Sugared puppy-dog tails: gender and design

to promote appropriate female gender roles—Mrs. Miniver maintained the middle-class home while making sacrifices, and Rosie beckoned women to the munitions factories. This kind of incidental learning also goes for learning masculinity and, more broadly, national identity; many PhDs have been exploring idealized American masculinity as embodied in film characters played by actors like Mora's 2006 book, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film, elegantly articulates the role of film in creating the hypermasculine machismo that was so central to Mexican national identity after the Revolution of 1910. Like media characters, products embody messages about who we can be. Of course, products are gendered based on who is associated with their use. When I was growing up, knitting needles and sewing machines were female, and guns were male; Kaffe Fassett, the male knitwear designer, and Annie Oakley, the gun-toting, free-spirited woman of the Wild West of America, cured me of these assumptions. It is possible to render visible these kinds of cultural assumptions and biases by noting our When I was a child, there was a rhyme my mother used to recite to me. Here's how it goes... What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails And puppy-dog tails. That's what little boys are made of. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice And all things nice. That's what little girls are made of. Personally, I resented this. Puppy-dog tails obviously wag furiously, and frogs, I'd been told, can jump up to eight feet. The dynamism of tails and frogs seemed so much more delightful than the comparatively inert properties of sugar and spice. I found hope in Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, a character in the cult 1960s British chil-dren's television series " The Thunderbirds. " Although a " girl " clearly made of sugar and spice, she was formidable. She was the London agent for International Rescue, a secret MI6-like organization whose charter was to save people and groups from evildoers and disasters. A 26-year-old British aristocrat who eschewed the social scene, she was beautiful , intelligent, and independent , not to mention fabulously dressed and accessorized. She had an enviable collection of vehicles, which included a six-wheeled pink Rolls-Royce called FAB1 fully loaded with machine guns in the grill, bul-letproof glass, water skis for travel on water, and radar-assisted steering. Lady Penelope provided the foundation for my youthful aspirations. She put James Bond, 007, in the …