Gendered voices in children's television advertising

Gendered Voices in Children’sTelevision Advertising

Fern L. Johnson and Karren Young

�—Televised ads for toys directed to children were examined to address two researchquestions: (1) Do advertisers script language differently for females and males? and (2)How is gender used as a discourse code to link products to gender roles? In a sample from1996, 1997, and 1999, ads for boy-oriented toys outnumbered those oriented to girls. Inboy-oriented ads, the voice-overs were exclusively male, and in the girl-oriented ads, theywere mainly female. Gender exaggeration in voice-overs was prevalent. Verb elements inthe ads were also examined. Gender patterns were found in the types of verb elements used.Boy-oriented ads contained more elements emphasizing (1) action,(2) competition anddestruction, and (3) agency and control. Girl-oriented ads contained more verb elementsemphasizing (1) limited activity and (2) feelings and nurturing. The speaking rolesscripted for girls and boys also revealed polarized gender voices and gender relations.Finally, the use of “power” words was prevalent in a number of ads targeted to boys butwas absent in those targeted to girls. We concluded that the gender ideology underlying theseads portrays males and females through strikingly traditional gender-polarized voices, andwe discuss the implications for teaching media literacy to children.

Advertising— on television, bill-boards, public transportation, the

internet, in newspapers, magazines, and

movie theatres—invades the conscious-ness of most everyone. Sponsors payenormous amounts to place ads in thoselocations where the largest segment ofthe targeted audience is likely to seeand hear them, and they rely on new,creative approaches both to instill andfuel the desire for more and more con-sumption. Although most ads targetadult audiences, children make up animportant audience. Children play witha vast array of toys and eat trendyfoods and snacks—many of which areintroduced to them through advertis-ing. This non-adult market is the focusof this essay.

In a consumer-oriented culture, ad-vertisers must position the productsthey represent as enhancements to bothhappiness and desirable life styles. Im-age serves as the link between product

Fern Johnson is Professor of English and Direc-tor of the Communication and Culture Programat Clark University. Karren Young is an inde-pendent filmmaker and production staff memberat WYBE Public Television in Philadelphia.The research was supported in part by a ClarkUniversity Faculty Development Grant to thefirst author. An earlier version of this paper waspresented at the Conference of the Organizationfor the Study of Communication, Language andGender, Milwaukee, WI (October, 2000) Thesecond author completed a portion of the analy-sis for a senior honors thesis at Clark University.We thank Sandra Zimmerman for her assis-tance and express appreciation to the reviewersfor CSMC for their helpful guidance in strength-ening the analysis.

Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVol. 19, No. 4, December 2002, pp. 461–480

Copyright 2002, National Communication Association

and consumer motivation: get the con-sumer to buy into the image associatedwith the product, and purchase be-comes more likely. “In short,” com-ments Sut Jhally (1995), “the advertis-ing image-system constantly propels ustoward things as means to satisfaction”(p. 80).

To keep the consumer system going,new strategies must be constantly in-vented to keep the buyer motivated tospend money, not only to replace olditems or replicate product choices butalso to stock the newest available goodsand services. The pressure for newnessof product and novelty of approachkeeps the creative department of adver-tising agencies experimenting withnovel strategies—strategies “over-the-top” of all that came before. The re-sults often appear ludicrous, startling,and bewildering in their separation ofthe product from the gimmick used togain and hold attention. Benetton, forexample, topped its already over-the-top approaches with a mini-magazinefocused on death row inmates insertedinto the February 2000 issue of Talk.Nike went so far that it crossed theacceptability line during the 2000 Sum-mer Olympics when it ran a slasher-type scenario featuring a woman escap-ing from a tent in the forest with anattacker in pursuit whom she outrunsbecause of her Nikes (the ad was pulledon September 19 because of numerousconsumer complaints). Children’s adssimilarly present novel strategies, mostoften aimed at exploiting themes of funand fantasy. In an ad for “Honey CombCereal,” three kids are transformed intoanimal heads, and dad into a completezombie with bug eyes whose easy chairbecomes a hospital-like stretcher; thekids race off with dad to the supermar-ket where they empty the aisle ofHoney Comb, heaping their grocery

carts and speeding to an older womanchecker who looks and acts like apunker. An ad for “Disney.com” showsa potato-chip-eating, bored boy beingsucked into a computer screen to thecraziness of the “z-ther zone”—a placewhere you “don’t need clean under-wear to go.”

With the rapid modifications in adpresentations, consumers are just aslikely to look for new ads as they arefor new products. Indeed, Robert Gold-man and Stephen Papson (1996) con-clude their aptly titled book, Sign Wars:The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, bysaying:

The capitalist idea of overcoming barriersto capital circulation has bred a commod-ity culture driven by an amazingly rapidturnover of signifiers and signifieds. Freeflying signifiers and signifieds are continu-ously recirculated into a still newer pas-tiche combo of the day. The combinationsinflate, the combinations deflate, and theprocess starts again, hinging and unhing-ing signifiers and signifieds to define newsigns. (p. 273)

Yet, beneath the creativity and inno-vation that produce new images, underthe over-the-top visual and sound biteinvitations, these ads contain many lessdiscontinuous, less fragmented, lessnovel representations and stories: the“united colors” of Benetton exist in aculture where black men outnumberwhite men on death row; the Nike adtaps into the realities of rape and fearin women’s lives; Honey Comb drama-tizes children’s wish for escape fromtheir parents’ rules about food so thatthey can consume loads of their favor-ites, and shows a story of dads so suffi-ciently inattentive that anything goes.And although Disney.com offers excite-ments not available in the “real world,”this technological fantasy is packagedfor boys, thus playing into the gender

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GENDERED VOICES IN CHILDREN’S ADS DECEMBER 2002

divide in technology use. The recogniz-able, more stable representations inads anchor what is new with what ismore enduring, essentially a tie to moredeeply contoured cultural meaningsthat, on close examination, look mark-edly conventional. Indeed, such repre-sentations serve to reiterate and rein-force certain dominant ideologies. Notsurprisingly, for-profit businesses capi-talize on dominant ideologies even asthey move elements of product promo-tion away from what we have come toexpect in advertisements or story-telling more generally. Exploiting cre-ative surfaces and more deeply embed-ded conservative ideologies, the paradeof ever-interesting ads can simulta-neously be short blasts of new represen-tational forms and depictions of domi-nant ideology, especially in theirrepresentations of identity possibilities.Moreover, since the middle of the 20th

century, ads have been increasinglytargeted to special audiences, each ofwhich is a “segment” for potential prof-itability through consumption. Chil-dren are one of these special audi-ences.

The Context for Marketingto Children

Children are one market segmentthat has grown dramatically in impor-tance (see Pecora, 1995). As initiatesinto consumer culture, kids are beingcultivated to spend their own and theirparents’ money on a vast array of prod-ucts—mainly in the toy, breakfast food,and snack categories. These three cat-egories have not changed much overthe years, but what has changed areincreases in quantity and product differ-entiation, along with a more rapid pacein the presentation of new products.McNeal (1998) reported that children

spent $23 billion as consumers in 1997,and he projected their spending wouldrise to $35 billion by 2001, with an addi-tional direct influence on spending byparents of $300 billion in response to thelitany of “I want this!”—“Get me that!”—“Please Mommy/Daddy, please!”—“Here’s my Christmas list.”

Along with being cultivated as con-sumers, children are also the targets ofwhat Jhally (1995) terms “image-basedinfluence” (p. 81). One main type ofimage-based influence targets genderidentity, and uses it to link products totheir consumers. Even brief viewing oftelevision commercials directed to chil-dren reveals the centrality of genderimages as a source of meaning. Thesegender images display appearances andactivities linked with gender. Based onour cursory examination, it appearsthat they also present an array of lin-guistic markers that bolster the morevisually obvious gender representa-tions; some of these linguistic markerscan be heard easily while others aremore subtle.

The purpose of the investigation re-ported here is to provide a critical ex-amination of discourse in televisioncommercials made for and marketedto children in order to determine thedegree to which the language codesthat are used call upon gender as ameaningful cultural category for sell-ing. Two main questions are addressed,both of which direct a systematic criti-cal inquiry regarding the ways in whichlinguistic markers function to definegender:

1. Do advertisers script language differ-ently for females and males in adsdirected to preschool and early el-ementary school boys and girls?

2. How is gender used as a discoursecode to link products to genderroles?

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CSMC JOHNSON AND YOUNG

Television as Cultural Resource forChildren

Children’s television programminghas been a major interest area amongmass communication scholars for manyyears. As part of that interest, researchon advertising to children has focusedprimarily on influence and effects, andthe implications of these for regulation.Many of the research studies prior to1990 are summarized in Young (1990).A recent volume devoted to childrenand advertising (Macklin & Carlson,1999) deals mainly with advertisingimpact as a complex social and cogni-tive process and with research on whatthe editors label the “two hot buttons”(p. xiii) in today’s advertising to kids:cigarettes and alcohol. In a section ofthe book devoted to future directionsin research, the authors emphasizenewer media for advertising, such asthe Internet, and refining audience re-search.

Although the case has been maderepeatedly for the importance of under-standing children’s television in gen-eral and advertising in particular, weoffer several points that are germane tothe present investigation and that em-phasize television’s role as a culturalresource. First, ads for kids serve astraining for consumer culture; hence,their role in enculturation and socializa-tion should not be underestimated (Al-exander & Morrison, 1995). Throughads, kids learn that products for saleoffer life style enhancements, fun, peergroup status, and up-to-date coolness.In short, children’s viewing of ads pre-pares them well for their roles as capi-talist consumers. Advertisers target kidsby appealing to their distinctivenessfrom adults and their power as “sover-eign, playful, thinking consumers” (Ka-pur, 1999, p. 125). The ads childrenview on television invite them to project

themselves into roles or to fantasizetheir play and responses to others inways that are suggestive as to what kidsshould do.

Second, ads are increasingly part ofthe daily cultural environment of ourlives. For today’s children, ads are for-mative in that cultural environmentmore intensely and pervasively thanever before. Advertisers see the poten-tial in the children’s market, especiallyin the context of U.S. cultural patternsof spending and consumption far out-pacing savings.

Third, ads directed to kids offer mod-els for how to act, interact, and speak.Even when children recognize ads asfantasy, visions of enactment areplanted as ideal images to strive to-ward. Children do, in fact, act out manyof the ads they see on television, dem-onstrating mastery of both actions andwords. Moreover, they can go a stepfurther by taking the words or actionsand placing them into a situation to-tally separated from the ad and itsproduct—a practice that parents andelementary school teachers see repeat-edly. The foot-kicking of a karate fightertoy, the head tilt of little girls playingwith their Barbie dolls, and the mouth-ing of dialogue and slogans such as“get the power,” “kids rule,” or “happe-nin’ hair” are examples of extrapolat-ing commercials’ content into play ven-ues. Using Judith Butler’s (1993) theorythat gender is performatively con-structed as a starting point, Meijer(1998) makes a similar point in herdiscussion of the “performative side ofadvertising.” She discusses the role ofads in promoting certain cultural stories.This line of thinking bears similaritiesto the cultural indicators perspective ofGeorge Gerbner and others, which isanchored in the idea that television isthe major storyteller of our time.

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Fourth, some of the models avail-able in ads for children map onto thesignificant foci of dominant ideology—gender, race, ethnicity, class. In thecase of the present project, gender ide-ology in ads is used to sell kids not onlythe commodity in question but genderideology itself. Ads, thus, are part ofeach child’s learning about gender andaccomplishing the cultural task of be-coming, in Sandra Bem’s (1993) words,a “gendered native.”

Related to these arguments regard-ing the importance of understandingwhat children view as cultural induct-ees, advertising functions as broad cul-tural impact—impact contributing to theenculturation of children through thecultural codes used to present prod-ucts. We are especially interested inwhat the discourse elements of ads con-tribute to the cultural milieu of kidsand to their available models for gen-der enactments. What forms of dis-course are given to boys and girls?What aspects of verbal language givegendered meaning to products, to theactors in the commercials, and ulti-mately to the child viewer who is be-coming, among other things, a gen-dered native of her or his culture?

Gender Codes in Children’s Advertising

Past research on television commer-cials directed to children has shownthat conventional sex roles underliethe content of many ads. Smith (1994)analyzed ads aired on children’s pro-gramming in 1991 and found ads fea-turing only one sex or the other to besex-role stereotypical. He concludedthat when “advertisements only showtraditional sex roles, they limit therange of experiences that children cantry out” (p. 335). Furnham, Abramsky,and Gunter (1997), who studied U.S.

and British commercials directed tochildren, concluded too that genderstereotyping “remains the dominantadvertising form” (p. 97). These conclu-sions are entirely consistent with re-search on children’s television pro-grams. Thompson and Zerbinos (1995)provide a useful overview of genderpatterns in programming as back-ground for their study of gender rolesin animated cartoons. In their study of175 episodes from 41 different cartoonprograms, they found both that maleleads significantly outnumbered fe-male leads (99 percent to 55 percent),and that male and female charactersportrayed gender stereotypic roles.

Gender roles are portrayed partlythrough the ways in which scenes areframed and timed and in aspects ofpresentation not always readily appar-ent. These more subtle codes were ex-amined by Welch, Huston-Stein,Wright, and Plehal (1979) who focusedon the level of action or activity, pace,visual and camera techniques, and au-ditory techniques in a sample of toycommercials directed at three targetaudiences: boys, girls, and both boysand girls. Among their findings weremore variability in the form of changesfrom scene to scene and more cameracuts in the boy-oriented commercialscompared to the other two targetgroups. Commercials targeted to girlscontained more fades and dissolves.Especially relevant to the present study,these researchers found that girls talkedless than did boys in the commercialsthat target both girls and boys, but theytalked a lot in those commercials tar-geted only to girls. These researchersconclude that, “the messages aboutmasculine and feminine behavior con-veyed by the features measured heremay be more influential [because they

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are subtle] than the blatant stereotypespresented in the content” (p. 208).

Despite some noticeable differencesin recent ads directed to kids—espe-cially in the more frequent, but stillminimal, inclusion of children ofcolor—we speculated based on our ownviewing that a close examination wouldshow more recent ads to be strikinglytraditional in portraying polarized gen-der codes. In an era when the meta-phor of “level playing field” is fre-quently used, and in the context ofgreater attention to girls and the “GIRLPOWER!” movement, one might ex-pect more enlightened representationsthan are seen in the typical ads pre-sented to children. We will, however,demonstrate through several character-izations of language contained in adsdirected to children that the underly-ing ideology for the discourse scriptedinto these ads presents verbal imagesof gender that conform to blatantlytraditional recipes for enacting and per-forming a gendered life. These imagesengage discourses that position girls(and women) in constrained positionsand boys (and men) in action-orientedpositions. As recipes, the ads turn outsweet girls and wild boys.

Television Ads as Cultural Environment

It has long been established that tele-vision contributes to the cultural envi-ronment of children. Data have beenavailable for a number of years aboutthe time that children spend per weekwatching television—mainly commer-cial television. Ads comprise an alarm-ing proportion of that viewing time.Research conducted on over 10,000ads taken from seven television pro-gram sources in early 1990 by Kunkleand Gantz (1992) showed a range of10:24 minutes (Nickelodeon) to 13:26

minutes (independent stations) of ad-vertising per hour of children’s pro-gramming. The 1990 Children’s Tele-vision Act regulated the amount ofair-time that can be devoted to com-mercials: 12 minutes per hour on week-days and 10.5 minutes per hour onweekends. Most ads run for 30 sec-onds, with a few 15-second spots ap-pearing also.

A simple calculation shows the mag-nitude of kids’ exposure to commer-cials. The regulated advertising limitscalculated as the number of 30-secondads possible in an hour of children’sviewing time equal 24 ads per hour onweekdays and 21 per hour on weekenddays. If a child watches just one hour ofcommercial television per day, thatchild would likely be exposed to atleast 160 ads each week. If a childwatches what has been reported as theaverage of two and one-half hours perday (Woodard, 2000), she or he wouldlikely be exposed to about 400 adseach week—many in this number re-peated over and over during the week.Young children tend to rivet their atten-tion on ads and look forward to theirappearance in the programs theywatch. Children at different ages under-stand and give meaning to ads differ-ently (see John, 1999), but regardless ofage, ads stick with kids. Producers ofchildren’s programming and advertis-ers catering to kids know that creatinga child-oriented television milieu boostsprofitability. “Young children,” saysStephen Kline (1993), “. . . clearly getexposed to many ideas about social lifefrom this specifically child-orientedprogramming and advertising” (p. 73).

To learn more about the broadthemes and more specific discoursestyles relevant to what children mightbe learning about gender from tele-vised commercials, ads broadcast on

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different types of television channelswere collected for analysis. Emphasiswas placed on elements of the gen-dered voice, specifically on four aspects:voice-overs, verb elements, speakinglines given to girls and boys, and theconspicuous use of the word power in anumber of ads oriented to boys.

Content and DiscourseAnalysis Study

Sample of Commercials

Samples of children’s television pro-grams in the cartoon genre were videorecorded from commercial networks,regional independent New England sta-tions, and Nickelodeon in the fall of1996 and 1997 and again in the fall of1999. We chose the three different pro-gram sources to ensure that the sampleincluded advertisements from a broadrange of cartoon programs (the DisneyChannel and the Cartoon Networkwere not included because at the timethe sample was collected, they werepremium cable selections in the re-gional market and, thus, available onlythrough expanded cable subscription).The 1999 sample was added to theoriginal two-year sample so that wecould check for any differences thatmight have occurred in the gender tar-geting of commercials.

Fifteen half-hour programs weretaped for fall 1996 and fall 1997, and24 half-hour programs were taped infall 1999 (actual time for each programis approximately 27 minutes becauseof commercial and station content be-tween programs). The total number ofcommercials included within the timeboundaries marking the beginning andending of the programs, exclusive ofnetwork and station promotions, was478 (149 for the 1996 programs; 133for the 1997 programs; 196 for the1999 programs). The range of commer-cials per program was 8.2 to 8.9 (com-mercials aired between programs werenot included in the analysis).

The ads were classified in one of fiveproduct categories (see Table 1): (1)food items, mainly breakfast cereals,snacks, and drinks; (2) toys; (3) educa-tional and public service announce-ments, such as anti-drug messages; (4)recreational facilities or locales, such as“Water Country” and “Chuck E.Cheese’s,” and fast food restaurants,such as McDonalds; and (5) video andmovie promotions. The 1999 sampleincluded additional ads for adult prod-ucts and miscellaneous services, whichwere coded as (6) other. The mostsurprising ads in this category were for“VISA Card” and “Ford Trucks,” bothadult products; the VISA card promowas scripted as a comedy about a man

TABLE 1DISTRIBUTION OF COMMERCIALS

CategorySample 1

1996Sample 2

1997Sample 3

1999 Combined

Food, drink, snack items 47.7% (71) 41.4% (55) 45.9% (90) 45.2% (216)Toys 42.3% (63) 42.9% (57) 34.7% (68) 39.3% (188)Educational and public service 3.4% (5) 7.5% (10) 3.1% (6) 4.3% (21)Recreation 2.7% (4) 2.3% (3) 6.1% (12) 4.0% (19)Video and movie promotions 4.0% (6) 6.0% (8) 3.1% (6) 4.2% (20)Other NA NA 7.1% (14) 2.9% (14)Total 149 133 196 478

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who gets locked in the bathroom of hiswoman friend’s glamorous apartment.The woman eventually gets a lock-smith by using her VISA card, but notuntil her man has given himself a fa-cial—all of which seems to be a gender-linked humorous appeal for young chil-dren to think about credit cards andwhat you can do with them when youhave no cash.

Commercials promoting toys madeup 39.3 percent of the sample—some-what more than the proportion of toycommercials in the sample collectedby Kunkle and Gantz’s (1992) in 1990.In the 1990 sample, 33.8 percent of theads were for toys. Using this data as acomparison point, we found a greaterproportion of toy ads in 1996 and 1997(42.3% and 42.9%, respectively) but asimilar proportion (34.7%) in the 1999ads. The higher percentage of toy adsin both 1996 and 1997 was likely influ-enced by pre-holiday fall promotionsfor toys in contrast to the 1990 samplewhich was collected in February. In-creased promotion of toys as commodi-ties may also have led to more ads inthis category. The decrease in the pro-portion of toy ads in 1999 compared to1996 and 1997 is less easy to explain.One factor contributing to this lowerproportion is the lesser number of “Bar-bie” ads, which may have resulted fromthe impact of an unsuccessful shift totechnology-related Barbie products,corporate losses, and an executiveshake-up at Mattel Toys (see White,1999).

Analysis of Toy Commercials

The commercials for toys were se-lected as the focus for analysis. Of the188 such ads broadcast during thesample period, there were 147 differ-ent ads (that is, 22 percent were re-

peats). Toy ads were selected for sev-eral reasons: they are the mostexpensive commodity for sale on kids’television; they are the product mostamenable to gender elaboration andsegmentation; and they are the cur-rency of cultural “stuff ”—and as such,the training ground for the inclinationto buy the newest products available.

The toy ads were transcribed andcategorized by their gender target audi-ence using three categories: (1) adstargeted to boys in which boys weredepicted, (2) ads targeted to girls inwhich girls were depicted, and (2) adstargeted to both boys and girls eitherbecause both genders were featured orbecause there was no gender content.Categorizing ads in this manner provedstraightforward. We did, however, addtwo criteria to clarify the categoriza-tion scheme. First, the gender of thechildren portrayed rather than the na-ture of the toy itself guided the coding.Thus, for example, an ad for “FrisbeeBowling” featuring only boys wascoded as boy-oriented even though theproduct itself carries no clear genderlink to boys. Second, ads explicitlyoriented to one gender rather than theother were coded as such even if achild of the other gender was includedeither in the background or for a fewseconds. These were judged to be “gra-tuitous,” token gender representationsand not explicit market orientations.Nine ads (4.8 percent) in which girlscould be seen were classified as “boyoriented” because the girls in these adswere either completely in the back-ground or were hard to detect withoutreplaying of the ads. For example, a“Super Soaker” water gun ad showed agirl in the background for about threeseconds but featured boys in the cen-tral roles and included an aggressivemale voice-over. There was only one

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example of a gratuitous token boy,which occurred in an ad from the 1999sample for a hand-held “Friend Link”toy; in this case, the boy was the objectof the girls messaging to one another.

Overall, boy-oriented ads exceededgirl-oriented ads, and there were rela-tively few ads directed to both girls andboys, x2(4) � 19.72, p � .001 (seeTable 2). Differences in gender-orienta-tion did, however, appear for the threeyears sampled. For 1996, boy-orientedads outnumbered girl-oriented andboy/girl-oriented ads. For 1997, theboy-oriented and girl-oriented ads weresimilar in number but greater than boy/girl-oriented ads. For 1999, boy-ori-ented ads heavily dominated thesample. Because our interest centerson gender representations in languageand not on sample year attributes, we

grouped all commercials together forsubsequent analysis.

The names of many of the adver-tised toys vividly position verbal im-ages of boys and girls in their culturalcontext. The act of naming linguisti-cally engages semantic notions that re-inforce gender polarization and directattention to certain attributes of genderideologies. “Big Time Action Heroes”and “Tonka Mega Crew,” for instance,stress size as critical in these male-oriented toys, while “Juice ’n CookiesBaby Alive” and “Bedtime Bottle Baby”signify parenting as a female-linkedquality. A sampling of toy names ap-pears in Table 3.

For purposes of understanding whatemphasis was being taken in the con-sumer development of boys and girls,we also looked at the type of toys being

TABLE 2GENDER ORIENTATION OF TOY COMMERCIALS

Gender Orientation 1996 1997 1999 Combined

Boy oriented 47.6% (30) 42.1% (24) 70.6% (48) 54.8% (103)Girl oriented 30.2% (19) 49.1% (28) 23.5% (16) 33.0% (62)Boy & girl 22.2% (14) 8.8% (5) 5.9% (4) 12.2% (23)Total n � 63 n � 57 n � 68 n � 188

TABLE 3SAMPLE TOY NAMES BY GENDER ORIENTATION

Boy-Oriented Toys Girl-Oriented Toys

Dragon Flyz Take Care of Me TwinsBig Time Action Hero Fluffy My Come Here PuppyElectronic Karate Fighters Juice ’n Cookies Baby AliveBeast Wars Transformers Girl TalkMars Attack Action Figures Star FairiesTotal Justice Super Heroes California Roller GirlSuper Man—The New Adventures Video Game Clueless Fashion and Makeup Dear DiaryTonka Magna Crew Tea BunniesPlay Doh Demolition Derby Fashion Magic Fingernail Fun Salon SetWar Planets Bedtime Bottle BabySuper Soaker Extra Power Water Gun Star Castles Light Up Gem Stone andAnamorphs Transformers Seashell CastlesVortex Power Bat Bowling Party StacieSuper Sonic Power Crash Pit Racers Friend Link

Potty Dotty

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advertised. The toys were placed intocategories based on their type (dolls,trucks, games, etc.), which were de-fined more specifically to better de-scribe the products for sale. Although arange of toys was promoted in the ads,several types dominated. For boys, ac-tion figures such as Karate Fighters andStar Wars characters were most com-mon (37 percent of the boy-orientedtoys). Also of note was the rise in 1999of emphasis on hand-held electronicgames and computer related toys(“Game Boy” for example): 16 suchads appeared in the 1999 sample, com-pared to one in 1997 and none in 1996.For girl-oriented toys, the most com-mon categories were what we labeled“posable figures”—Barbie Dolls beingthe most common, but also includinganimal figures—which comprised 44percent of the toys promoted. Unlikeaction figures, these posable figures areshown being placed in scenes with littleor no action. This type of categorydifference in the toys marketed to boysand to girls reinforces traditionally po-larized ideas about the play activities ofboys and girls.

Dimensions of GenderedLanguage in Toy Ads

Voice-Overs

The dominance of male voice-oversin television commercials has been welldocumented (see Allan & Coltrane,1996), and we did not expect to heardepartures in the ads we analyzed. Thefaceless but not genderless person be-hind the voice provides information,urges consumers to pursue the prod-uct, and sometimes makes disclaimersabout the product or its packaging andappearance. To determine the particu-lar patterns in gendered aspects of

voice-overs in ads directed to kids, weconsidered two attributes of the voice-overs: (1) the gender of the voice-overand (2) whether the voice-over wasgender-exaggerated.

All of the commercials in the sampleincluded voice-overs. A male voice-over was heard in every one of theboy-oriented and the boy/girl-orientedads. The vast majority (89%) of thevoice-overs in girl-oriented ads con-tained female voices, but there weresome with male voices. Four ads ori-ented to girls contained both a femaleand a male voice-over. In all but twelvecommercials, the voices heard werethose of adults. Of the twelve non-adult voice-overs, a girl’s voice washeard in eight girl-oriented ads, and aboy’s voice in only one ad oriented toboys (those oriented to both boys andgirls included one boy’s voice-over andone in which both boys and girls wereheard). Based on these patterns, theuse of voice-overs appears to follow asimple rule: sex of the voice-overshould generally be matched to sex ofthe target for the toy, but the malevoice-over may be used in ads targetedto girls and must be present in adstargeted to both sexes.

Anyone who has listened to thevoice-overs in ads directed to kidsknows that some rather strange soundsare emitted from the faceless speakers.The voices often sound stylized to cre-ate a particular quality associated withthe play that is to be imagined by thechild. Amid more normal soundingvoices, we hear unnaturally deep, huskyvoices; voices that sound like growls;squeaky, high-pitched voices; voiceswith a sing-song quality; voices sound-ing out of control. To understand thedegree of gender voice stylization andexaggeration present in the voice-overs, we characterized each voice-

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over as either “normal sounding” or as“gender exaggerated”; in a couple ofcases, animal voices were used, whichwere noted as “other.” For male voice-overs, we listened for exaggerated mas-culine and/or aggressive voice qualities.For female voice-overs, we listened forexaggerated feminine, high pitched and/orsing-song voice qualities. A third personnot involved in the project listened to20 voice-overs and characterized all ofthem in the same way that we did.

Exaggerated gender stylization wasprevalent in the voice-overs used incommercials for both boy-oriented andgirl-oriented toys (80% and 87%, re-spectively). Gender stylization in pre-sentation of the voice-overs was notcommon in the few commercials fortoys pitched to both girls and boys.

It seems that advertisers, when con-structing voice-overs, strive to accentu-ate gender, sometimes to the point ofcaricature. The male voices are toowild and loud, and the female voicesare too high pitched and singsong. Al-though adults might perceive thesevoices as caricatures, children—espe-cially those in pre- and early elemen-tary school—likely interpret them moredirectly. From a critical perspective,the exaggeration, even if playful, servesto stabilize polarized images of the gen-dered voice and may also contribute toattitudes and stereotypes about howfemales and males sound. The exag-geration is precisely what we hear inthe mimicking of gendered voices, es-pecially when males imitate the femalevoice.

Gendered Verb Elements

Verbs and their associated wordscontain a rich semiotic map that pro-vides clues to the nature of agency,action, and type of activity. As children

develop language, their understandingand use of more complex verb systemsalso develops. For pre-school children,verbs play an important role in bothdirecting and commenting on activityand action. Classic examples of self-directed speech demonstrate this as-pect of children’s language, for in-stance, in expressions such as “throwball” when the child is throwing theball or “push it” when the child ispushing a toy across the floor. Playactivities for this age group and olderare replete with verbs to accompanythe action. Because actions engage par-ticular connotations in the context of acultural system that underlies the nam-ing of activity and action through lan-guage, the semantic “text” for any verbincludes much more than the action orstate itself. Thus, verbs, like other as-pects of language, contain “semanticnotions” (Johnson, 2000, p. 36). Thesesemantic notions encompass the cul-tural connotations and ideologicalmeanings that develop over time withuse of the verb in context. In a demo-cratic society, the verb “dictate,” forexample, might suggest something thattakes away another’s freedom and au-tonomy; in a culture saturated withviolence, “smash” might suggest mean-ings related to aggression and de-struction of property; and “nurture”extends beyond the protective develop-ment of infants and children to morepublic facilitation of the developmentof others by teachers, coaches, andmanagers in the workplace.

To gauge the role of verb elementsin creating a gendered voice in adsdirected to children, the transcriptionsfor ads that had been coded as eithergirl-oriented or boy-oriented were ex-amined for their verb elements. Allverbs were considered except those inthe “TO BE” copula forms (“is,” “are,”

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etc.). From that examination, five cat-egories were developed to distinguishparticular types of verb elements thatmight be relevant for gender imaging.Emphasis is used in the text to high-light the particular attribute.

1. action verb elements, which are de-fined as those verbs that relate tophysical movement or motion, usu-ally associated with an agentExamples: crawl, fly, jump, race, ram,throwSample: from ad for “RC MEGARACING”

steer em, pass em, rough it upride the railshit a jump and throw a blockspeed up and take-offflip over and keep on movin

2. competition/destruction verb elements,which are a particular case of actionverbs, directly relate to competitiveaction or to destructive movementsor behaviorExamples: crush, fire on, knocked out,pounce, slam, stomp [your opponent]Sample: from ad for “K’NEXBREAKAWAY SPEEDSTERS”

first you make emthen you break emsmash em upbreak em smash em feel the power

3. agency/control verb elements, which aredefined as verbs referring to thetarget consumer or the speaker inthe commercial as one who pos-sesses power over someone else orsomething else, or who acts as acause or catalyst for changeExamples: control, defeat, rule, takeSample: from ad for “WAR PLAN-ETS”

you transform planet rockinto a mighty war planetyou construct generator nodesto form the ultimate war planetof unlimited power

4. limited activity verb elements, whichare defined as verbs or verb ele-ments that signify an activity or stateof being that does not involve ex-plicit physical movement linking theperson to an action indicated in theverb, even though some motion maybe involvedExamples: beware, get, go, know, look,talk, wait, watchSample: from ad for “FRIEND-SHIP LINK”

just look and seeand you might findthat perfect friendwho’s just like you

5. feeling and nurturing verb elements,which are a special case of limitedactivity verb elements, are specificin their orientation to emotions andcaringExamples: cuddle, loves, taking care of,tuck you inSample: from ad for “TAKE-CARE-OF-ME TWINS”

take-care-of-me twinskeep me on the runbut caring for twinsis so much more fun

The types of verb elements used inthe different target audience groupswere analyzed to see if the semanticnotions engaged through these verbsdiffer in the boy-oriented and girl-oriented ads. Although our concernwas not with analysis of the quantita-tive distribution of language elements,frequency counts are provided to un-derscore the prevalence and magni-tude of themes in the verbal imagespresented. These counts should be in-terpreted in the context of the highernumber of boy-oriented than girl-ori-ented ads (the ratio is 1.66:1). Thefrequency counts for verb elementtypes appear in Table 4 and show cleargender-linked patterns, x2(3) � 165.99,

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p � .001 (FEELINGS and NURTUR-ING verb elements were excluded fromthe chi-square analysis because the cellsize for boy-oriented ads is zero).

Several patterns stand out when welook at verb element types. First, themost conspicuous among the verb ele-ments is the large difference in FEEL-INGS and NURTURING verb ele-ments between boy-oriented and girl-oriented ads, x2(1) � 33, p � .0000.These elements are completely absentin the ads for boy-oriented toys. Incomparison, scripts cultivating the fe-male voice of nurturance are repletewith the verb “love” (and “loves”). Anumber of nurturing verbs also clus-tered around the role of mothering andtaking care of baby dolls just as amommy would care for her baby, or insome cases, mothering words by anadult female shown in the ad. “Feed,”“cuddle,” “tuck in,” “bathes,” and“care” typify this type of semantic ori-entation.

A second pattern of gender polariza-tion emerged for verb elements relatedto COMPETITION and DESTRUC-TION, which are heard frequently inads for boy-oriented toys, x2(1) �44.33, p � .0000. The boy-orientedads contain over twelve times as manyof these verb elements as do the girl-oriented ads. Across the three sampleyears, scripts cultivating the male voice

loudly proclaim the semantic notionsof competition and destruction withverb elements such as “bash,” “battle,”“compete,” “rammed,” “rumbled,”“slash,” “smash,” “toppled,” and “wreck.”

The competition/destruction verbsheard in girl-oriented commercials sug-gest less intensity and out-of-controlactivity. “Win” was heard in an ad for“OLYMPIC GYMNAST BARBIE” inwhich we see the quintessential girls’sport—individually oriented and associ-ated with eating disorders. “Break” oc-curs in an ad for “TALK BACK DEARDIARY” and refers not to somethingthe girls do but to an action taken byboys who tried to “break into” thegirl’s old diary. In the 1999 sample,three of the four verbs in the competi-tion/destruction category were utteredby a gratuitous boy who appears in adsfor “BOWLING PARTY STACIE”:after lurking in the background whiletwo girls play with the game, he grabsthe Stacie doll when the girls leave theroom and commands her to “slam” thebowling pins. These latter two ex-amples reinforce gender polarizationbecause the boys in the ad are the oneswho voice the competition/destructionverbs.

Third, verb elements associated withLIMITED ACTIVITY are strikinglymore present in ads targeted to girlsthan in those targeted to boys, x2(1) �16.34, p � .001. Even though boy-targeted ads contain a reasonably highnumber of these verb elements, wordsof this type are much more prevalentin the girl-targeted ads. The most fre-quent limited activity verb elementsfor girls were “come,” “got,” “go,” “be-lieve,” and “look.” For boys they were“watch,” “go,” “need,” and “get.”

A fourth pattern was for AGENCYand CONTROL verb elements to bemore prevalent in the ads for boy-

TABLE 4FREQUENCY OF VERB ELEMENTTYPE BY GENDER ORIENTATION

OF COMMERCIAL

Verb ElementType

Boy-Oriented

Girl-Oriented

Action 68 51Competition destruction 113 9Agency and control 103 24Limited activity 151 268Feelings nurturing 0 66

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oriented toys than in those for girl-oriented toys, x2(1) � 24.57, p � .0001.The ratio of these elements in boy-oriented compared to girl-oriented adswas in excess of 4:1. In the boy-orientedads, many different agency/control verbsoccurred; the more frequent ones were“rule,” “control,” “drive,” “change,”“stop” (as in “stop the alien invasion”from an ad for “ANAMORPHS THETRANSFORMERS”), and “take over.”Many of these verb elements expressedstrong forms of agency and control andoften occurred in conjunction with verbelements of competition/destruction. Incontrast, the agency/control elements ingirl-oriented ads suggested weaker se-mantic agency/control: the most com-mon verbs were variations of “to make,”plus “create,” “take,” and “change”(which can express strong or weakagency depending on its context).

The verb elements in the category ofACTION showed less variation by gen-der-orientation of the commercial. Be-cause all toy ads appeal to the child’sfantasy of doing something with thecommodity object for sale, this is notsurprising. Indeed, variations on theverb “fly” occurred as the most com-mon action verb across the samples.Yet, there are some differences in theverbal images suggested by the particu-lar action verb elements used in theboy-oriented and girl-oriented ads. Inthe boy-oriented ads, we tend to hearverbs such as “pass,” “throw,” “takeoff,” “zoom,” “flip,” and “fire on.” Theverbal imaging associated with girl-appropriate physical activities and ac-tions engaged less intense forms: varia-tions of “skip,” “walk,” “twirl,” “move,”“dance,” “stroll,” and “check out” (asin “check out Happenin’ Hair Barbie”).

Putting these verb categories to-gether, children hear a consistent differ-ence in the images of the gendered

voice that are created. Looking at theads without hearing them reveals onepart of the gender polarization processbecause we see girls and boys presentedquite differently—doing different things,associated with different toys, wearingdifferent types of clothing, and so forth.These visual aspects are relatively easyto point out to even an untrainedviewer. When it comes to listening,many aspects of the verbal imagingprocess are more difficult to hear; it isunlikely, for instance, that specific verbswould be recalled in the same way asmight be the hair color of a characteror the scene in which a child is shownplaying with a toy. Yet, these moresubtle gender cues constitute aspects ofgendered discourse.

The Speaking Roles of Girls and Boys

That women are talkers and mendoers is a persistent Western culturalbelief. This, of course, is a far too gen-eral assumption, but it persists in thefolk linguistic domain. Indeed, there issome evidence that women, comparedto men, use language more as a re-source and more as a legitimate activ-ity in and of itself (see Johnson, 1996;Walker, 1994). Yet, evidence alsoshows that women are conversation-ally dominated by men in some con-texts related to work and decision-making and that they may even fallsilent when persistently cut short (seeRomaine, 1999, Ch. 6; West, 1992). Inthe cultural contexts in which languageis used, variations will occur in genderrelated patterns of dominance, talk-ativeness, and silence. It is useful, how-ever, to ask what models of genderedtalk occur in the commercials that chil-dren watch and hear. Do advertisersscript speech similarly for girls andboys, or is a gendered representation

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of talk advanced? What happens whenboys and girls are placed together incommercials? Do they talk equally? Insimilar ways? To address these ques-tions, we examined the speaking rolesin the sample considered for thisproject.

Of the 188 ads, 41 percent (78) in-cluded speaking turns. A speaking turnwas defined as a verbal utterance by anon-screen character. The boundariesof a turn were marked by the begin-ning and end of continuous speakingby an on-screen character; thus, a turncould end when another on-screencharacter began speaking, when avoice-over began, or when action ormusic rather than speaking was fea-tured.

More than half of the girl-orientedand the boy/girl-oriented ads con-tained speaking turns (55 percent and53 percent, respectively), compared tothe boy-oriented ads, where only 26percent included speaking lines,x2(2) � 69.73, p � .0000. If thissample is typical of what children areexposed to when they watch ads withincartoon programming, they are beingpresented with verbal models that rein-force the language stereotype that girls(and women) engage in talk while boys(and men) prefer action to words.

In those commercials where boysand girls appear together (which aremost often for games), we have anopportunity to see and hear models ofgender relations. Many of these adsdemonstrated clearly scripted elementsof gender relations—in all cases ele-ments that polarize boys and girls. Oneof these is a girl-oriented ad, shownduring “Scooby Doo,” for a board gamecalled Girl Talk; in this game, the play-ers draw cards that instruct them to docertain things or to take a penalty “zitsticker.” The comments of two young

teen boys, shown in black and white attheir school lockers, are interspersedinto the scene of four girls, shown incolor, playing the game in a girl’s bed-room. The comments that the boysmake about the girls are immediatelycontradicted by the girls’ discoursewhile playing the game, conveying theidea that girls, when left to themselves,engage in trivial, child-like games andgossip. All characters in the commer-cial are white with the exception ofGirl 3 who is African American (andhas only a supporting speaking role inwhich she latches a remark onto thestatement of another girl).

Boy 1: Kelly’s not goofy like other girlsGirl 1:I play to win! [as Kelly jumps arounddoing the chicken]. . .Boy 2: Susan’s more sophisticated. . .Girl 2: [reading from a game card] “Call aguy and tell him something gross.” Never!I’ll take a zit-sticker [Susan puts a zit-stickeron her face]. . .Boy 1: Kelly would never kiss and tellGirl 1: My first kiss? Sure, I’ll talk about it.It was at the movies.Girl 1: I’m a winner/Girl 3: /and a flirt a gossip and boy crazyGirl 1: can we talk about this?

The name of the game itself announcesthe separation of girls and boys, usingthe well established semantic notion ofgirl talk as a cultural form to sell thegame. The boys appear to be olderthan the girls, and the camera angle onthem is from below, which enhancestheir stature. Contrary to the images ofboys in many boy-oriented ads, theboys in this ad appear in control ofthemselves and reasonably mature.This is clearly an early-teen dating

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scene packed with gender codes, andits placement in a cartoon programdirected at younger children gives it aclear socialization function.

Another example of how gender re-lations are represented in discourse istaken from a commercial for the boardgame Trouble. This ad shows two girlsand two boys playing the game. Bothboys speak in the ad. One girl is com-pletely silent, and the other utters onlythe affirmation of “Yeah” followed bya giggle in response to one of the boys’remarks that “It’s fun getting intotrouble.”

In the ads oriented to both girls andboys that include speaking lines, boyshad more speaking turns than girls. Inthese 23 ads, girls spoke in five ads:one speaking turn in four ads, and twoturns in one ad. The boys charactersspoke in 9 ads: one speaking turn inthree ads, two turns in three ads, andthree turns in four ads. The sample issmall, but it appears that boys are givenmore speaking roles in these ads thanare girls. Also, when both girls andboys speak in an ad, girls speak only inresponse to the actions or statements ofboys; for example, in an ad for thegame Trouble with four speaking lines,the single girl speaker orients to theboys’ comments:

Boy 1: hey want to get into trouble?Boy 2: yeah, it’s fun getting into troubleGirl: yeah [giggles]Boy 1: back to start

This is a classic case of male control ofdiscourse.

“Power” Discourse

Other aspects in the discoursecodes likely differentiate images ofthe female and male voice in similarways. For example, the use of caption-

ing in boy-oriented ads—often in capi-tal letters and with exclamationpoints— emphasizes certain verbal el-ements and visually stresses certainaspects of the male paralinguistic pro-totype. The effect looks very muchlike an overdone PowerPoint presen-tation with words popping up, jump-ing, and flying about on the screen.The words “power” and “mega” runthrough many of the boy-orientedtoy ads. The use of the word “power”in ads oriented to boys was so con-spicuous that it caught our attentionearly in the project.

No other attribute typifies tradi-tional conceptions of maleness in re-lationship to femaleness more thanthe uneven balance of power favor-ing males. Power is thought of bothas a relationship attribute, as in “Heholds all the power in the relation-ship,” and as an individual attribute,sometimes in the context of others, asin “He is a powerful leader,” andsometimes more self-contained as in“He has powerful strength.” Even inthe more self-contained sense ofpower, the underlying semantic no-tion contains meaning related to rela-tionships. To have power is to havethe potential to use it with otherpeople, to be in an unequal powerrelationship with other people, or toact upon things. Power can also beassociated with objects, which by im-plication will transfer this quality tohumans if they possess or use theseobjects; a good example of this is thenaming of the energy snack food“Power Bar” with its implication thateating the food will give the con-sumer more power. Linguistically,“power” is most often used as a nounor adjective and is commonly alsoused as the base for the word “power-ful.” As a noun, power is a thing to

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possess, essentially a static imposi-tion of a state that is given culturalmeaning. To hold power is literallyto hold nothing, but the semanticnotion of power utilizes power as ametaphor to “thingify” actions or pro-cesses. Here, the semantic notion isconsistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s(1980) characterization of an ontologi-cal metaphor, which “allows us to pickout parts of our experience and treatthem as discrete entities or substancesof a uniform kind” (p. 25). Whenused as an adjective, “power” trans-fers the same properties attributed toits noun state to some other noun.

The transcripts of all ads in the twosamples revealed that approximatelyone-fifth (21 percent) of the ads forboy-oriented toys contained thewords “power” or “powerful.” Of 45power words, 28 were nouns, for ex-ample, “pack secret power,” “morepower than before,” “home run power,”“get the powers,” “pump up the power,”and “power you’re packin.” “Power”was used as an adjective 17 times, forexample “pow-pow-power wheels”“power pack,” “power bat,” and “powerbase.” “Power” as an adjective wasused in the names for two toys:“POWER RANGERS ZEO” and“SUPER SONIC POWER CRASHPIT RACERS.”

“Power” was heard only once in girl-oriented toys ads. Ironically, the onlyinstance of a power word in girl-ori-ented ads was in the commercial for“BARBIE SUN JAMMER CAR.” Herethe word came at the end of the 30seconds when the manufacturer wasidentified as “Power Wheels.” Toymakers and their advertisers eithermake no effort to associate or mayconsciously avoid associating girl-toyswith power or their potential to trans-fer power to their users.

Implications

The ads we analyzed along withmore informal viewing and re-viewingof many television commercials di-rected to children raise serious ques-tions about the ongoing role of televi-sion in gender enculturation, especiallyamong very young children. Kids lovecommercials, and it is a rare child whodoes not watch them with rapt atten-tion. Despite the messages that young-sters receive from parents and teachersabout the greater equity of the sexes ineducation, sports, jobs, and so forth,polarized patterns of language con-tinue to be modeled in consumer cul-ture directed to children.

One interpretation of the themesfound in the advertisements we ana-lyzed is that they are a response towhat strategically savvy advertisersknow about selling to boys and girls.From the perspective of what interestskids, there is evidence pointing to gen-der differences in what kids value intelevision programs. Valkenburg &Janssen (1999), for example, found dif-ferences in what boys and girls in thefirst- through fourth-grades found inter-esting in programs: boys favored pro-grams with action and violence morethan did girls, and girls favored pro-grams with innocuous content andcomprehensibility more than did boys.These interests likely carry over to ad-vertising content. Even if this is thecase, the sharply polarized gender mod-els offered up in ads coupled with theverbal images created for girls and boysrecycle conventional gender ideologyrather than minimizing or challenginggender stereotyping.

Gender polarization in ads may per-sist for many reasons, but several possi-bilities seem likely. First, because weare dealing with a commercial enter-prise, past formulas that work will likely

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endure, unless there is clear evidencethat these formulaic approaches fail tobe effective with the target audience.From a marketing perspective, changefor the sake of social progressivenessmay simply be too risky.

From a marketing perspective, it isalso more profitable for producers ofchildren’s toys to create separate toysfor boys and girls as a way of placingmore items in the marketplace. If boysand girls are presented with differenttoys, they will likely believe that it isappropriate to buy and associate them-selves with different toys. This type ofmarket segmentation primes childrenfor adult consumer behavior and ispart of the cultural making of genderednatives that Bem (1993) describes.

The appeal to gender polarization inadvertising directed to children pre-pares the child consumer for the bar-rage of gender specific products andappeals that have become common-place in the adult consumer market-place. In a reciprocal manner, the po-larized gender strategy in presentationsto children places their world of goodsin the context of the larger world ofgoods that are visible and audible inthe adult domain—goods that solidifythe separation of activities, voice, inter-ests, and appearances of women andmen. Selling gender dichotomies tochildren primes the economic pumpfor the substantially larger profits to behad in the sharply divided, sex-linkedconsumer market of adult products.Many of the adult products that chil-dren are seeing and hearing about willbe meaningful because the scripts forgender and consumption have beenlearned in the process of the child be-coming a gendered native of her or hisculture.

Although the finding that gender isheavily used in advertising directed to

children (or to adults for that matter) isin itself not surprising, our researchoffers insight about how language ele-ments contribute to the construction ofgender. Language patterns are power-ful symbolic resources for situating gen-der identities. Yet, language patternsoften go unnoticed or are consideredless important than the material as-pects of gender identity. What we haveadded to the knowledge about advertis-ing to children is a map of how gen-dered language features that have beenthe subject of extensive sociolinguisticinquiry are given voice as part of thestrategy for selling consumerism to kids.Television advertising offers a sitewhere gender specific polarization intoys can be exploited not just visuallybut through manipulation of what isculturally recognizable as the gen-dered voice. Television serves as a per-vasive “secondary source” for how boysand girls (and men and women) speak(Romaine, 1999), thus perpetuating thecycle of reciprocal influence back andforth between folk-linguistics (whatpeople believe about language use) andlanguage as actually used. The verbalimages of boys and girls speaking, asthose images are attached to genderdifferentiated commodities, symboli-cally undermine more nuanced cul-tural ideas about gender role changesthat have currency in education and atleast some parental guidance.

In our study, we addressed severaldimensions of language that are steepedwith gender semantics. There are likelymore ways in which the 15 and 30second “commercial” packages of ide-ology create verbal imaging of gender.It would be useful to examine, for ex-ample, the relation of verbal utterancesand visual features in the ads, such asplacement of the actors, paralanguage,and nonverbal aspects (head tilts, arm

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movements, posture, facial expres-sions) of boy and girl actors.

Although not addressed in this anal-ysis, race and ethnicity are also voicedin alarming ways in television’s appealto kids as consumers. For example, theonly instance in our samples of an adexclusively featuring a black boy de-picts him speaking a version of rap-vernacular dialect, and the few adswith visibly Asian children rarely givethem any voice at all. An examinationof ads directed to children that focuseson the appropriation of “cultural diver-sity” would be a valuable addition toscholarship and media literacy pro-grams.

After watching and listening to hun-dreds of television commercials di-rected to kids, the voices begin toinhabit one’s head. Many are memo-

rable—to us but more so to kids whoare their targets. For those concernedabout teaching gender sensitivity tochildren, the messages from toy ad-vertisers are stiff competition. In ourears we hear a sickeningly sweet voicesinging “Potty Dotty” as girls are in-structed to practice mothering, and agrowling voice-over proclaiming theaggressive power of “Electronic Ka-rate Fighters” who are swinging ateach other in an out-of-control scenethat cuts back and forth between hu-mans and toys. These voices and im-ages and many others like them con-stitute part of kids’ culture. Clearly,as we teach children to be medialiterate, that literacy training shouldinclude tuning their ears to the im-ages of gender conveyed through lan-guage.

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Received February 5, 2001Final revision received March 1, 2002Accepted June 5, 2002

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Gendered voices in children's television advertising