Gender Roles and Expectations presentation

I thought this presentation was really interesting. My favorite part was when we saw the you-tube videos of the commercials targeted at kids. It was so drastically different. The girls commercial was super pink--everything in the commercial was pink--the room, the house the girl was in, her clothes (?). There was this cutesy song with a little girl singing. The song was about how she just loves to cook and do laundry. Can we say gender stereotypes? This girl was about six years old. She doesn't know what doing laundry and cooking really is or what it can symbolize. It makes me remember when I was younger and loved using my little girl broom and fake vacuum. I wanted to be like my mother I suppose (although my parents shared a lot of the domestic responsibilities), but to me, playing with these chore-items was a grand time. That did not stick with me, to say the least.

The other part that I found interesting was the picture of the same crib-set-up for a baby boy and a baby girl. There were different colors and patterns for the boy and girl. This is before they can make their own decisions, but they already have gender expectations. I also noticed that in addition to the colors and patterns, both set-ups had a stuffed animal, but (if I wrote this down right in my notebook) the boy's room had a lion and the girls had a teddy bear. I guess boy babies are more aggressive and manly than girl babies.

Our drawings of the ideal man/woman and not ideal man/women were funny. I noticed that the un-ideal man had a lot more personality traits while the un ideal woman had more physical characteristics.