Anyway, the "book" was SO sexist! I don't know why I was surprised, but it just seemed so outrageous. Every single photo in the catalog was gender-specific. Young boys were dressed in blue jeans or khakis and wore striped polo shirts, and modeled "masculine" toys, like tool sets, hotwheels tracks, nerf balls and guns, etc. Girls were dressed in obnoxious amounts of pink, or wore skirts and ribbons in their hair, and were shown playing with distinctly "feminine" toys, such as easy bake ovens, dolls, kitchen sets, etc.
The young boys and girls were rarely shown modeling the same toy; when they were, however, it was still extremely sexist and gender-ized. See:
In this picture, the boy is grilling (because that's our society's masculine way of cooking...and, come to think of it, is rather off-limits to women) and the girls are far removed from the grill. One (in a short skirt) is leaning against the refrigerator, as if waiting for her pie to bake, while the other girl (with bows in her hair) is washing dishes.
In this advertisement, the girl (in pink), is cooking/preparing food for the boy (in jeans), who sits out of the kitchen eating.
I remember being a little girl and looking through the Christmas catalogs, circling the toys I wanted (admittedly, the girly ones). My little brother, Max (he's 7), was recently looking through a Halloween costume catalog and really wanted to be a Egyptian princess because the girls' costumes were so much prettier than the boys. He said he would never ever be an Egyptian princess because everyone would make fun of him.
Genderizing begins at such a young age!
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