The Differance between girls and boys

[thegayhare]

Now as some of you know I like to play with nerf guns... any way in walmart I spotted these "Girl" guns
The Heartbreaker Bow


Pink Crush


Power Pair


Guardian Crossbow


Sweet Revenge


how stupid is that.   they are almost all single shot, overly stylized with sadly cutesy names

And look at the bullets



why would they feel girls would need stupid stylized bullets, these darts are going to be flying at some ones head do you think anyone cares if they have hearts on them

Compare that to the "Boys" guns




Now I don't see anything in those that makes it boys only....  the girls I know who like guns wouldn't want anything like the girly guns mentioned  

I swear they think unless they as pretty pink and glitter to something girls wouldn't touch them

I will admit I kinda like the looks of the Sweet Revenge pistol,  It would look cool modded right and it does come with a cool little holster,  If I found one cheep I'd try to mod a snub nosed barrel on to it but



what do you think?

[Amber Williams]

I can't deny I'm a bit of a fan of some of the aesthetic. What can I say? I do like pink despite both some groups saying "PINK= GIRLS SO GIRLS MUST LOVE PINK" to "PEOPLE SAY PINK=GIRLS SO GIRLS SHOULD HATE PINK AND REBEL."

My main regret is the simple one-shot.  By all means barbie dreamhouse the heck out of my nerf guns, but I want me some rapid shot multi-piff-dart action ontop of that.

I guess my main mindset is akin to how I feel about my gun mods in video-games. Hell yes I will run through Borderlands wearing the brightest pink monstrosity ever. I'm a pretty princess of bullets!  But under the pink coating I want all my stats to be the same as the next gun of the same model.

Edit: And truth be told, there is something useful about having very specific looking bullets. it means you can figure out which ones are yours amidst the hail of nerd-darts. XD

[thegayhare]

nothing wrong with pink,  one of my favorite shirts is pink

the thing that annoys me is it just seems the first thing anyone does when trying to market something for girls is make it pink

and I agree with the shot count limit.  in the product line you have 5 blasters with 3 single shots and one 5, and one 6 shot  and they are the slow reloading types of multi shots.  

on the darts I can see your point but that would be only work if they sold packs which featured one design per pack  instead every pack includes several darts each  dart with a different design  but each pack you buy features the exact same variety

I guess they are hopping people will trade  there darts so they can get a full load of the designs they like

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I guess my main mindset is akin to how I feel about my gun mods in video-games. Hell yes I will run through Borderlands wearing the brightest pink monstrosity ever. I'm a pretty princess of bullets!  But under the pink coating I want all my stats to be the same as the next gun of the same model.

I'm happy to make my runner be fuschia, usually. Either that or bubblegum.

And I don't want my pretty pink princess gun to be the same stats. I want it to obliterate anything in front of it, to make my enemies weep in terror, and to hear the lamentations of their women, those that are left alive.


So, uh. Single-shot weapons are a pain, particularly with the inherent inaccuracy of nerf weapons in general. Do they provide a 36 pack replacement set of darts, for when you run out?

[Mao]

My favourite colour is violet.  I kinda like some of these guns too!  They can market them to whoever they like, the people who like them, will buy them.  Though from my experience in borderlands, Mab is all about the pretty and deadly.  The pretty deadly.  Or running us off the road in her pink runner  while shouting "Woooo!"... or was that Mason?  I think they both like doing it, honestly.

[thegayhare]

LOL in borderlands I'm usualy driving a purple runner myself...

[Brunhidden]

and sometimes it just gets a new level of wrong



im happy with my daughters- at age four my older daughter decided she liked 1980s voltron and at age two she had been an ozzy fan, she still loves skulls on everything. an avid videogamer she insisted we get, and then beat by herself, the game 'brutal legend' because she found out it had ozzy and jack black decapitating demons. if my eight year old daughter wants her bow to be pink i only begrudge her a little because its still a deadly weapon she pointed at my groin

daughter 2 just turned five, she was big on 'cars' and has said she wants to be a monster truck driver. also she seems to have a love of transformers and all giant robots. this is the quiet cuddly one, yet somewhere she learned how to use wrestling moves on her older sister

both of them have 'batmanned' as a verb, and a fathers heart can feel nothing but pride when his second grader decked a bully for picking on another classmate. they have earned their tiny capes

and of course i starkly am the man who does the cooking and the laundry, and people would probably pay to see a burly man like me sewing the holes in his pants closed with a needle and thread- ive got plans to make decorative hats and acessories from old ripped tshirts

[LionHeart]

I've seen those pink toolkits before, often sold as a fund-raiser for breast cancer.

I've even seen a pink cordless drill, marketed at women (something to do with different balance and lighter weight for women's lesser grip strength, I believe).

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

im happy with my daughters- at age four my older daughter decided she liked 1980s voltron and at age two she had been an ozzy fan, she still loves skulls on everything. an avid videogamer she insisted we get, and then beat by herself, the game 'brutal legend' because she found out it had ozzy and jack black decapitating demons. if my eight year old daughter wants her bow to be pink i only begrudge her a little because its still a deadly weapon she pointed at my groin

Your daughters are awesome - I think it's the result of having awesome parents.

And, from what I hear, Brütal Legend is fairly easy to get through, but even so, props to her for completing it. I doff my hat. ;-]

[Amber Williams]

and sometimes it just gets a new level of wrong

Course now I feel conflicted.  Because I do think that is a very pretty toolkit.  If I had to buy a toolkit, I would be highly tempted to get it because yes...I do find it pretty. I think the pink is a nice shade. I like the idea of all my tools having a similar theme. 

But statements like that make me feel like liking it is a bad thing. That I'm less of a female because I'm somehow enabling a stereotype.  That unless I become a tomboy and embrace stuff typically associated with boys, I'm doing it wrong and I'm a failed feminist.  That to like girlish things means I'm part of a problem.  That me liking a pink toolkit is me embracing the gender shackles and I cannot possibly like that toolkit because I like pink.  But because I'm a girl and it's expected of me.

In some ways it is a double edged sword being feminist but enjoying feminine things.  That I'm expected to flip off gender stereotypes...by ultimately bolstering them via shunning something on proxy that it is "girl-stuff".    As I said, I went through a time where I didn't like the colour pink...simply because it was expected of me to because liking a colour pink would mean I was being a stereotypical girl.   

And despite my liking of pink, it means I likely will never get a pink toolkit. Because it's expected of me to not buy it and give corporations money that further bolster the stereotype. 

[Brunhidden]

the stereotype only really gets insulting when you find out the pink cordless drill is 2/3 the weight of a normal cordless drill

i appreciate things being pretty, so does my wife, thus its not a gender thing. granted i have a wife who agrees that axes and shields make awesome wall decorations, but cant something be pretty without making it a joke?

oh, you're a girl, have this pink barbie nurse in a mall / oh, you're black, have this gift basket full of fried chicken, grape soda, and watermelon / oh your hispanic, heres a pinata full of churos and chalupas 
-of course i like those things, don't make me feel bad for liking them!-

[Mao]

Question:  Is it 2/3 of the weight because of what you believe to be a gender stereotyped design, or is it 2/3 of the weight for other reasons?  Beware of confirmation bias.

[Brunhidden]

Question:  Is it 2/3 of the weight because of what you believe to be a gender stereotyped design, or is it 2/3 of the weight for other reasons?  Beware of confirmation bias.

the reason given is that its lighter for women, they literally label it so

[Mao]

So now the next question:  Is that inheirently sexist?  Yes, I know that the average doesn't apply to all cases, but if it can be statistically shown that the lighter weight will, on average, make it easier for women to use, is that wrong?  Isn't it instead enabling them access to something that they might not otherwise?

This is what I was talking about with the confirmation bias.  You don't know *why* this design decision was made, but you ascribed to it sexist intentions and used that to assume it was bad.  Could someone interpret it that way?  Sure.  That's been proven.  You can also interpret it as I have.

The next question:  does the weight affect it's performance?  Does it perform less effectively than one made for a man?  Using my little bit of knowledge of tools, I could see this being less effective... unless of course the woman was strong enough that it was irrelevant.  Something that is entirely possible too.  It's easy, particularly in the world today, to immediately assume that things are sexist given the culture we live in and the push of modern feminism.  If you stop and really think about things it starts to be a less clear cut situation.  Again: beware confirmation bias.

[Kafzeil]

Okay I love the idea of designs of darts, but I wanna know if they come in sayings like "Ya Feelin' Lucky punk" or "Ezekiel 26 :17" or even just "muertos". Or darts you can paint yourself.

What? I love the idea of putting my rivals' name on a dart.

Also I'd just tell my daughter, if I hade one, the single shots are kinda crap and give her a sniper nerf or the one with the huge drum magazine and tell her "Hit 'em while they're reloading".  I am not adverse to the idea of pink weapons myself, though. I love making my Borlderlands  cars pink, and I customized a bear(APC) in Saints Row 2 to be matte pink.