Question

There's a lot to think about in a recent study on Disney Princess Media. The study was covered by the Huffington Post (You'll find other press coverage if you search for it).

Here are some more points made about the study, quoted from the Oregon news source:

Linder and her co-authors found that 96 percent of girls and 87 percent of boys had taken in some form of princess culture. Roughly 61 percent of girls reported playing with a princess doll in the last week, but only 4 percent of boys said they had played with the dolls.

When the subjects were examined a year after the initial analysis, both girls and boys who played with the dolls showed an increased likelihood to adhere to female gender stereotypes, a fact that could prove especially problematic for girls, said Sara Coyne, a co-author of the study and professor of family life at Brigham Young University.

Here's how the HuffPo journalist described this part of the results:

For both boys and girls, greater interactions with princesses predicted more gender-normative behavior — like wanting to play with traditional female stereotypical toys and activities (e.g., dolls, tea sets, playing house), and behaviors (e.g., avoiding getting dirty, avoiding taking risks)

1. Do these descriptions of the results actually show a relationship between Disney Princess media and gender-normative behavior that is different for boys and girls, as the one headline suggested?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a relationship between disney princess media and gender normative behavior that is different for boys and girls.

Disney princess media makes toys and games different for different gender. Since birth a girl and a boy is told to act according to the norms. Their parents starts to tell them that if you're a girl you need to show softness in your actions and words both. If you're a boy you don't have to cry because real men don't cry. All this things takes up a large part of the head in both boys and girls. When they are see disney movies they see barbies acting like what a actual women should behave like. The actions matches the things told by their parents. And when they get toys of barbie girls start to relate to it more than boys. Boys more likely are attracted to car racing games, wrestling games etc, because that matches with the toughness and the things they have always been told about to be as a man.