53 Shopping Days Left Until Xmas

[seraphcelene]

The gender coding time of year has started off with a bang. Every time I turn on the TV I am assaulted by commercials featuring little girls playing with plastic stoves and oh, how cool it is and they talk! Apparently, when she wasn't off having adventures featuring sharks, shipwrecks and the rescuing of handsome princes, Ariel was busy filleting fish. I was unaware.

So, sorry. Pardon my sarcasm.

Did you SEE how much junk she had in that cavern? Do you know how much TIME it takes to accumulate that much stuff? How much searching and exploring has to be done? I guess the marketing peeps over at Disney don't really think so.

What really got me, however, was the Dora the Explorer stove.



I am incensed!!! Dora the freaking Explorer has a plastic pink stove!! When does Dora have time to cook???? She's EXPLORING!! What the fuck?! And the worst part?! The very best of the worst part? The stove includes a little phone that rings and when you answer it Dora's friend Diego asks what's for dinner.

*facepalm*

OMG! Are you kidding me right now?

Two of the more proactive female characters for young girls have been chained to the stove.

I mean seriously. Seriously.

And of course that got me to thinking about Buffy and the way that Joss rewrote the blonde cheerleader stereotype. Even Heroes is getting involved with Clare, although with a different purpose and, perhaps, to a lesser degree. I love, and everyone has talked the subject to death, I am sure, how Buffy moves throughout the series from passive to active. As she grows, the movement from WTTH to Graduation, we see her evolve from the hand to the mind. She moves beyond just action (Giles does most of the thinking and deciding) to a planner (the definitive moment in that arc, of course, coming in LMPTM). Even Cordelia, the other obvious female stereotype in the Jossverse, recasts herself over the seasons in very surprising and aggressive ways. Perhaps, even more startling than Buffy's evolution since she begins the series having already begun her evolution. Cordelia we watch from beginning to end.

I find it vastly disconcerting to see marketing that implies, what I see, as a regression, a movement away from action and back into passive gender models. Not that there's anything wrong with home and hearth. Not at all. My mom stayed home until I was maybe eight or nine years old. But, seeing characters that function outside of traditional gender codes of behavior recast into a traditional model is just wrong and disturbing. If they were going to do this, couldn't they have picked a character that already functioned as part of that (gods, I am completely losing my words) behavioral model?

Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Am I being overly sensitive? Maybe it's just a pink plastic stove and who cares? Would YOU buy one for your daughter? What if your son wanted one?

I'm curious.



Oh and a note to glossing: THANK YOU!! I will email you later. But everything made perfect sense and thank you thank you thank you!!!

Comments

[kilraaj.livejournal.com]

The Dora one didn't bother me, mostly because I do remember her helping make food at least once on the show (mixing the chocolate, my little brothers love that show) and, hey, her cousin's coming over to eat. It just seems like a family gathering to me. Of course, I haven't seen the commercial myself yet, but that's just the impression I get from your description.

The Ariel one is kind of...wtf. I mean, even assuming she does take time from exploring to do "traditional" female things, which doesn't seem likely--she's a princess. Why on earth would she be the one cooking? >.>

[mawaridi.livejournal.com]

she's a princess. Why on earth would she be the one cooking?

And a princess who lives under the sea for the first sistxeen years of her life, at that. For heaven's sake, she doesn't even know what fire is, or how to use a fork. How could she handle a stove??

To seraphcelene, no you're certainly not the only one. The whole thing fills me with despair, and it's not just the toys that are in stores these days, but...oh...everything. It's like we've made so much progress and now it's just going down the drain because people keep forgetting to care.

[seraphcelene]

And a princess who lives under the sea for the first sixteen years of her life, at that. For heaven's sake, she doesn't even know what fire is, or how to use a fork. How could she handle a stove??

AAHAHAH!!!

It's like we've made so much progress and now it's just going down the drain because people keep forgetting to care.

And that makes me wonder, have we really made much progress down in the grain where it really counts? I mean to the point where it's more than just a "thing you do" because it's PC, but something you do because how else should it be? I put up shelves and drill away with my cordless, black power drill (I am so in love with that thing) because it's something that needs to be done and I have two capable hands to do it with. But I have friends who wait for their boyfriends or brothers or fathers. Hell, they even ask me before they think to do it themselves. Why do they assume that they can't handle it? It's a drill and some screws, it's not rocket science.

[seraphcelene]

The implication in the commercial is that Dora is cooking for Diego and it's because she's a girl (she cooks) and he's a guy (she eats). How about having a few little boys in the commercial helping out and then when Diego calls maybe it wouldn't be so blatantly divisive. I could also be overreacting, but when I think of Dora the Explorer I think of jungles and mountaintops and learning cool and neat things. Not making dinner for Diego. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I really do enjoy cooking and more than that, I enjoy making huge meals for my family and friends to enjoy. I find great satisfaction in feeding people; it's one way I show my love. BUT, kids are young and impressionable and I think that Dora, of all people, could be promoting something more adventurous. And maybe it's because of all the stoves I keep seeing and all of the little girls in all of the commercials and it's like do we really need one more plastic stove and does it really HAVE to be Dora? There's Ariel (gods) and Barbie and the Easy-Bake oven and all of its knock-off's. Can we get that science kit that cinnamonical mentioned. Just one, that's all I'm asking and not because you are a parent and were wandering around Toys R Us and found one, but because your kid saw that commercial with Dora doing neat things with a magnifying glass and boy would she like to have one.