"Can we fix it?" – I'm not sure.

Some reflections on representation of gender roles particularly in children's media.

 

As I have young sons and I am extremely interested in their development into gender roles as well as their attitudes towards women and girls, I decided to take as my main focus for the day representation of women and girls (as well as men and boys) in children's media.  The data I collected in the course of the day - a content analysis of the day's transmission on the CBeebies television channel - will be written into a more formal report but I wanted to capture here, more informally, a series of observations made during the normal course of the day of action - 3rd July 2007.  


*Warning* - some of the content of this web page is not suitable for children to read.

I am painfully aware of the absolutely relentless diet of gender-stereotyping that goes on all around young children, in the media and educational materials as well as from peers and adults.  In children's media, boys and men are active and visible: there are fewer women and girls.  Sometimes the women and girls are portrayed as normal individuals but often they are pigeonholed.  In day to day life, 'deviant' or transgressive behaviour is surveilled and pronounced upon time and time again.  I have watched my sons being ridiculed by their peers for having a pink bell on a bike (aged 3), for dresssing up in a friend's thrilling floaty dress with matching shoes and feather boa (aged 4), for asking to watch a DVD of Sleeping Beauty (aged 4), for playing with girls instead of excluding them from a game (aged 6).  In my hearing they have been challenged by adults for transgressions such as wearing nail varnish (aged 4), or for reading books about fairies (aged 6).  For their birthdays and at Christmas they are given football paraphernalia, guns, swords, warrior figures, tanks and bomber planes to play with.  They are exposed to endless pronouncements about "what boys are like" and "what girls are like".  Against this backdrop we are often treated to folk wisdom from fellow parents, neighbours or relatives who inform us that this is how nature made boys and girls: boys are instinctively violent, competitive and athletic while girls are instinctively soppy, nurturing and VERY INTERESTED IN THE COLOUR PINK. 

 

To a feminist whose vision of the world as it could be for our children is different from the way the world is now, these distortions of gender difference and exaggerated reflections of the status quo are significant and damaging.  They matter because they interfere with children's ability to develop into free individuals, and to respect the individuality and personal qualities of others around them.

 

The day begins with getting ready for school and nursery.

 

07:45 – 08:15 - reading school books

There is no available list of the books contained in the school library.  This morning I took a quick look at the contents of the book bags of our 5 year old and 6 year old.

 

5-year-old

Library book – self chosen

'Meg and Mog' - a well known illustrated children's book.  Meg the witch (F) and Mog her cat (M) go off to a wild Hallowe'en party with all the other witches (Jess -F, Bess - F, Tess - F, Cress -F).  The spell they cast goes off with a BANG! (they turn all the other witches into creatures).

Verdict: Hurray!  Female characters take the lead roles and the only male character is a sidekick cat.  While I suppose there has been plenty written in feminist theory about women as witches, these are sympathetic characters.  While they do take care in dressing up, carefully putting on their Hallowe'en regalia, at least it is all black stuff (not a hint of pink in sight).

 

Oxford Reading Scheme book #1 – illustrated text

'Naughty Children'.  Featuring the child characters Biff and Chip the twins (M and F) plus Kipper their brother.  Mum is at home with her three children.  A man in a pinstripe suit drops off a girl and a boy to spend the day with the family.  The kids behave badly until mum takes them out to a park. Later the man in the suit comes to pick the visiting children up.

Verdict: I do wish that sometimes mum would swap her dangly earrings and comfy gear for a sharp suit, but to be fair when dad makes an appearance in the series he is never in a suit either.  That is left to the father of the 'naughty children'.  Thankfully, all the children are equally rumbustious in this story.  It is by no means a 'Peter and Jane' nightmare of the kind I recall from my youth.

 

Oxford Reading Scheme book #2 – illustrated text

'Book Week'. Kipper (M) enjoys book week at school: the children make stories, have a visit from an author and dress up.  One woman features: she is a teacher.  Every other adult is a man.  I recorded, page by page, the number of times that male and female characters appeared in the illustrations, whenever I could tell what gender they were.

 

Boys

Men

Girls

Women

1

0

0

1

6

0

5

1

5

1

2

0

4

1

1

0

9

1

1

0

6

2

2

1

3

1

0

1

6

1

1

1

1

3

0

1

41

10

12

6

 

Verdict: Gosh!  There seem to be significantly more men and boys going about their business and doing stuff than women and girls.  Perhaps there was a female-specific virus doing the rounds in Kipper's home town that day and they were home sick in bed, or maybe they had just gone shopping.

 

6-year-old

Oxford Reading Tree: Patrick and the Fox.

This is an illustrated story which is about a boy character who discovers a fox in the garden.  His mother and father both feature.

Verdict: Just another story where the main character is a boy.  Nothing wrong with that, but if I had access to a list of all the stories in the library I would be willing to bet that they are in the sizeable majority.  While Patrick's mum initially disappoints by instructing dad to put the rubbish in the dustbin (perhaps she is allergic to rubbish, or maybe not strong enough to lift the plastic bag), she later redeems herself by washing the car.

08:15 – 09:15 The School Run – visible dads

My (male) partner takes the three older children to school most mornings, on his way into work.  The school day starts at ten to nine and parents are often reminded of how important it is to be punctual in arriving at school.  Unfortunately it is not uncommon for the children's teachers, who often have meetings before the school day starts, to be five or even ten minutes late in welcoming the children into their classrooms.  This makes it quite stressful for parents in paid employment who have to then race against the clock to get to work on time.  At our school there is a wide mix of parental occupations, and the playground is not – as it once was – a female preserve.  Today my partner counted 16 men dropping their charges off in the playground in comparison to a rough count of 30 or more women. 

Verdict: In my view, this constitutes a 'critical mass' of dads.  Not sure what the collective noun for that would be.

 

Today my sons will be taught by:

1: two female teachers

2: a female teacher and a female learning assistant

3: a male teacher (the only man on the teaching staff) and two female assistants.

 

09:15 – 09:45 – The nursery run

On Tuesdays I drop our youngest child at nursery, which is a Sure Start Children's Centre.  On the wall as you enter the building is a gallery of photographs of the staff.  Of around 30 staff there are three men pictured.  One is the caretaker, one is the business manager and one is a childcare practitioner.  This reflects national and local statistics.  In Bristol 80% of the total city council's children's workforce is made up of women, although this varies across sectors. Learning Support Assistants are the poorest paid profession of those included,  and 96% of this workgroup is female.

 

We consider ourselves very fortunate that our son gets cuddles and nurturing care from male as well as female role models in his nursery setting.

 

09:45 – 11:00 – The shopping experience

One of our children was due to attend a birthday party for a boy and a girl in his class in the coming weekend.  These days children bring a present, worth a few pounds, to give to the birthday boy or girl (not like in my day, when you were lucky to get a smelly rubber and a pencil... but that's a gripe for another day).  I thought it would be interesting to take a trip to the big out-of-town Woolworths emporium, where so many kids' gifts are sourced, and have a look at what was on offer.  I tasked myself with finding a gift that I could buy twice; equally suitable for a boy and a girl.  After all, at five years old surely there would be scope for some non-gender-specific toys???

 

The first aisles you come to on entering the store are those displaying children's clothes.  I took some photos of the 'girls' aisles' and the 'boys' aisles'.  I should point out that there are no generic aisles for children's clothes, and that extends to babies too.

 

                 

 

                                                                                                                                       

 

It was more or less impossible to find any clothing or shoes that might be described as 'neutral'.  For the girls, everything comes in shades of pink or purple and most items are branded with 'characters' such as Barbie or the Bratz.  Images of white-skinned cosmetically enhanced girls with long blonde hair predominate.

 

When I took a trip to the boys' clothing aisles, things were not much better.  At least there was a more imaginative variety of colour here (blue, khaki or black) but again character branding was everywhere, from Bob the Builder slippers for the toddlers progressing through Fireman Sam to superheroes and fighting heroes emblazoned on everything from pyjamas to casual wear.

 

          

 

 

The celebration of excess testosterone is a theme that gets repeated in the menswear section:

 

With a heavy heart and an empty shopping basket I progressed to the toy section in my mission to find some suitable gifts.  I rounded the corner to a frankly overwhelming smorgasbord of pink: fluffy heart-shaped cushions, cosmetics, hairdryers, stationery.  At least Woolworths didn't seem to be stocking my personal top scorer in the catalogue of despondency: the Playboy children's range complete with pink bunny logo.  (There is a woman who drives around Bristol in a car kitted out in Playboy accessories.  I would be really interested to ask her, one day, what her message is).

 

Bleuccch.  To escape the pastel frenzy, I moved on to the aisles where the toys for boys were stocked.  Lots and lots of construction and engineering toys: cars, planes, dinosaurs.  These were all branded for gender (except for the special range of magnetic construction toys for girls, and you can guess what colour they came in). There were some quite good scientific toys and games for older children, but nothing suitable for the young ones.

 

There is a huge range of 'action figures' available in the store for children to play imaginatively with.  They are mostly superheroes complete with weaponry, but I did manage to find some figures who were not carrying weapons: the charming 'World Wresting Entertainment' collection.  As you can see, we can choose between 'Adrenaline', 'Ruthless Aggression' and (if we have a bit more to spend) 'Deluxe Aggression'. 

 

 

In some despair, I got to the end of the aisle and then stumbled across the MegaBloks 'Rescue Tech' figures. 

 

In class this year, the children have been learning about 'people who help us' such as firefighters, nurses, police officers, so at last here were some appropriate toys accompanied by the tools of their trade (not weapons!) which would make suitable gifts. The range ('building heroes to save the world') features 'Policeman', 'Fireman', 'Paramedic' and, er, 'Construction Worker'.  The figures are obviously not female but, what the hell, I bagged a Policeman and a Paramedic and got out of there.

 

11:00 – 11:40 – Communications technology

Before embarking on the children's TV analysis, I sat down to catch up with a few bits of work on the internet.

 

Skype

Last night, I had tried to access my rarely-used 'Skype' video conferencing account to have an arranged online conversation with my sister who lives abroad.  So that she would see I was online, I changed my online status to 'Skype me', not realising that this would mean my Skype account (just my first name, my city, my age and gender) would become visible to the 7 million or so users online at that point.  Within seconds I realised my mistake, as two 'chats' and five calls came in to me.  They were all sexual.  Ron in Holland wanted to know if I was a 'horny uk babe' while Alansex wanted to know if I wanted 'to watch him cum'.  Another charming fellow accompanied his call with a close up photograph of masturbation.  I was really quite shaken by this, as well as angry that cyberspace has apparently been taken over in this way.  I was very disturbed to see that Skype (which is free to use) has now integrated its user accounts with PayPal (the internet's leading secure payment system), so that a money balance is always displayed.  I have heard of children selling live footage of themselves in sex acts to strangers online, and can now see how this is done and indeed can't think of many other uses for this new system.  I had immediately deleted the offensive calls but if it ever happened again I would save them to take to a police station.  This morning I wrote to Skype detailing what had happened and asking that they check their records and remove the people (who broke their terms and conditions by contacting me in that way) from membership.  I also requested details of the masturbating man and his picture so that I can pass them on to the police (not that the police will do anything, but it will make me feel better).  Skype replied with an automated message telling me how to select privacy settings.  So I wrote to them again detailing my request again.  They wrote another automated message back.  So I wrote to them again detailing my request again.  Do you ever get tired of banging your head against a brick wall?

 

Email

 

When I signed on to my email today I received just the one junk mail advertising porn:

 

Subject: Re: t,een with perky tlts gets fuiked on bed frogs

                 From:         ahcatchwater@mail.com

                      To:               ***@virgin.net

Hello,

 

mature babe abusing blond t,een dyke

http://****.jjjmgdmqj.info/por_dol_geo/index.html

 

------------------------

This is by no means a rare occurrence – I had two last week.  They use mis-spellings of known porn words to get around the software content filters:

 

Subject: Re: brunette t,een gives head for messy faciaI boxes

                 From:         goodvaskegg@as9105.com

                 To:               ***@virgin.net

Hello,

 

pretty t,een in towel stripping in bathroom

http://*****.tfqxwrbuu.info/por_dol_geo/index.html

 

 ---------------------

 

 Subject: Re: blond t,een fingering for orgiasm on bed seven

                 From:         shakerushgate@dodo.com.au


                 To:               ***@virgin.net

Hello,

 

innocent busty t,een sucikeds dlck for orgiasm

http://****.acihqzkfq.info/por_dol_geo/index.html

 

--------------------------

I have always been an enthusiast for the internet/web and the freedoms and possibilities they open up for women.  But the relentless intrusion of degrading, woman-hating, objectifying material that they bring into my life (despite all efforts to block such things) sickens me.  The presentation of material like this every day puts me in my place every day.  I do everything in my power to avoid being reminded in this way of women and girls' role in society as sex objects for men.  I don't like to think about the extent that pornography such as this must feature in the lives of people who don't strive to avoid it, and clearly for anyone who seeks it out it must be possible to spend every waking hour wallowing in it.

 

11:40

 

At this point I had had enough of documenting the extra indignities and outrages on top of the task I had actually set myself to do, so I settled down with the Cbeebies programme schedule for the day, which I hope to report on soon.


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