At her NAFTAstic masculinity marketing blog The Achilles Effect, Canadian social media expert Crystal Smith decided to throw all the ads for boys' toys and girls' toys into the Word Cloud Generator and see what retrograde gender stereotypes came up.
It doesn't lessen the impact of seeing the results of the ad hoc experiment one bit to say that the biggest words in the girl toys cloud were "love" and "fun," while in the boys' cloud, it was "battle" and "power."
Which, quick: do NOT think of Pat Benatar.
Holy smokes, have I really never seen this video? Her dad kicks her out of the house, and so she becomes a dance hall hooker/labor organizer before heading back? What does this song even mean??
Love Is A Battlefield - Pat Benatar [youtube.com]
Word Cloud: How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes [achilleseffect.com via dt reader sara]
