Hey!!! It's not a doll, It's an.... Action figure
Ever since our lecture on identity and culture this week I have not been able to get the, idea of identity out of my head. Funnily enough I saw a good example the other day, as I was working a young boy (couldn’t be older than 3 or 4) was playing with toy soldiers, and as he was playing he began to imitate the sound of gunfire, this is a noise I’m al to familiar with from my days in the backyard playing with the green and brown toy soldiers, the Pew Pew of the guns and the Vroooo of the tanks are all noises still fresh in my mind after any years. As I was contemplating this, the boy’s father walked into the room where he was playing and said “Did you know when I was a little boy like you I also played with toy soldiers.”
A thought struck me at this point. Little plastic men have transcended 3 generations of people in this house at the moment. This is a key point in the identity that shapes us as young boys, you dream of being a fighting man weather it is a soldier or a knight or some other character that entails violence, and this is what can lead us to form our identity, over the years when I realised that the “pew pew’s and the Vroooo’s” of the battlefield were only glorified images in my head and learned the reality behind these noises, I began to search for a way in which I could conduct battle in my own way as I’m sure many people have and as many people say, one thing all males have in themselves is the desire to be better than he other males. And this desire is what formed my identity pushed me into sports, today when I step onto the soccer field my blood pumps and I prepare for the adrenaline rush or when I’m on the track the person next to me is running as much to beat me as he is for glory.
Anyway, back to my point. Are we really so different, sure everyone has their own uniqueness’s but, in essence aren’t all males still at the core a little boy playing in the backyard trying to decide if green should beat brown today? Especially in todays consumer driven society where there are 4 or 5 key “looks”. Even the people who want to non-conform have a certain look, so that while we all strive to have this identity really in essence we are similar to everyone and while maybe 40 years ago they didn’t have emo’s or metro’s or jock’s they still had 5 year old boys who played in the dirt with toy soldiers.