A brazen knight- adorned in shining armor, riding atop a gallant steed. A beautifully-well-groomed princess- dressed in the finest materials cascading around her feet, trapped and in need of rescue. Do these two images ring any bells?
Throughout the history of the United States, and really the entirety of Western culture historically, society has developed cultural tools to instruct children on what it means to be a boy or a girl. Culture refers to the ideas, beliefs, values, normative behaviors, media, laws, and other socially constructed ideas which are specific to any given society. A social construct is any ideation which is established collectively by a group, which then forms the backbone of a shared understanding of reality. The engendering of boys and girls through cultural tools, such as the media and toys, is known as gender socialization. Gender socialization begins at a very young age and, as this ethnography evidences, plays a large role in the larger structures of patriarchy in society in the United States.
According to “The Social Construction of Gender,” by Judith Lorber, the construction of gender begins at birth with the assignment of sex based on what the genitalia look like at birth (1994).
A binary gender classification dominantly exists in the Western Society in which newborns are assigned to be boys or girls based solely on physical appearances. This practice has many concerns, especially when children are born as intersex. According to an article written by Nuria Gregori Flor, et al.,“'Intersex' is an umbrella term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit the typical definitions of a female or male body (2018).” Children born as intersex are regularly viewed as a social problem and surgeries are performed upon the newborns to “cure” them, even in the absence of any health problems (2018). This “typical definition of the sexual anatomy of a female or male body” is the very basis of the socialization of the binary gender system.
Newborns, having now been assigned a gender upon the examination or reconstruction of their genitalia, have their gender further socially constructed through the clothing their parents or caregivers adorn them with.
The article written by Witt SD, “Parental influence on children's socialization to gender roles,” states, “he strongest influence on gender role development seems to occur within the family setting, with parents passing on, both overtly and covertly, their own beliefs about gender.” Everyone in the Western cultures are well aware that a baby that is dressed in blue is a boy, and that a baby dressed in pink is a girl. This idea is a social construct that parents use in order to make a statement to the public about whether their child is a boy or a girl. People acknowledge these social constructs and treat the child in accordance to the roles associated with either gender. Boys often are treated in a more “adult” manner with terms like “champ” and less inclination towards “baby speak” (the high pitched tones used to speak to children), while girls are often treated in a much more gentle manner being coddled more and treated with more fragility than boys are.
Treating children in this manner teaches them what it means to be male or female. Usha Ram, et al., state in their article, “children learn [to equate] maleness with power and authority and femaleness with inferiority and subservience (2014).” This engendering of roles in children leads to severe outcomes in the greater structures of society. Boys are taught how to dominate and exercise authority while girls are taught to be submissive (2014). Society then creates stigmas upon the different genders and how they are treated in certain circumstances which leads to the normalization of gender biases throughout the social systems.
Not only do the clothes used to engender children play a role in the construction of gender, but so do the toys meant for and given to boys and girls.
I conducted an ethnography of the toy sections at two major stores, Fred Meyers and Wal-Mart, in order to best capture the dominant schema of the Portland, Oregon social construction of gender. Both stores were consistent with one another in the manner of which they marketed and displayed their toys, as well as the type of toys marketed.
What I found was that there was a clear distinction in the marketing of toys for girls and for boys.
The toys intended for either sex were located in their own aisles separated from the other gender's toys. Toys marketed to girls were full of bright colors with a heavy reliance on pink and purple hues, while boys were focused primarily on blues and greens. The activity level designed for the use of these toys was polarized between the genders with girls toys being low level activity like playing dress-up/house with dolls, while boys toys tend to be high level activity like fighting figurines and sports. Even the “dress-up” for boys was focused on high activity characters like Ninja Turtles and Star Wars where girls dress up focused primarily on submissive characters like Disney princesses.
While there were many distinct differences between the two gendered toy sections, one last thing I found to be of interest was that the toys marketed to girls tended to display a side of imagination with mythical creatures involved, such as unicorns and mermaids. However, toys marketed for boys relied almost wholly on a sense of realism with actual people and more life-like imagery. The marketing and application of these toys used as gender construction tools impact society in many ways as children grow to become a part of the social order.
As I mentioned previously, the clear differences in the social construction of gender and gender roles leads to the development of severe injustices within the larger context of society. Judith Lorber writes in her article, “As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses (1994).” One of the major components that is affected by these gender constructs is an individual's wages. According to The American Association of University Women, women were paid only 80% of what men made in 2017, putting the wage gap at 20% (2019).
I cannot help but think of the ways in which society has influenced me and my own personal experience of gender.
I personally consider myself to be gender non-binary. I do not relate with the idea of maleness (in even its most healthy representation), nor with the idea of femaleness, but rather closer to androgynous in that I relate to having aspects of both female and male. I grew up on the East Coast just outside of Washington DC where people tend to be much less progressive in their ideas. I was forced into playing sports that I never wanted anything to do with and bombarded with an array of constructs guiding me to become a man. I never felt comfortable taking on the label of being a boy, or a man, and it wasn't until I moved to Portland, Oregon and started to explore what it meant to have a gender that I understood why. Having been forced into representing an idea that I felt little to no relation to deeply disturbed me and has since caused serious detriment in the ability to feel safe in expressing who I am and what I feel.
Gender is a social construct developed by humans interacting in social settings and has been used to instruct children in their roles as males and females beginning at birth and continuing throughout the lifetime.
The constructs children learn at home and in social interactions in our current schema of gender leads to gender biases creating and exasperating social inequalities in relation to gender. However, since these ideas are designed and encouraged by humans, then too can humans be the ones to resolve the inequalities which stem from these concepts of the socialization of gender.
Works Cited
Flor, Nuria Gregori, et al. “Bioethics and Intersex: ‘Time out’. A Paradigm Shift on Intersex Management in the Spanish Context.” Athenea Digital. Revista De Pensamiento e Investigación Social, vol. 18, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1899., doi:10.5565/rev/athenea.1899.
Lorber, Judith. The Social Construction of Gender. 1994.
SD, Witt. “Parental influence on children's socialization to gender roles,” Adolescence, vol 32, Summer, 1997. pp. 253-259. PMID: 9179321
Ram, Usha, et al. “Gender Socialization: Differences between Male and Female Youth in India and Associations with Mental Health.” International Journal of Population Research, vol. 2014, 2014, pp. 1–11., doi:10.1155/2014/357145.
The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap. The American Association of University Women, www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/
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