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No Girls Allowed

polygon.com

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Re: No Girls Allowed

#111

Post by aestra »

AlexandrB wrote: post #48
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…

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…

Thank you for sharing the diamond story. It really was one of the first national marking campaigns. De Beers paid celebrities to wear diamond engagement rings and talk about their diamond engagement rings, and now everyone "has" to have a diamond engagement ring.

Men wearing a wedding ring, another marking campaign invented in the 1940's.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#112

Post by dsirijus »

6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #102

Although the site looks snazzy, it's annoying that page-down goes one line too far. Page-down. Huh? Oh. Line-up. Ah. Page-down. Huh? Oh. Line-up. Ah. . . . Frustrating reading experience that distracts from the message.

For me, it was annoying in a general sense (can't pin-point it). I was going to article and out of it 3 times.

trying to read it / gah, can't / but there's interesting comments on hn about it / trying to read it / dammit! / it's being upvoted almost to #1 / ok, ok. i'll go through exruciating pain of reading it / it wasn't worth a read anyway

Re: No Girls Allowed

#113

Post by pit »

ajitk wrote: post #39
tomp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember all the fear mongering about violence in computer games (especially first-person shooters). Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up (in fact, they are falling IIRC). Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. Sure, it can change what we buy through brand-perception…

Don't ads create false memories[1] and consequently our behavior? [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-...

> We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

What's interesting about this is that marketers are now stealing stories from consumers and selling them right back, either by monitoring our behavior (both on- and off-line) or direct solicitation. "Tweet your favorite Dunkin' Donuts memory with #DunkinMemories!" There are even promotions that encourage consumers to write and produce their own commercials for a product -- there was one a while back where the winning ad was shown during the Super Bowl.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#114

Post by aestra »

spindritf wrote: post #72
rmc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generall…

>There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too.

No there isn't.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16287113/

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#115

Post by pbhjpbhj »

AlexandrB wrote: post #48
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…

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…

30s of research gives me this http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=0eBEAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=%2...

It's a patent application from 1928 which speaks about engagement rings with a bezel for a stone.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that diamonds would be one choice for the stone prior to 1928. They certainly are only one amongst many choices in the present day too. Do USA-ians only have diamond engagement rings?

The cited Priceonomics article contains a logical flaw. It says demand was created in the De Beers campaign but then goes on to describe how great demand was purposefully under-supplied by Rhodes in order to prop up the price. Similarly it says roughly 'you like diamonds because a marketer told you to' but also then says that diamonds prior to establishing large mines were the preserve of Kings and Queens ... why then did they like them; they are just people too. The answer of course is that they're durable and look pretty and aren't [or weren't] commonly available. It's a great article, but they like you I fear have just pushed it that tiny little bit further seems supported.

Some other citations from a couple of minutes searching:

- this patent suggests that large settings on narrow bands were the fashion in 1927, http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=LtZEAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=%2...

- Beck vs Cohen, 16 March 1933 concerns the specifics of engagement rings being part of an obligation to marry; suggesting they were a customary part of betrothals at that time.

- from 1868, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tL1YAAAAcAAJ&dq=%22engage..., suggests at pp18-19 that when betrothal fell out of fashion in the middle ages engagement rings were retained.

TL;DR - the suggestion in your post is that engagement rings were very uncommon [my word, AlexandrB's was "occassional"] in USA prior to a De Beers campaign. This seems to be an exaggeration. Perhaps De Beers instead achieved the end of making diamonds the fashionable stone to choose for the already customary engagement ring.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#116

Post by rayiner »

k_os wrote: post #17
rayiner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a house full of Disney princess stuff for our one year old. It will probably still be true when she's 5 and can actually influence our purchasing choices. But what will the "market dynamics" tell you about her preferences, other than they are stable once we established them? Anyone who still believes in a simplistic rational actor desperately needs to read the work that's been done on behavioral economics. Da…

I believe feminism is most prevalent today than it ever was in history, are there any statistics showing that girl toy sales have declined? From a quick search i find this : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/mattel-net-falls-24-as-barb... Barbie sales declining but American Girl is up 14%. You'd think that half a century of counter-culture would almost drive to the ground gender specific toy manufacturers.

First, "feminism" is too broad of a concept to apply in this context. The subset of "feminism" you're probably talking about, a counter-culture push back against gendered socialization, never got much traction to begin with and is certainly not more prevalent today than it was say in the 1960's and 1970's. The mainstream of modern feminism embraces gendered socialization, and indeed there is a major contingent of modern "feminists" that are quite reactionary (extolling the virtues of stay at home motherhood). Moreover, birthing and medical trends have also gone backwards. For example, formula feeding, which unshackles mothers and allows fathers to assume the primary role in feeding infants, has been on the decline since the 1970's. In 1972, only 22% of women breastfed in the U.S., by 1995 it was back over 60%. We're still limping towards gender equality, but "feminism" as it used to exist is quite dead.

Second, it's ridiculous to think that "half a century of counter-culture" would do anything to impact a sociological phenomenon that has roots in human society dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. Girls are given dolls to play with because the historical role of women has been primary caregivers to children. That was true a thousand years ago, and it's less true but still very true today. In the 2000's, almost 25% of families with children under 15 had stay at home moms, and out of the families where both spouses worked, the mother was the primary caregiver in 70%+ of cases. This sociological fact is reflected in the market. Household products are still marketed to women, and unsurprisingly, so are dolls marketed to girls.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#117

Post by Kequc »

knowitall wrote: post #29

While I think the history of marketing of games is interesting, to be honest to me this read like "bla bla bla... Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.... bla bla bla" Meaning the conclusion "no girls allowed" is just randomly inserted somewhere in the middle of a wall of text. Just because boys and men were identified as a large audience and targeted with…

The article seemed to suggest there was a "girls section" and that everything else was the boys section. To my eyes and I assumed every sane person, it appears there is a "dolls section" and then every other section. The dolls section isn't exclusive to just girls and the rest of the toy store certainly isn't exclusive to just boys.

Similarly with what the author called the "girls games" section of the games area. It is my understanding that the games are organised into genres. The "cutesy" section isn't exclusive to just girls and the rest of the video games aren't exclusive to just boys.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#118

Post by rayiner »

minikites wrote: post #81
junto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. > I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Yeah, that doesn't actually make any sense. Pink:blue::girl:boy is 100% artificial and one recent source has it the other way around: > For example, a June 1918 art…

It should be noted that for centuries in the western world, boys and girls also both wore dresses.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#119

Post by rmc »

knowitall wrote: post #68
rmc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But very definitely not give into the wishes of their sons who want pink. Parents apply pressure too.

True :-) More people seem to be concerned about girls liking pink than about boys not liking pink, though.

Boys will physically assault boys who like pink. It'd say that counts as "people concerned that boys don't display their liking of pink".

Re: No Girls Allowed

#120

Post by aestra »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #94

As a parent of two pre-school girls, this is a concern of mine. But in some ways I think this issue is worse for boys than girls. Girls are "allowed" (but not encouraged) to shop from the boys section. My daughters have and use some boys' clothing, toys, furniture, etc. But a boy wearing pink clothes or dancing or playing with dolls is setting himself up for extended teasing.

This is annoying. If anything because "too girly" boys can't use it anymore too. For example, the formally boys names of Alexis and Evelyn. Girls started to outnumber boys with that name and suddenly you couldn't give your boy a "girl's name."
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