Gender Stereotypes We put on Children, and their Lasting Effects

One thing we see too often in a television show is a father figure who sees his boy child playing with girl child toys, and as we can all guess, he is outraged.  But why?  Why can't his boy child play with barbies?  Why do we gender these toys?  I was walking down the hall with a friend last week and i saw an abandoned pair of Sperry shoes, and i said, "Check it out (name withheld), those look like your new shoes", and he said "Nah, those are the girl Sperrys, I'm a boy."  We put ourselves in these boxes with neat labels, to make it easier for us as a society to determine who doesn't belong in a box, it's a system set up to screw the outliers.



















;jb




This is an ad from what appears to be a children's magazine.  Except it's not really an ad, it's more of a testament to our stereotyping system, and it affects our children in ways it really shouldn't.  In the image we see on one side a white girl, dressed  entirely in pink, wearing a dress, and holding her princess toy.  On the other side we see a very punk-rock looking white boy, pretending to play a guitar, with his hair messily tossed, while wearing a blue shirt.  The image that this sends our children is that girls are tamer, they need their hair in curls, and they need to dress in dresses.  It tells young boys that they need to be extreme, and love rock and roll.  The dangerous part of these stereotypes is that it tells girls that they can't play guitar, and that they have to be tamer than their XY chromosome counterpart.  For boys it furthers the stereotype of "manliness".  It tells them they can't wear pink, and they can't wear dresses, they have to be bigger than girls, and show it.  In these types of ads  extremes are shown, and then often if a child doesn't fit into this box, they feel panicked and wonder why they can't  be like that nice looking boy or girl in the ad, and too often they'll carry this uneasiness about their gender identities throughout their lives.

The Scratch In My Bass

The varnish was stripped, you could see the soft maple wood where a coat of varnish should have been, there were other marks too, the flamed varnish pattern danced within the bass, the elegant curve of the violin corners danced off of the bass, the upper bout had been slashed and it was this wound that killed it.  I stood in the practice room where the philharmonic orchestra was running through our repertoire. It was after our break when i had noticed what happened to my bass.  The gash was deep, deep enough to be a costly repair.  I thought about who could have done this to my bass, maybe a violin player carrying something heavy and in a rush scraped the cold metal edge of their music stand against the soft bout of my bass.  The cut was surrounded on all edges by a sea of varnish, it seemed to interrupted the bass's side like a person asking a very rude question.  The violinist who did this, they were probably worried, they were scared that they would have to tell what they did to their parents, who they know would be unable to pay the damages.  The guilt might overwhelm them, having to sit maybe 15 feet from the person whose instrument they vandalized.  The guilt would make them want to come clean to me with some sappy heartfelt apology, but it was always "Next week i'll tell him, for sure."  But next week would never really come.  

"Oh, Steve what happened to your bass, that looks bad!" my stand partner said.  The conductor raised his baton and we played 8 measures before he stopped to correct the cellos.

"What, happened, was your bass already like that?"  she said.  I looked back down at my bass.  The varnish was stripped and the maple wood of the bass peaked out like the baldness under an aging man's comb over.