"Digital-Doll Sites Capture Interest of Young Girls"
There is a new online market, targeted towards preteen and teenage girls, that expoits and promotes gender differentiation. Companies such as Cartoon Doll Emporium and Stardoll (and pretty soon Barbie and Bratz), have websites where girls can spend hours dressing up two-dimensional, virtual dolls. "I go on there every day," eleven-year-old Hannah Reichert says. Stardoll has about 6.4 million members, 94% female. "Guys are welcome, but they really just don't get it," said Mattias Miksche, the site's chief executive. They don't get it because our culture has ingrained in our heads that girls play with dolls and boys play sports. We should be heading away from these gender stereotypes rather than embracing them. So why are these companies doing this? Obviously, because they can make a profit from it: "Stardoll has received more than $10 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures." And Cartoon Doll Emporium "collects about $30,000 a month in advertising revenue." Both companies also charge money for special dolls or outfits.
These companies are making money by expoiting gender, by reaffirming that girls should play with dolls. In fact, the audience isn't just young girls: "Ms. Stanger, a 38-year-old in Salt Lake City...spend[s] about 12 to 15 hours a week, and about $30 a month, on her own creations." So if grown women are also buying into this, where will it end? And if companies like Barbie and Bratz are about to jump on the bandwagon and make online doll-dressing even more popular, how will girls learn that there's more out there than dolls? How will girls learn that they can also play sports, or play with G.I. Joes....or do something creative where they actually use their imaginations rather than conforming to the gendered labels that culture has and is constructing? I blame capitalism. Consumption, consumption, consumption. If the mentality in this country was other than to maximize profit by maximizing consumption, maybe kids (and adults!) would have more freedom to identify with universal ideas instead of gendered conceptions of what he/she is supposed to be.
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3 comments:
So, you're saying that GI Joe isn't a doll, eh? What's that thing of which Cleopatra is Queen??
Heheh. Puns.
I think it is important to note here that these kinds of practices hurt boys just as much as girls (to be clear, you did mention this in your post--I am just commenting further). It is just as harmful for a little boy to be told that blue is a boy color so he can't like pink, purple, or yellow, or enjoy floral things, or play with dolls. It is just as harmful for a boy to be told he cannot be nurturing--nurture a toy like a doll or a stuffed animal as children often want to do--as it is to tell a girl that she must be nurturing.
It is shocking to me how strongly parents (one hopes unknowingly), as well as marketing and the media (this is of course, because the parents are indoctrinated into the capitalist machine as well) stifle their children by enforcing gender -specific play. I watched in horror as a woman I know told her 3yo son that he could play with the polly pocket dolls as long as he knew that they were girls' toys and that he was a boy, not a girl.
Yeah, I definitely agree that boys are affected just as much (if not, more) than girls by the cultural division of "boy" and "girl" toys. It is more acceptable for girls to be "tomboys" than for boys to do the reverse. And to clarify, I think G.I Joe is a doll, but the roles that boys are supposed to adopt by playing with G.I. Joes are quite different than the roles that girls are supposed to adopt when playing with Barbies. These different types of dolls create different types of role-playing scenarios, which, in turn, shape and define the identities that children associate with.
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