“What? A child playing with Barbies? It's a mess, man. Only little girls play with dolls. Everyone knows it!” That's seven-year-old Cavin's response when asked what he thought about boys playing with Barbie dolls. Hearing these words can make you understand that even from an early age, children have been strongly influenced by gender through society. According to sociologist James M. Henslin, gender is “the behaviors and attitudes that a society considers appropriate for its males and females; masculinity or femininity” (280). Over time, gender has been a way of thinking about what is appropriate for different sexes, a term Henslin defines as “biological characteristics that distinguish females and males, consisting of primary and secondary sexual characteristics” (280). For many years, society has solidly constructed gender characteristics and continued to encourage traditional gender roles for new generations. Toys, a common object that many children play with early in life, are actually a gender socialization agent that many people take for granted. Through observations at a local toy store, such as Toys R Us, one can recognize how toys reinforce gender roles. To fully understand toys as a reinforcement of gender roles, one can look at the display of toys in Toys R Us. When you walk through a toy store, you can see the obvious categories that toys are separated into, including gender. When you walk into Toys R Us, you see the aisle categories on the left side in blue. Some of the categories in this section were action figures, cars, and trucks. From an overall view, the colors shown by these lanes are dark such as dark blue, black, dark gray, dark green, dark orange, etc. In this part of t...... middle of paper... ...der stratification - inequality of power, property and prestige between men and women (Henslin 280) - is still encountered within our society, and men are usually superior to women; women are lifting feminism. Henslin defines feminism as “the philosophy that men and women should be politically, economically, and socially equal; activities organized in the name of this principle" (292). An example of a toy I saw that showed feminism is a pink bow and arrow in the archery section of the toy store. Although black bows and arrows dominated this aisle, there was a bow and arrow for girls showing that women have the right to be equal to men. One last game that I saw at Toys R Us that interested me was a video game called Grand Theft Auto, which is a video game aimed at kids. The aim of this game is to join gangs and do their "dirty work". In some parts of this