Re: <nettime> The Barbie Syndrome

[Julia Lazarus <jux@cs.tu-berlin.de>]

Hi Rebecca,

you do add some good points to the girlie-game play.

However, as with all things, proabably the truth is somewhere in the 
middle.

For if we can not escape socialisation
..girlish pink games might be the chance to get girlish girls 
involved into "cyberspace", along with the other ones, who had the great 
luck to get a less girlie-like education/socialisation by their families.

Me being a luckily one of previliged coed type woman, with no gender 
specific education by my mom, but of course part of a western society 
still, and therefore not totally free of socially-influenced so 
called gender-specific behaviour, also want to add, that I don't think 
the typical(?) boy-type game of shooting "enemies", and finding in some 
strategic or brutal steps the whatever called "gral" of the game
is any more sophisticated or challenging to play, than a barbie-plot.

I find the difficulties in these games not in the gender-specifics, but 
in their gross lack of intelligence.

The pitty thing is games like "myth", which did even ask for 
mathematical, somewat, skills, is that there are so few of them.

Maybe this is because the market is refering to the request by people. 

After all only a very little percentage of population has access to a
good education. Which would also transform the gender-difference in 
something in between people, and not in between genders, as you say in 
your article.

Knowing that this is the question for which was first chicken or egg,
I wish to point out, that barbies, of course being advertised with great 
effort since years, and the advertisemnet targeted specifically towards 
girls, the bad thig about is is not the advertisement, but that as the 
sold numbers of puppets proove, it is really the girsl who respond most 
directly to these silver and pink colors. Whoever makes them buy that 
stuff, it is definitly not the media, sure mattel would be more than 
happy, if also boys would respond to that pinkish glamour thing, there 
advertisement department created around that sexy blond puppet.

julia

jux@cs.tu-berlin.de
http://shoko.calarts.edu/~julia


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