Pollitt's Essay 'Why Boys Don T Play With Dolls'

In the essay, Why Boys don’t play with Dolls, by Katha Pollitt, the ethical issue of children being forced to follow roles that our society has based on gender. Pollitt’s essay was written 22 years ago, so the essay was written about how gender stereotyping was being handled back in 1995. Pollitt mentioned how NOW (National Organization of Women) was organized 28 years before she wrote her essay, and how, after almost three decades after the organization was formed, our society had not done much in altering its views on gender roles (Pollitt, 1). Pollitt pinned most of the blame for why things were not changing as much as they should be on parents. While children are always being influenced by everyone they encounter, parents and guardians have the largest influence. The way that parents and …show more content…
In her essay, Pollitt pointed out a few gender stereotypes that our society has created, as well as how some parents raise their children promoting these roles even though they themselves disagree with them. Gender-neutral parenting is one of the positive movements aiming to fix this ethical problem. While there is some opposition to the extreme versions of this parenting, there are more positive aspects from the tamer sides of this style of parenting. Parents are not the only people who need to place less emphasize on gender. All adult need to stop marking things as either for men or for women, and marking people strange if they do something that our society says doesn’t go with their gender, like if a boy wears a tutu or a girl who plays with trucks.
The ethical problem that Pollitt discusses in her essay is how children are being forced to adhere to gender specific roles. Society has created social norms, which are things that our society agrees to being “normal”. Anyone that goes against these so-called norms is typically viewed by the majority as being different or strange. Gender roles are created when a society views gender stereotypes and