Are girls hard-wired to be all into pink and princesses? If you are looking for the answers, you probably won't find them here. For example:
"The reason why girls like pink is that their brains are
structured completely differently to boys," says child psychologist
Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. "Part of the brain that processes emotion
and part of the brain that processes language is one and the same
in girls but is completely different in boys. This explains so much
- you can give a girl a truck and she'll cuddle it. You can give a
boy a Barbie doll and he'll rip its head off. These differences are hard-wired at birth but you can't take
away the cultural conditioning, which helps it along a bit."
Oh. So pink is, um, nurturing? Or about language and emotion? I'm so confused. See, I don't get how the princess thing and the pink thing and the cuddly-emotion thing are one and the same. However, explanations are clearly not part of the recipe of newsflashes in this one. Let me summarize the rest for you. Disney markets the princess thing to little girls! Barbies might or might not be bad for girls! Bratz are too sexualized, and that is not good!
I do love this quote from a Mattel rep, defending Barbie's educational value by citing
the company's launch of Barbie and Tanner, her dog that really poos. "You can actually clean his poo up with a pooper scooper,
so it teaches them that if they take their dog for a walk, it's
good to do the right thing by the environment." Wow. That doll has some really important lessons to share with us. Like "it's good to clean up poo". Sorry, my hysterical laughter is making it hard to write.
While it's hard to take this all seriously, I'd just like to add I find it interesting people somehow think cultural conditioning is this little thing you can just get over easily, while genes are the real deal. We are social animals; our socialization is what makes us human. I'd say that's just as powerful as a gene. Gawd, I'm such a faux-grad student.
