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No Girls Allowed

polygon.com

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Re: No Girls Allowed

#71

Post by leokun »

junto wrote: post #37
spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…

> Recently she asked for a pirate ship for her birthday, so it isn't all bad.

Hrm, Jake and the Neverland Pirates fan? My daughter likes izzy and I saw an izzy costume on Halloween. Pirates are getting popular.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#72

Post by spindritf »

rmc wrote: post #57
spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

Gay people. There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago. Either there are more gay people naturally today, or the societal pressures 50 to 100 years ago to marginalise gay people were successful and were able to convince lots of people to stay in the closet. If society can do that to gay people, can the same happen to gender roles?

> There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago.

There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. My pet theory is that with the increase of wealth and progress in technology, medicine, we can afford more risk including tolerance of risky behaviour.

With things like the antibiotics, condoms, hormonal contraception, abortion (that is not likely to kill you) and just generally low risk of destitution, people don't need to be as careful as they used to. Many religious taboos are guidelines for surviving in a harsh world, and the world just isn't that harsh any more.

But those are real, material changes. It's not a matter of perception.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#73

Post by AlexandrB »

k__ wrote: post #54
AlexandrB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b... I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape an…

The point OP made is the opposite. Everyone already thinks marketing shapes our idea of what is "normal". The question is "Does it really do this?"

If marketing doesn't, then what does? Culture? But marketing is part of culture. In fact it has become inseparable from it.

When I was growing up the "I am Canadian"[1] rant was a super-popular thing in my school. But this is from a beer ad of all things! And yet in some way it helped shape what being Canadian meant for a significant number of people at the time. If you make the argument that your peer group influences what is normal that's still no escape from marketing as friends of mine were literally quoting this ad word-for-word.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a straight line between marketing and a specific effect. Ideas and culture don't work like that. But they do work, otherwise nothing cultural would ever change - fashion, as an industry, wouldn't exist.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU

Re: No Girls Allowed

#74

Post by exelius »

hownottowrite wrote: post #6

In 1983, North America experienced a massive recession in the video game industry, now known as the video game crash. The crash had devastating effects, bankrupting game company after game company. At its peak, the revenues for video games in the U.S. sat at $3.2 billion in 1983. By 1985, revenues fell a whopping 97 percent to approximately $100 million. There are many factors behind the crash. The key factor is that…

The "casual gaming" market of today is a lot healthier than the console market of the early 80s. In 1983, the world was enchanted by the potential of video games but the technology just wasn't ready yet. If anything, the great gaming crash scared off the companies that jumped in because it was popular but weren't ready to innovate and paved the way for the real innovators like Nintendo and Sega.

The casual gaming market is nothing like that. It's really just the long tail of the larger $70 billion gaming industry. Add to that the fact that smartphone penetration ramping up in emerging markets that never really saw significant console sales and you've got access to a lot more consumers.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#75

Post by leokun »

spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

> I don't buy it.

There's an entire branch of social science that spends a lot of time on marketing, sociology. I recommend reading up on it from an academic perspective. Marketing is very influential but it isn't mind control. I'd say it shapes expectations more than create demand for particular products. And from an anthropological perspective I'd say marketing actually reveals more about a culture than it creates.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#76

Post by tehwalrus »

junto wrote: post #37
spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…

My Niece's pink obsession began as soon as she started school - I think it's a mixture of peer pressure and subtle clues (e.g. the grandparent's "aren't you pretty" comment.)

It's actually amusing in her in particular - she must wear pink, and mummy must do her hair nicely, but then once that's done she's outside climbing trees and getting muddy. It seems that once she's put on the "girl uniform", she can go be herself again.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#77

Post by eseehausen »

junto wrote: post #37
spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…

Pink as a girl's color and blue as a boy's color is a relatively recent cultural assignation. Maybe she likes it on some genetic level, but your wife obviously doesn't, and the way you interpret it is based on marketing that assigned pink to girls.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St...

Re: No Girls Allowed

#78

Post by dasil003 »

crntaylor wrote: post #4

I like the article. I think it's well written, an important subject, and the world would be better if more people read it and digested its message. I still wish it didn't repeat the myth that Coca-Cola invented the modern image of Santa Clause, though. http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp

I think Tim Allen invented the Santa Clause.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#79

Post by joosters »

spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

Look at the gigantic sums that companies spend on advertising. They can't all be throwing their money away. You can either assume that all these companies are complete fools, or the marketing works.

In fact it's getting easier to prove nowadays, with so much more data from the likes of adwords, loyalty cards and so on. Marketing has more 'real numbers' behind it to give confidence in spending the money.

Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn't affect them. But, it does. You are not immune to it.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#80

Post by Goladus »

macspoofing wrote: post #67
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument kind of ignores marketing. If I spend several million (probably billions cumulatively at this point) telling people that product X should be associated with characteristic Y which is traditionally assigned more to one gender than another, then I'm likely to be modifying the market to an extent that you cannot truthfully say that market dynamics provide a reason for the disparity that will emerge.

And your argument just presouposes a certain causality. Do marketers market pink toys to girls because that's what they want girls to buy, or because that's what girls want to buy? It seems the latter is much easier, than the former, No? It's so stupid, because the arguments are always structured as, "society forces behaviour on girls and boys", when it seems pretty obvious it's more of a feedback loop. Tendencies tr…

Exactly. This is not to say that marketing cannot be criticized for stereotyping, but it's far more likely due to exploitation of the natural differences in populations than the sort of raw prejudice so often implied.
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