Possibly, but if that’s true, wouldn’t magazines have moved away from building issues specifically for “men” and “women” by now? If the pot of gold is so large, why do things like Cosmopolitan still exist and seem to be very profitable? GTA 5 is so obviously built around a menu of male tastes, and it made zillions.
I think the explanation is that building media that panders to gender is probably more profitable than building a watered down experience that appeals to “everyone”, since you can scratch all the right itches. And violence, as supported by the many stats I cited upstream, is a particularly male itch. (So is porn, which is a related urge. 26% in the last 24 hours!)
The problem with Egalia and gender-neutral toy catalogs is that boys and girls, on average, do not have identical interests, propensities, or needs. Twenty years ago, Hasbro, a major American toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse it hoped to market to both boys and girls. It soon emerged that girls and boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof. A Hasbro manager came up with a novel explanation: “Boys and girls are different.”
While I completely agree that there should be a wide range of media and game choices for everyone, building games that outright pander to the perceived – and more than perceived, backed up by extensive behavioral data which I cited above – interests of a specific audience or gender doesn’t seem wrong to me. And is clearly wildly popular, and wildly profitable.
(They should still offer female avatars as a choice, in all cases.)
