The harm of pink toys

This week we were discussing the article about how princess stereotypes can actually be harmful in the development of young girls. The text argued that it automatically drives girls into being good, caring and in conformity which eventually leads to decreasing opportunities in the future.

As I have a 3,5 years old daughter I have empirical knowledge of my own. I´ve never pushed kids into certain roles i.e my son plays with dolls oocasionally with his sister etc. But I somewhat agree with the article´s notion about the innate choices, such as our son plays "girls" games but he tends to play more with cars or play football. The same goes with our daughter, she plays football too, but she values her dolls more. Of course they could have picked these things along the way, but we haven´t coarsed them into specific roles.

As relation to language I´m anxiously waiting to hear when the difference arises when using language. I remember from another course where we were analysing texts and deciding whether or not they were written by a woman. The were some tendencies such as female writers used more descriptive language and long phrases than male writers. However at another course I came across this female writer who used an alias and wrote as a man in order to be more credible (long time ago, 19th century or so...). As regards to language I don´t these things are innate, rather something we probably learn in school. I´ll end this text with a universal question: Why is it that when a female curses it is regarded somehow worse and aggressive? And I somewhat agree with this, or at least I sort of notice it better when a girl curses.