty seconds this advertisement has made it appear normal that women should care about how “fresh” their houses smell because a house without Glade Scented Candles is as unacceptable as ugly shoes.  The advertisers at Glade represent femininity as self-conscious, materialistic, and home-centric.

            David Newman explains this projection of women in the media by stating that television and advertisements perpetuate gender stereotypes. (Newman 91)  Newman provides the example of Jif Peanut Butter perpetuating gender stereotypes: “Commercials for a popular brand of peanut butter still contain the tag line “Choosy mothers choose Jif,” reinforcing the expectation that mothers are the primary caretakers of their children.” (Newman 91)  Glade is essentially doing the same thing as Jif in this advertisement; Glade is reinforcing the expectation that women are the primary caretakers of the home by having two women discuss how essential it is for a house to smell fresh.

            The Glade advertisement is projecting the idea that all women should subscribe to the way of thinking provided by the commercial and buy the product; this type of behavior is described by George Lipsitz when he discusses the evolution of television and consumerism in the United States.  Lipsitz provides examples of television being used to convey societal expectations, such as Americans buying on credit in the 1950s. (Dines and Humez 44)  According to Lipsitz, television projects a way of life that the standard American consumer will emulate; if this is true then it explains why Glade’s commercial tries to attract what they believe to be the lowest common denominator of female consumer, the housewife.

            The examples of Newman and Lipsitz are strengthened by James Lull’s concept of hegemony in relation to the media and advertisement.  Lull defines hegemony as “the power or dominance that one social group holds over others… hegemony is more than social power itself; it is a method for gaining and maintaining power.” (Dines and Humez 61)  S.C. Johnson, the company that produces Glade Scented Candles, is the dominant force in this scenario.  This corporation uses television to show the advertisement which projects the beliefs held within the advertisement to the consumers, who in this case represent a subordinate class.  The consumers accept this commercial as a realistic representation of what life ought to be like, and the consumers buy the product.  It is not through this commercial alone that hegemony is exercised to perpetuate this gender stereotype; the belief that women should be the keepers of the home has been perpetuated by books, films, plays, television shows, and other forms of media representing a dominant ideology or class within this hegemony.

            While this commercial shows what a specific company feels is the broadest, most relatable representation of femininity, this concept is reinforced throughout the media as a whole.  As long as consumers accept the projected stereotypes as normal, the stereotypes will not change because corporations are making money perpetuating these stereotypes.  And with modern technology the stereotypes that replace the current stereotypes will be projected by other corporations in order to make money; the cycle of media hegemony seems unlikely to stop as long as there is money to be made.

Works Cited

Dines, Gail, and Jean M. Humez. Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Second ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. Print.

Glade Scented Candles Ad. Youtube. 2 Feb. 2009. Web. .

Lipsitz, George. "The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class and Ethnicity in Early Network Television." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M.

Humez. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 40-47. Print.

Lull, James. "Hegemony." Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Second ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003. 61-66. Print.

Newman, David M. Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Print.

Blog Post 1: Blog Link-Hunt - Chris M

Axe Body Spray Ad Objectifies College Students
June 2, 2009
http://genderacrossborders.com/2009/06/02/axe-body-spray-ad-objectifies-college-students/
Elizabeth Switaj
Gender Across Borders

Maxim 100 things you need to know about women...
June 30, 2006
http://charliegrrl.blogspot.com/2006/06/maxim-100-things-you-need-to-know.html
"charliegrrl"
Blog of Feminist Activism Against Porn

The Boondocks Season 3 Premiere: Does Aaron McGruder Hate Barack Obama?
May 3, 2010
http://live.drjays.com/index.php/2010/05/03/the-boondocks-season-3-premiere/
Michelle Huxtable
DrJays.com

Jersey Jetsam: MTV Goes to the Beach
January 18, 2010
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2010/01/18/100118crte_television_franklin
Nancy Franklin
On Television: The New Yorker

Tabloid Talk Begins This Week
April 25, 2010
http://feministfatale.com/2010/04/tabloid-talk-begins-this-week/
Melanie Klein
Feminist Fatale

Link to Blogging in College: the main Gender & Pop Culture blog

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