Ah! A Spider!

I work as a pharmacy technician, and the staff at my pharmacy is made up of all females. The other day while at work I was talking to another tech and one of the store managers. I was telling him that I am going to be moving at the end of next month, and asking him to hold some of the big cardboard boxes with handles that product is shipped to the store in from the liquor department. He said that he would, but he also suggested that I ask someone in the farm stand department to hold some banana boxes for me as well, as they are quite large. I told him that there was no way I wanted anything to do with those boxes because one time I was talking to a guy who worked in that department and he said that they often find large (usually dead) tropical spiders in those boxes. Another tech overheard me say something about spiders and got nervously asked us if there was a spider around. I told her what we had been talking about, and then the manager said to her that he had seen one a few minutes ago in our bathroom (the pharmacy has its own bathroom in it). She asked him if he killed it, and he said no. She asked him to go in there to find and kill it (she hates spiders). He said one of us could do it if it bothered us, and she replied by saying "but we're all girls, and thats what men are for! to kill spiders!"

While doing the reading assignment for this week the connection from the reading to the personal experience that I drew was from chapter one in Media, Gender and Identity. On pages 2-3 the author talks about media influences on our expectations of human behavior. One thing the author observes is that "domestic or romantic dramas (including soap operas) show us how neighbors, friends and lovers interact" (Gauntlett 3). I would be willing to be that my co-worker had at some time in her life seen in a movie or on a TV show an interaction where a female was frightened by spider and demanded that a man kill it for her. The killing of spiders and other creepy crawlies are part of the stereotypical roles of a man, to defend and comfort women. I wonder how men who are afraid of spiders deal with this social expectation of them to be the exterminators?

Happy Meal

The other day before my evening class I swung through a McDonald's drive-thru to grab a quick meal. I ordered a kids chicken nugget meal (because the regular meal is a ten piece and is more than I wanted) and the person taking my order asked if the happy meal was for a boy or a girl. I said it did not matter, and she asked me again "is it for a boy or girl?". Again I said that it did not matter. She told me my total and I drove around to the window to pay. When I did get my kids meal I looked inside and saw that I had received a Hello Kitty toy in the meal. I assume that I was given a "girl's toy" since I am a female. I think this because whenever I go to McDonald's I get a happy meal and I always say that the gender does not matter, yet I can not recall ever being given the "boy's toy".

This interaction reminded me of the part of the reading where the author saw the dad with the stroller on the train and initially could not tell the sex of the child, but as soon as the father put a baseball cap on the child the author said that she thought "Ah, a boy". But then that initial assumption was disrupted by seeing that the child also had pierced ears, flowers on their sneakers, and lace trimmed socks. The interaction reminded me of how the author goes on to discuss the social function of addressing gender roles to children almost immediately when they are born. This interaction seemed to me to be another example of how gender roles are reinforced by society. Though I do not know what the boy toy option was, I doubt it was a Hello Kitty bobble head figure dressed in pink.

The interaction made me wonder, why do toys have to be so gender segregated?