Hot Wheels Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hot Wheels - Essay Example The Hot Wheels website offers numerous video advertising spots depicting products such as an attacking octopus racetrack, a racetrack that purposely brings cars together to crash, skateboarding figures, a working radar gun and a racing timer. Each of these activities may be equally attractive to girls as they are to boys. Go to any cross country meet and you will find usually more girls running than boys – a fact that indicates girls may be just as interested in toys such as the racing timer to stage their own competitions or the radar gun to clock their speed. BMX and skateboard parks are usually populated with a relatively even mix of female and male participants, yet there isn’t even a hint of them associated with the skateboarding toys. Women are now even able to race in NASCAR. All of the commercials available illustrate that the toys are intended to be used by boys only. In each commercial featuring children, the children are invariably all male. Even in the octopus racetrack, when a crowd of people is shown at the end of the pier, there are no recognizable female figures among the children and adults fleeing the scene. These commercials are so exclusively male that there aren’t even any girls watching the action, such as standing at the sidelines of an impromptu race.