Boys Battle and Girls Love: Word Clouds of Gendered Advertisements
Filed by: Alex Blaze
April 25, 2011 2:00 PM

http://www.bilerico.com/2011/04/boys_battle_and_girls_love_word_clouds_of_gendered.php

A blogger who writes on boys and images of masculinity put together two word clouds based on advertisements for toys that appear in major afterschool cartoons, one for boys and one for girls.

Now, the argument could be made that boys really do like those toys in general and girls, in general, really do like the girl toys. I don't think that desire can exist in a vacuum and that girls and boys aren't affected by what they think girls and boys should be playing with. It's also contradictory to argue that ads don't effect desire; the entire point of advertising is to make people want things that they didn't want before. But that's not really the issue I see here.

Interestingly enough, I have a son who did care more for the "build" "create" "save" type toys and is now a US Naval officer by way of the US Naval Academy. Even there though, his continued interest was nuclear engineering, which flows into the peaceful and helpful use of atomic energy.  From the needs of atomic enery, control systems come that do include a few war and violence producing machines, but which have an even broader use in peaceful and helpful settings such as medical robotics and assistive devices for the disabled and elderly.  This type of thing is his passion.  Did I do something wrong??