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jeremey02 we have this paper on gender roles in video games, which started me thinking.
To recap what I said in comments, we as a species develop ideas about the world around us, from both personal experience and observation of others' experience-- the media playing a big part in the second, by presenting us with things to observe in movies, tv, games, books, internet, and so on. It's especially important to consider what is presented to children, because first they lack the personal experience to judge whether something is reasonable or not, and second they're much more attentive to learning what their environment can teach them.
One of the concerns that parents have had for a few decades now is about companies' portrayal of female roles-- it's been a fairly big issue, from questions about whether schools carry stories with strong female characters in their libraries, to toy packaging. Many changes have been made, and companies now consider whether they present a "passive female" role in regards to their products. However, I think there's a bigger issue at stake.
Play is becoming more interactive with the world as a whole-- or at least the corporate parts of it. In 1980, a kid who wanted to "play Barbies" could either play with the dolls, their clothes, and their various playsets like the Dream House and Corvette, or they could choose to color in a Barbie coloring book. Most play would be spent on the dolls themselves, which was fairly self-directed or peer-directed (a fancy way of saying that kids would make up their own stories or activities with the dolls) according to the kids' own ideas. The coloring books, on the other hand, had a rudimentary plot, usually involving something such as "Barbie finds and returns a lost puppy" or "Barbie goes on a picnic with friends." Coloring the pages meant, to some extent, participating in the plot, which was based on a corporate image of who Barbie is (pretty, happy, well-dressed, has friends, etc).
If a girl 25 years ago wanted a Tonka truck, and could convince her parents to get her one, other than the toy packaging (which, face it, is pretty swiftly discarded) there was nothing to make her feel strange about playing with it alone in the back yard. (By the way, I'd like to thank my parents for my Tonka dump truck, and for spending $40 to have a load of sand delivered to our house. Coolest summer EVER.) Play today is a lot more corporate-focused-- more interactive toys will respond to the assumed audience with assumed ideas. Many toys reinforce ideas about what you-the-player should be or act like. Let's take this sample dialogue from the start of the popular game Animal Crossing, one of Ravenlet's favorite games:
Rover (the computer's character): What's your name?
[the player enters their name using the gamepad]
Rover: Oh, so your name is _____?
The player gets two choices here:
--Yes, isn't it cool?
--Yes, isn't it cute?
If you choose that your name is "cool" the response is "Oh, you must be a boy!"
If you choose that your name is "cute" the response is "Oh, you must be a girl!"
You can then respond that Rover is correct, or that no, you're a boy who thinks his name is cute, or a girl who thinks her name is cool. If you do so, Rover responds that you're weird.
Yes, that's correct, the game itself makes fun of you for choosing the "wrong" word for your gender!
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm thinking of when I say that we have a bigger problem than promoting girls' freedom to be strong and assertive, or boys' freedom to be nurturing and emotional. The problem we have is that we assume kids today have the same freedoms we did-- to live inside our own heads, to play alone and be who we want to be, without having to give up parts of ourselves to do it.
I'm not really concerned about the "gender ghetto" of having certain words reserved for women and girls-- I'm concerned about the division of the world into two parts, and the way that conditioning is creeping into games, toys, coloring books, and TV shows-- how we're passively allowing our children to be told that they need to conform to one gender role or the other, all the damn time.
My concern isn't primarily about the equality of the genders. My concern is that separate is not equal.
jeremey02 we have this paper on gender roles in video games, which started me thinking. To recap what I said in comments, we as a species develop ideas about the world around us, from both personal experience and observation of others' experience-- the media playing a big part in the second, by presenting us with things to observe in movies, tv, games, books, internet, and so on. It's especially important to consider what is presented to children, because first they lack the personal experience to judge whether something is reasonable or not, and second they're much more attentive to learning what their environment can teach them.
One of the concerns that parents have had for a few decades now is about companies' portrayal of female roles-- it's been a fairly big issue, from questions about whether schools carry stories with strong female characters in their libraries, to toy packaging. Many changes have been made, and companies now consider whether they present a "passive female" role in regards to their products. However, I think there's a bigger issue at stake.
Play is becoming more interactive with the world as a whole-- or at least the corporate parts of it. In 1980, a kid who wanted to "play Barbies" could either play with the dolls, their clothes, and their various playsets like the Dream House and Corvette, or they could choose to color in a Barbie coloring book. Most play would be spent on the dolls themselves, which was fairly self-directed or peer-directed (a fancy way of saying that kids would make up their own stories or activities with the dolls) according to the kids' own ideas. The coloring books, on the other hand, had a rudimentary plot, usually involving something such as "Barbie finds and returns a lost puppy" or "Barbie goes on a picnic with friends." Coloring the pages meant, to some extent, participating in the plot, which was based on a corporate image of who Barbie is (pretty, happy, well-dressed, has friends, etc).
If a girl 25 years ago wanted a Tonka truck, and could convince her parents to get her one, other than the toy packaging (which, face it, is pretty swiftly discarded) there was nothing to make her feel strange about playing with it alone in the back yard. (By the way, I'd like to thank my parents for my Tonka dump truck, and for spending $40 to have a load of sand delivered to our house. Coolest summer EVER.) Play today is a lot more corporate-focused-- more interactive toys will respond to the assumed audience with assumed ideas. Many toys reinforce ideas about what you-the-player should be or act like. Let's take this sample dialogue from the start of the popular game Animal Crossing, one of Ravenlet's favorite games:
Rover (the computer's character): What's your name?
[the player enters their name using the gamepad]
Rover: Oh, so your name is _____?
The player gets two choices here:
--Yes, isn't it cool?
--Yes, isn't it cute?
If you choose that your name is "cool" the response is "Oh, you must be a boy!"
If you choose that your name is "cute" the response is "Oh, you must be a girl!"
You can then respond that Rover is correct, or that no, you're a boy who thinks his name is cute, or a girl who thinks her name is cool. If you do so, Rover responds that you're weird.
Yes, that's correct, the game itself makes fun of you for choosing the "wrong" word for your gender!
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm thinking of when I say that we have a bigger problem than promoting girls' freedom to be strong and assertive, or boys' freedom to be nurturing and emotional. The problem we have is that we assume kids today have the same freedoms we did-- to live inside our own heads, to play alone and be who we want to be, without having to give up parts of ourselves to do it.
I'm not really concerned about the "gender ghetto" of having certain words reserved for women and girls-- I'm concerned about the division of the world into two parts, and the way that conditioning is creeping into games, toys, coloring books, and TV shows-- how we're passively allowing our children to be told that they need to conform to one gender role or the other, all the damn time.
My concern isn't primarily about the equality of the genders. My concern is that separate is not equal.