Gender Norms and Commercials

For this week’s post I was struggling to decide what it was that I wanted write about. It was one of those moments where I was just watching TV looking for something. However, it did not work. I ended up turning on a kids channel and watching SpongeBob. The next thing I know I am watching children’s commercials and that is when it hit me, its not even so much children’s television shows that are so corrupt it is the commercials for their toys.

I found myself rolling my eyes at the outrageously gendered commercials that were directed towards children. The first thing you notice is that every commercial directed towards girls is covered in pink and fluffy colors and the boy’s commercials had blues and dark colors. However, that was not even the most disturbing part to me. For the girl’s commercials all the advertisements were for pets and a great deal of products dealing with babies caring for something. Of course many people could argue that girls tend to have a natural instinct to care for children and pet but the commercial was pushing this theory. It is as if the media is promoting motherhood from the earliest age a child can comprehend caring for others. I find it disturbing that as children girls are learning that they are expected to be mothers and care for things other than themselves. Now the boy’s commercials, on the other hand, were all of violent toys. This was amazing disturbing. All the toys were of violent robots, car crashes and just being meaner and stronger than their friends.

I can’t think of anything that represents hegemonic culture more than enforcing gender norms. However, the commercials took it one step further by promoting motherhood for girls and violence culture for boys.