The average child watches thousands of television commercials every year. Ads geared to kids don’t just encourage purchases of mass-produced plastic toys and mass-produced junk food: they also enforce rigid gender stereotypes about who should be playing with which kind of toy. Girls want sparkly pink ponies that bake cupcakes and need to be fed bottles, and boys want loud, fast remote-controlled tanks that shoot lasers and green slime. But happens when you pair the audio to a “boy” ad with the video to a “girl” ad?

Meet the Gendered Advertising Remixer, a Flash application which lets you do exactly that. It offers a nice selection of toy commercials with clear gender messages, and lets you mix those messages up in a way that’s amusing and enlightening.

Says the developer:

The project’s goal is to help empower youth of all genders to better understand, deconstruct and creatively re-frame the highly gendered messages emanating from their television sets.

My personal favorite is the My Little Pony car video paired with the Tonka truck audio, and the other way around works, too.

Gendered Advertising Remixer: Beta 1 [Kaltura] (via Etsy Storque)

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