Playing Hangman

Both Scanlon and Kimmel make good points as to how society shapes gender. It is interesting to see the subliminal messages pointed out in such an obvious way. It feels like I’m playing a game of hangman and when looking directly at the answer seems so distant and unachievable, but when it is told to me it is a complete “Oh/Duh!” moment. Having grown up playing/owning the games that Scanlon mentions makes me wonder how many of the letters given to me were from society and how many were from my parents. I always thought that my brother and I were the exceptions to the rules and that our parents influenced us more than society. Neither of us were ever pushed to “do” our gender by our parents, but as I look back I realize that we “did” gender almost to a T and I think a lot of it had to do with the games we played. We weren’t avid TV watchers, but we loved to play games. Games that were very gender specific. Like I said my games included those mentioned and others like them. His games were Legos, Army men, cars, Cowboys and Indians, and other toys that involved imagination, but still kept to the norm of potential violence and aggression as well as domination. The games we played with our parents were very gender neutral and included a fair amount of intellect to play in relation to age. Those games, however, were not influential enough to change the outcome of our game.

While our games are not yet over they are proving to be tough to change, I with my happiness dependent on having a man in my life and he with his “strong” silence and lack of emotion are proof that society has made us who we are regardless of what our parents said or did. It’s difficult to accept that those subliminal messages actually worked and are still working 20 years later. I see the same games in stores with updated boxes, but with the same picture and description and I wonder if girls today are still buying into it. So far they appear to be, and the popularity of these games has crossed over into the virtual world which a much more powerful influence on kids and teens today.