"You Missed a Spot"
As the holiday season approaches, toy catalogs begin flooding the mail; though, they are sadly no longer intended for my enjoyment, but instead for my nieces and nephews. Anyways, I've put myself in charge of flipping through them to find the most appealing toys to ensure that the little kids and babies have some good presents coming their way. Although I've been aware for some time that toys are generally catagorized into "for girls," "for boys," and "for everyone," I've also noticed that many parents and certain labels try to catagorize a little less to decrease gender stereotypes and all that (then again, probably not so much toy companies and labels as they've really perfected their marketing techniques to target whomever they please without directly offending them). However, as I flip through these catalogs I notice that they've separated their pages as girl pages and boy pages--which is fine. What bothers me is that in a few different catalogs I've noticed that the girls sections, along with being filled with dollhouses and fun stuff like that, they have pretend cleaning sets. Kicthen sets are fine, that's pretty normal, but targetting cleaning sets to girls? In one picture they show a girl with her little broom and quote nearby saying "you missed a spot!" That sounds like a fun toy... And my guess is it won't do all that much to teach them to clean up. Whenever they get out their little janitor kit they'll just end up scattering that everywhere and then leaving it for another toy.
In all honestly, I could see myself asking for a toy like that when I was little, but that's because my mind was already corrupted from watching movies like Cinderella where your three options as a girl are: clean, cook and wait on people; wait for a handsom prince to sweep you off to his castle; or, be a mean spoiled step-sister that sits around and does nothing all day. It's one of my favorite movies though. I'm not trying to be hypocritical, I'm merely commenting on one aspect of our society. So I hope all those girls have fun with their brooms and dust pans and maybe for their sixteenth birthday they'll get a real vacuum, then they can grow up and sit at home watching "Desparate Housewives" on DVD. That's the life.
I also just finished Wuthering Heights (which I loved), and and one theme throughout it is disease, which related very well to the article I read for biology (I would post a link to it, however I don't know where it's from) about antibiotics. Just as I was saying it'd be interesting to look at disease as it relates to culture, a report came on the news about the apperance of polio in an Amish community. Very unfortunate, but also interesting.
Posted by lib at October 30, 2005 07:16 PM