The Importance Of Toys

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Toys have been separated by gender since the very beginning of toys. I distinctly recall walking right to the “boys” section for my toys, bypassing anything that was pink or labeled “for girls”. But it’s not just me who recalls doing this, but most children in American would recount a similar experience. A recent CNN article by Emanuella Grinberg titled “Let toys be toys: The case for gender-neutral marketing” exposes the fallacies of the idea that toys will only be successful if they are marked for a particular gender. Grinberg (2015) supports Michael Messner’s findings in “Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters” showing that gender-neutral toys can not only succeed for the marketers, but also for the kids who purchase and use them. Based off of …show more content…

It shows how these subtle images we receive at an early age of what is masculine and what is feminine; actually carry with us throughout the remainder of our life. This doesn’t just stop once we graduate from using toys; this effects each and every one of us for the rest of our lives. Whether we realize it or not, what we learn at a young age about color and the use of masculinity and femininity to separate boys and girls, directly effects the structure of gender for the rest of our life. We often don’t even recognize or understand the structuring of gender that takes place at an early age, but this is highlighted in Messner’s article “Barbie Girls versus Sea Monters”. The CNN article features two vitally important aspects in Messner’s work, power and segregation.
Power
Messner talked about the “structure of gender” which I have talked about earlier, but he specifically broke it down into a couple categories, power and segregation. Segregation I will get into later, but I want to really dive in on power for a second. Messner took a look at a youth soccer league and quickly stumbled upon something that is fascinating. Of the 30 positions on the Board of Directors, males controlled 21 of them and females controlled only nine positions. Of the 156 recreational soccer teams, 133 teams were coached by men, compared to just 23 teams coached by women. You could then make the argument that it’s just because more men are interested in soccer than women. But Messner quickly dispels that,

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