Many LSU students have already scheduled their classes for the fall semester. Imagine, however, that the prerequisite for that class you’ve been dying to take is that you be the “correct” gender.
Are you a girl who wants to take a fluid mechanics class? Sorry, this class is for boys only. Are you a boy who wants to take an English class on Old South Sexuality? Too bad, only girls can take this class.
McDonald’s is behind on the times, thinking that children still like clowns, want birthday parties in greasy fast-food restaurants and need gender-based toys accompanying their Happy Meals.
Not only partly responsible for the growing waistlines and cholesterol levels of millions of Americans, McDonald’s is also reinforcing the idea that implementing gender standards on young children, regardless of their personal tastes, is OK.
When you were still of Happy Meal age, you probably remember being asked if you wanted the “girl toy” or the “boy toy.”
Antonia Ayres-Brown recently wrote an essay published on Slate concerning an experiment she conducted in 2008, when she was only 11 years old. Frustrated with fast-food company employees inquiring whether or not she wanted the “girl toy” or “boy toy,” Ayres-Brown wrote a letter to the McDonald’s CEO.
After receiving a reply from a “customer satisfaction representative” claiming that McDonald’s employees are not trained to ask about “girl toys” or “boy toys,” Ayres-Brown embarked on the experiment.
When boys and girls, ages 7-11, were sent to 15 different McDonald’s locations to order Happy Meals, employees at the counter gave the child the toy that matched their gender, without even asking, about 93 percent of the time. However, when the children attempted to return the toy in exchange for the opposite-gender one, nearly 43 percent of stores refused.
In one particular case mentioned in Ayres-Brown’s experiment, an employee flat-out lied to a young girl who asked for the boys’ toy, claiming they were out of stock. When an adult male was sent a few minutes later, he was instantly given a boy’s toy.
A popular graph on the Internet perfectly sums up this boy/girl toy issue. It demonstrates “how to tell if a toy is for boys or girls.” It then asks, “Do you operate the toy with your genitals?” If the answer to this question is yes, then the toy is not meant for children. If the answer is no, it can be either a boy’s or girl’s toy.
Young children are routinely trained at a very young age to like what is appropriate for them to like. Girls are given pink clothing, tiaras and makeup sets, while boys are given toy trucks, comic books and action figures.
While it is true that some girls want to play with Barbie dolls and some boys want to be Superman when they grow up, we barely give them the chance to decide for themselves what they like.
Instilling these kinds of thoughts in children just leads to future gender disparity. Telling girls that Legos aren’t for them can lead to girls not wanting to be engineers. Teaching boys that it’s not OK for them to show or recognize emotions can lead to them not becoming social workers or psychiatrists.
What McDonald’s is doing by designating its toys as being for one gender or the other is further establishing these harmful gender norms.
Girls can read comic books and boys can be ballet dancers, as long as you don’t tell them that what they’re interested in is “wrong” for the gender that they are.
Children just want McNuggets, not to be discriminated against because of their gender.
SidneyRose Reynen is an 19-year-old film and art history freshman from New Orleans.