“This is ‘Lord of the Flies’ with a female protagonist and better weapons”
“It’s the coming of age of the Title IX mom, who grew up as an athlete in her own right,” he said, referring to the gender equity law. “And men, who have grown up in that environment, who have daughters, want their children, both boys and girls, to have equal opportunity to play.”
Previous efforts by toy makers to market traditional boys’ toys as new lines for girls proved successful in just a few categories, like construction and ride-on cars, said Jim Silver, the editor in chief of TimetoPlayMag.com, a website about toy trends.
Selling action figures to girls has been less successful, he said, pointing to Princess Tenko and the Guardians of Magic from Mattel and Kenner’s Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, both of which bombed.
For many girls, things changed with the arrival of Katniss. Zing, whose sales doubled during the two weeks that it advertised on 3,600 movie screens playing “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” last fall, plans to advertise on twice as many screens for the first installment of the series’s two-part finale, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” which is due in November.
Jill Calderon, an 11-year-old sixth grader in Atlanta, is so enamored of Katniss that she and her friends play “Hunger Games” at recess, authentically reconstructed with a make-believe cornucopia and a presiding “game maker.” Her grandparents were horrified by her interest in a story that revolves around children battling one another to death in a dystopian world, but her mother is fine with it. (video at the link)
NYT
12 comments:
I hope little Grace isn't aiming that bow at the Clinton's house.
She could get in a lotta trouble.
When bows are outlawed, only girls will have bows.
Uh huh. And little boys are suspended from school for using finger guns on the playground.
Patti Smith is a big "Hunger Games" fan: link
50 years of attempted social engineering failed.
Why not give up and let girls be girls?
My sisters and I used to make rubber band guns.
Judgy Bitch does a great job of showing just how totally the social engineering has failed. Read her posts on the kind of degrees women pursue and the jobs they take.
Women, by and large, want to do the same work outside the home that they used to do inside the home. They do the same caretaker work for money, instead of love, as Judgy Bitch says. This makes the home an empty, cold place.
The only place where the social engineering has taken hold of women is in encouraging them to whore.
Yes, but would Diana have touched one with a ten foot pole?
Or a six foot Spartan?
I have a nephew who plays "Hunger Games" on Minecraft (its a mod to the game). He is only 10 and doesn't really understand what the movie Hunger Games was all about. I'm not about to try to sit down with a 10 year old and explain. He is just having fun. Why ruin it with sociological explanations, doom and gloom.
When my daughter was about 8, she had her own bow and a small crossbow. Everyone hunted and bow hunting was a big event. During the off seasons, we would have competition archery events. She got quite good at it for her age class. It is a skill that doesn't necessarily rely on brute strength, especially the crossbow. It is something that girls can compete equally (or almost equally) with the boys. No one made her do this. She just wanted to do so.
Lord of the Flies wasn't a dystopian world. It was just kids.
They straightened right out again when the adults showed up. Everything was normal.
The lesson being that that's what normal is.
They make kids small specifically to limit the damage they can do.
The world would not be a good place if the wishes of six-year-olds came true.
Starting with school bus crashes.
I saw both movies and liked them enormously. That said, the plot is a preposterous crock. They mine coal with exploited labor, but use robots for crowd control. What really sells the movie is Jennifer Lawrence. She makes the whole thing credible, and you can't help but root for her......She's really nice. She only kills the mean bullies and none of the nice kids. She went out of her way to help that cute, little black girl. And it was especially touching the way she arranged a floral display next to the little girl's body after she was killed. Even when you're fighting for your life, it's important to make those small gestures to show what you're fighting for......There's much about these movies that make me gnash my teeth, but I keep rooting for Katniss.
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