Day Twenty-Five: Why do they trick girls into buying pink stuff?

I stumbled on this video and totally fell in love with this kid:

In the video this little girl, Riley, is talking to her dad about toys and astutely points out

"Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses! Some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses! So why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different color stuff?"

I have spent a huge part of my career trying to understand gender and how gender influences purchasing patterns. When I was in college I developed a class called “Design with Gender in Mind.” In order to create the curriculum I researched the biological differences between men and women. For instance women have a larger corpus callosum than men. The corpus callosum is the central part of the brain that facilitates communication between the right and left hemispheres. This means that women process information more like a web where men process information very linearly. For instance if you were to ask a woman to spell a word parts of her brain in both hemispheres would light up, whereas a man spelling the same word would only use one concentrated part of his brain.

The other core part of my research focused on how men and women functioned socially. In order to try to understand what it meant to “be male.” I spent two weeks living with a group of men and one month as a man. I created a persona of myself, Ben, and tried to only do things that were officially sanctioned by my manly advisors. This meant no Ani Difranco for a whole month…and a whole lot of Die Hard. It also meant binding my breasts, stippling on facial hair with mascara and a toothbrush, and learning how to pee standing up. I also learned how to ride a motorcycle and shoot guns. I created a focus group of men who knew about the project to act as my advisors on everything to the way I walked to my intonation when speaking. I shopped with men, played video games with men, and even ate like men…which for my men meant a whole lot of frozen pizzas and canned chili.

Here are the only photos that survived multiple moves:

After my month as Ben the plan was to spend an entire month as a girly girl. I would let my roommates play dress up with me. I would learn how to apply make up. I would wear girl shoes and dresses and watch more Sex in the City than any human should be subjected to. The weird thing was, I was so uncomfortable with the attention that I was getting as a girl that I decided to cut the experiment short. I had always kind of flown under the radar, and the unwanted cat calls were too much for me to handle.

 Through additional research I started to uncover that the way kids play is deeply rooted in gender. Boys will naturally gravitate towards competition and finding ways to make their play about winning, while girls will create elaborate stories to explain the world around them.

 So seeing this video of Riley made me think: Right on! You can be whoever you want to be and play with whatever you want to play with. I had my fair share of Barbies (granted mine all worked for NASA) but thanks to Brandon I also had tons of matchbox cars. I loved to build things and collected Knex well into my 20’s, but I also used those structures to create fantasy lands for my Littlest Pet Shop characters to play in. I think Riley will eventually realize that it is not the color of the toy we play with that matters, but how we play with it.