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Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes, by Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown, Mark Tappan
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Player. Jock. Slacker. Competitor. Superhero. Goofball. Boys are besieged by images in the media that encourage slacking over studying; competition over teamwork; power over empower - ment; and being cool over being yourself. From cartoons to video games, boys are bombarded with stereotypes about what it means to be a boy, including messages about violence, risktaking, and perfecting an image of just not caring.
Straight from the mouths of over 600 boys surveyed from across the U.S., the authors offer parents a long, hard look at what boys are watch ing, reading, hearing, and doing. They give parents advice on how to talk with their sons about these troubling images and provide them with tools to help their sons resist these mes sages and be their unique selves.
- Sales Rank: #496833 in Books
- Published on: 2009-10-13
- Released on: 2009-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.57" h x 1.21" w x 6.51" l, 1.16 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
About the Author
LYN MIKEL BROWN, ED.D., Professor of Education at Colby College, is the author of Girlfighting and Raising Their Voices. SHARON LAMB, ED.D., Professor of Psychology at Saint Michael's College, is the author of The Secret Lives of Girls and Sex, Therapy, and Kids. MARK TAPPAN, ED.D., Professor of Education at Colby College, writes about boys' development and education, and conducts workshops for parents and teachers on the impact of media on boys.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Biased, unscientific, and unfortunately fatally flawed
By Michael Brotherton
I initially became aware of this book from articles online and a tv interview with one of the authors, Sharon Lamb, that I found ridiculous. I know that sometimes media coverage distorts things, so I wanted to read the book and give it a fair shake. While there was some distortion, the truth was as bad or worse in a variety of ways.
The intended audience for this book are parents of boys, which I am not (yet). I am, however, a boy at heart and still like most of the things I liked as a boy. I'm a science fiction novelist, a scientist (astronomy professor), and a consumer of products aimed at boys as well as older males, which the authors are definitely not. That objectivity can be an advantage, but they seem to have their own strong biases, that, coupled with a lack of intimacy with what boys like makes them seem extra clueless from time to time.
Their work is fatally flawed, both in execution and presentation. Everything they say isn't worthless, but this is too much money and too much time to spend to get out someone else's biased opinions about something to be scared about.
First, from my perspective as a scientist, I was very disappointed. The press release about the work told me they'd "surveyed 674 boys age 4 to 18, walked through malls and talked to sales clerks and came to understand what boys were reading and watching on television and at the movies." I learned less from the introduction of the book where the authors state that they're not presenting their survey or any of their results, or even what kids they surveyed and how they were selected. They filter their data and just give your their conclusions, without the opportunity to review the material for yourself. I might not minded so much except that they have a lot of conclusions they totally fail to justify, and the biases revealed while reading the book failed to inspire credibility.
First, I don't know if most of the kids are 4, 18, or something in between. I don't know if they're white, black, rich, poor, urban, or country. I don't know how they were chosen to take the survey. How about an appendix? A weblink? It's sort of criminal not to tell the reader if the surveyed kids are like your kid, and there's essentially no information about this later. Also, the term "boys" is used as a moving target, sometimes referring to young children, sometimes older teenagers, which is also not helpful.
The authors simply assert, without justification, that media (which includes toys, movies, tv, books, marketers of all types, etc.) gives boys role models that fall into these stereotypes: Player. Jock. Slacker. Competitor. Superhero. Goofball. And these are all bad, because all stereotypes are bad, because limiting boys' choices is bad. And some of these would be bad even if they weren't stereotypes. They don't explain how they reached this conclusion, and seem to be able to force every character into one of these five, whether they really fit or not. Surprisingly, Michael Scott of The Office is a "slacker." I don't think so. They either don't know what a slacker is, or they don't recognize that Michael Scott, as screwed up as he is, isn't one. He's a complex character of the type that isn't supposed to even exist.
The authors also have a list of good messages and bad messages, which they never explicitly state, or justify, but you can figure out after reading a few hundred pages. These arise out of a combination of a particular flavor of feminism and political correctness, never quite spelled out, along with a conviction that anything stereotypical is bad. Teamwork is good, self-reliance bad, for instance. Competition and winning is bad (because most boys will be losers). Consumerism and materialism is bad (even when research has shown not having enough money leads to unhappiness). Not all boys have an interest in sex (yeah, some of the boys pre-puberty). There's no list of these, again. They're just apparently obvious and indisputable and rarely supported with citations. Another fatal flaw is that there's little in this book to show that these messages actually have negative impacts on boys. I can believe some do, but I'd feel better if the research was there to show the effects of different messages. There is research, for instance, suggesting that some forms of aggressive play are healthy for boys.
Another fatal flaw is the assumption that commercial interests have consciously conspired to push these messages, with barely even lip service to the truth: there's a complicated give and take between our culture and boys' interests and the messages they see. Honestly, if switching up the message would let a company invent and sell mass quantities of a new product, they would do it. Advertisers and movie makers use test audiences and see what their markets respond best to. It isn't a one-way street. There is something fundamentally clueless about the authors' whiny over-the-top lamentations about commercial interests and the repeated rhetorical questions about why, oh why, don't they give boys more options? The obvious answer, which seems to elude these well-educated folks who have spent years wondering, isn't a conspiracy, but economics. They believe they'd lose money, or at least not make as much. And they probably regularly test that belief.
Another fatal flaw is they're not trying to give an unbiased view of all the messages being sent to boys. They're specifically looking for messages they think are bad. This means that they scrutinize things that are pretty good overall to pick at one small thing they don't like. For instance, they say positive things about Spider-man, but ultimately focus on his choice at the end of the first movie to push away Mary Jane and go it alone. Doing things alone is a bad message, so Spider-man is problematic. Even though he gets with Mary Jane in the second film, which they ignore.
Even when something isn't bad for the appropriate age group, as labeled by a rating, the creators are blamed when younger children are disturbed by inappropriate violence. Parents, the target audience, get a free pass for taking their 6-year old to a PG-13 movie because Iron Man and Batman products are also marketed to younger kids. There's an agenda about whom to blame, and it's never parents.
In the spirit of the book, now that I've been very critical I'll backtrack and say, oh, it's not so all so bad. They got some things right, too. What are the things I think are probably right and problematic in one way or another? Dads are often portrayed as buffoons or villains in tv shows or movies, I agree. There is a big cultural issue among boys not wanted to look like "fags." The overt and realistic violence of tv wrestling probably isn't the best example for boys. There's also an unfortunate culture of violence and degradation of women associated with rap music. Female characters in comic books all have giant boobs. Yeah. I would never have realized these things without this book (that kind of sarcastic aside is very much in line with how the book reads).
The best things about the book could be covered in a single chapter. The authors recommend that parents be aware of what their children are consuming and discuss some of the messages they're getting and make sure they realize they have options. They also give some lists of good movies, books, etc., that they think aren't too compromised by bad or stereotypical messages, and some of them are quite good in my opinion, e.g. the movie October Sky.
I collected dozens, maybe more than a hundred, examples of things I thought were mistakes, clearly biased, unsupported, or otherwise questionable. This book is not worth that level of critique, but I want to share a few funny things.
There's a discussion of listening to the "silly" music of Phish with your son. There's no mention of the marijuana culture associated with this band at all! I can just see this scene acting out in real life between a son and a clueless dad (potentially as awkward as that scene in American Pie with the porn magazines).
When talking about essentially everything, the authors don't seem to understand that "all" means "all" and overgeneralize to an embarrassing amount. For instance, one sentence states that "all" superheroes go it alone...then a few sentences later they mention Fantastic Four, Power Rangers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There are plenty of superhero stories (lets add X-men, Justice League, etc.) that stress teamwork, but they're conveniently ignored. Likewise when talking about toys, why are they "all" cars, airplanes, and trains? Well, in the next paragraph building sets are discussed, and then also action figures. So they aren't "all" the same, except when they want them to be. And there's a lamentation that a toy truck doesn't include a driver figure, thus denying boys the opportunity to imagine his day, what he's thinking and feeling while driving, etc.
In a discussion of movies like James Bond and Wanted, somewhere between Superhero and action movies, the authors comment on two instances where female characters are assassinated in creative ways...and simply must point this out as a message that "killing women is fun!" A different brand of feminist would be happy to see that both sexes are getting killed (men are killed 95% of the time in tvs and movies), but these authors simple can't resist the sexist jibe. I'm not comfortable with this type of sexist telling anyone what is healthy for boys, or for society as a whole.
In a discussion of a Halo novelization, they point out all the specific detail given to the military equipment in the opening pages. They lament about how horrible it is that boys need to know all this detail, totally clueless about one trick of good writing: specific detail grounds a story and helps author credibility while building the world.
There's a whole section devoted to sneakers, a lot of it related to rap music. There's a lamentation about how sad it is that boys have so few options when it comes to footwear. Seemed to fit the stereotypes of women obsessed with shoes, which I found ironically funny for a book whose message is that stereotypes are bad.
"All" superheroes and action heroes are out for vengeance...which they characterize as "I'll show you!" after a failure. That's not vengeance. And our vengeance-based superheroes, aren't usually. Spider-man fights crime because he has the power and responsibility to do so for the greater good -- he didn't kill his uncle's murder. Batman didn't kill his father's killer. Neither did Daredevil. Ugh. Now, the Punisher is a different story, but that's his R-rated thing.
You just can't win with these authors. Jack Black in School of Rock is called a slacker and hence is a stereotype and bad role model. Except...in this movie and almost all stories, there is a character arc of transformation. The slacker learns to care about something and work hard at it until he is successful at the end and no longer a slacker. Criminals in movies like Blow are shown having fun with all the money and the toys they can buy with it, although they are of course caught in the end. But the authors claim that boys (the 4 year olds watching the movie no doubt because they never tells us the age group who said they were watching movies like Blow) will only remember the fun of materialism, not the ending of the movie or its overall message. It's like taking quotes out of context to give them the opposite of their intended meanings.
They don't like Family Guy because the show only seems to care about being funny. The lack of a politically correct message of their liking means they don't like it.
They don't like potty humor. They think it's a stereotype that little kids like potty humor, so that shouldn't be a common message. Well, crap. *I* like potty humor. Eric Cartman crapping on the teacher's desk in order to get detention and avoid a fight makes me laugh out loud every time. How dare comedy writers write funny stuff that's known to be funny? I mean, stereotypes are stereotypes because there's truth and success in them, even though they can't apply to every individual case. Seriously, they recommend a reduction in the potty humor out there.
There are many lamentations about how art is portrayed as a girl thing and boys aren't given the option to be artists. Also reading. Maybe if there weren't books like this one disparaging Superheroes in the title, comic books might help get more boys into art and reading the way they did for me. If only the authors gave as much thought to serious positive action rather than only complaining and finger pointing...
Seriously, I was not happy with this book. They stereotype every character into one of their classifications, complex or not, appropriate or not, without actually showing how they do it or what the total distribution might look like. They clearly have biases they never back up with research. They don't show their research. They just have lists of cherry-picked examples they crow about, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not. This isn't science. This is just a shoddy, whiny series of unsupported opinions.
I scanned amazon reviews of their previous book, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes, and found a lot of my criticisms for the boy book also hold for the girl book. I was dismayed to see references to this book being used in Women's Studies programs, as this is not a serious, scholarly work, but that kind of sales and attention might help explain when the media gave Packaging Boyhood the attention it got.
The real problem isn't that a lot of people will read this book. It's that it got misleading headlines based on a particular narrow opinion plastered in newspapers and on TV portrayed as serious results based on serious study and scholarship. That's fear-mongering for attention's sake and sales, worse than anything those evil marketers do targeting boys or girls, in my opinion.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A Solutions-Based Compass To Navigate the Media Morass
By Shaping Youth
I've asked "What About the BOYS?" time and time again...ever since I founded our nonprofit, Shaping Youth.org which deals with media and marketing's impact on kids.
Thankfully, authors Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown and Mark Tappan must've heard my poignant plea in the universe, as Packaging Boyhood serves up a wallop of a treatise on how the narrowcast gender roles and causal links to behavioral cues are upending our BOYS just as much as our GIRLS in a variety of overt and subtle marketing manipulations.
Funny, conversational and evidence-based, it's refreshing to see that Packaging Boyhood authors trump the staid style of Ivory Tower hand-wringing academics and `get real' with often amusing but blindingly pertinent examples of ads, campaigns, and online/offline media that permeate with creativity but underscore `what it means to be a male' with 21st century "equal opportunity toxicity." (sports and danger, the fastest man wins, full throttle drinking, big guys big guns, boys as players, slackers, pornified young lads at tweenage and ever earlier years, etc)
I particularly like that it's not a `power whine' but instead offers parents some `try this' examples in counter-marketing style which is the same solutions-based approach we take to media literacy at Shaping Youth.
I use Packaging Boyhood as a teaching tool when we tackle parent AND youth education, along with Media Education Foundation films, Jackson Katz Youtube clips, and data from The Good Men Project to uncork important convos on `what's happening out there' with our sons and to help brainstorm solutions to shift the track to a healthier worldview for kids...
Moreover, as a parent, Packaging Boyhood gives us the ammo to `fight back' in the battle for our sons' hearts and minds by lifting the veil on the whys and hows of attitudes and internal landscapes emulating aggression/violence, buffed boy, ripped six-pack icons of video games, `hunks' modeled and merchandised ad nauseum, and the quest for almighty `hotness.'
p.s. I have a teen daughter, not a son, but I continue to consult the book to make sense of some of the mirroring I see in her guy pals, with hiphop bravado hiding tanked self-esteem, adolescent angst and `The Adonis Complex' surfacing in comments that reflect boys' increase in eating disorders.
Once you read the book, it's like seeing a living lab because the evidence is everywhere touching what they do, hear, watch, read, and listen to. Makes me just want to reach out, HUG these guys and let out a `rebel yell' for change!
Amy Jussel
Founder/Exec. Director
[...]
Using the power of media for positive change
@ShapingYouth
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Well-researched and significant contribution especially for parents
By msyulo
I have come to know these authors through their book Packaging Girlhood which has provided me a wealth of research and analysis about how the media and intentional marketing ploys effect the lives of girls from birth. Packaging Boyhood, a complement to the first book, similarly looks at how external influences often send specific and sometimes detrimental images to young boys. While, in their Preface, the authors admit that there are certainly other factors that contribute to how boys mature, there are still many negative hurdles of which parents should remain aware. You can take a look at their extensive bibliography and index to know that they have done some serious research. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is concerned or has questions about how marketing uses subtle messaging to influence our kids.
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