SOUNDTRACK: JOHN ZORN-“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (2011).
Wild skronking horns, screamed vocals, chaos chaos cha–. No.
Piano and vibraphones with some gentle guitars thrown on top. This is a beautiful, gentle jazz rendition of this song. What makes this so strange is well, frist, because John Zorn loves death metal and all things noise. But also because John Zorn revels in Jewish culture. So what’s up with this holiday album?
Evidently he always wanted to make a holiday album. And he’s using most of the same guys who have played with him for years.
That’s a real Christmas miracle! Read more about it here.
[READ: December 16, 2011] Children, Gender, and Social Structure
Our director sent us a link to this article to get us in the holiday spirit (you have to subscribe to JSTOR to read it). Although he spoiled it in his email (boys and girls are different), I still enjoyed reading the contents here. At least somewhat. The article was really quite dry and relied on some scientific terminology which I found confounding. Nevertheless, the results were easy enough to follow, and that’s what really matters.
The most interesting thing was the setup. They read all of the letters mailed to Santa that were received in the Seattle post office in 1978. (I wondered why it was so long ago before I confirmed that this was written in 1982, so that makes sense). They received 855 letters that year. And I found this breakdown as interesting (if not moreso) than the rest of the article: 63% were from within the state; 29% were from out of state (how did they get there??); and 8% were from out of the country (what?? how, why?–no answer is given, sadly). 31 letters were illegible, so they were out. The rest were assessed by gender of the names based on a baby naming book (from 1966!). This yielded 359 from boys, 391 from girls, 46 gender ambiguous (what percentage would there be today??) and 28 with no name.
I was also fascinated by the age breakdown: 24%: 5 or under; 41% 6 or 7; 29% 8 or 9 and 7% were ten or older!
After a brief explanation of the number of toys kids asked for (an average of 5 across the genders), they move into the heart of the matter: grouping toys and seeing who wants what. They use 27 categories (based on a 1975 study) to subdivide the toys. An interesting aspect to this is that most studies of gender and toys are based upon the actual children playing with actual toys in a room. This actually limits the options. So using a Santa list means the sky is the limit for what kind of toys they can ask for. As such, the 27 categories proved to be somewhat limiting.
I’m not going to go into the meat of the article or the details, but I am going to reveal this exciting breakdown:
Percentage of requests for boys and girls
- requested by boys more:
- Vehicles 43.5 8.2
- Sport 25.1 15.2
- Spatial-temporal 24.5 15.6 (this is construction sets or clocks)
- Military toys 23.4 0.8
- Race cars 23.4 5.1
- Doll (humanoid) 22.8 6.6 (monsters, superheroes, robots)
- Real vehicles 15.3 9.7 (bikes, scooters)
- Doll (male) 10.0 2.8
- Outer space toys 7.5 0.3
- Depots 6.4 0.5 (garages, airports)
- Machines 4.5 0.8
- and requested by girls more:
- Doll (female) 0.6 27.4
- Doll (baby) 0.6 23.0
- Domestic 1.7 21.7
- Educational art 11.4 21.4
- Clothes 11.1 18.9
- Doll houses 1.9 16.1
- Clothing accessories 2.2 15.3
- Doll accessories 1.1 12.5
- Stuffed animals 5.0 9.7
- Furnishings 1.9 5.4
- neither emphasis
- Toy animals 6.4 7.6
- Books 4.1 6.6
- Educational teaching 11.9 12.2
- Musical 16.4 20.9
- Games 25.6 21.4
- Live animals …. …. (why are no numbers given here??)
After the specific results listed here, they offer a theoretical interpretation. They break these categories down into Representational toys (things that have an adult approximation–dolls, machines, race cars) and Nonrepresentational (books, clothes musical). The category break down is not much different in this section. Boys like toys that represent what adult males do/have and vice versa.
However, they also create another division: Inner vs Outer (I had a hard time wrapping my head around what these distinctions meant, but by Inner they mean private and individual centered and by Outer they mean a more public and collective orientation), it becomes clear that boys prefer Outer to Inner toys by a wide margin.
Their final conclusion “gender effects among children’s requests for toys are associated with the enactment of adult social roles” seems pretty valid to me.
Congratulations on reading this far. And Merry Christmas.
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