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Gendered Monkeys

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[Hook/anecdote on observations of nephews etc]
A few years ago, a video of a five-year-old girl named Riley went viral. Standing in a decidedly pink toy aisle she laments, “Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff?” Riley is not the only one questioning the ways in which toys are gender-stereotyped and marketed, and some go so far to argue that, in addition to shaping gender identity, it in contributes to gender inequality. [additional discussion/framing main questions of the paper etc] Gender, not to be confused with sex, which is biologically defined by reproductive organs, may be understood as a socially constructed range of characteristics that pertain to and differentiate between masculinity and femininity. To further clarify, “male” and “female” are sex categories, …show more content…
Hassett, Siebert, and Wallen claim that rhesus monkeys display gendered toy preferences, which is significant because they are not bombarded with stereotypical marketing campaigns or pressured by societal cues. In their study of the interactions of 34 monkeys with human wheeled toys and plush toys, they found that male monkeys, like boys, showed strong preferences for wheeled toys, whereas like girls, female monkeys displayed more variability in their preferences, thus the difference in preference between wheeled toys and plush toys differed greatly between males and females. This in turn suggests that such preferences can take root in the absence of explicit gendered socialization. The researchers offer the hypothesis that “toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans” (359), and “that biologically-based sex differences in activity preferences significantly influence sex difference in childhood object choice”

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