A class I recently taught was studying an English unit on Advertising, which looked at advertising of products for children. I enjoy teaching advertising units because I find the children love learning about how words, images, colour and sounds can be used to influence their choices in food, toys and clothing. They find it empowering so I find it worthwhile. The study of advertising often highlights gender differences in the imagery presented to our children and so indicates how we differ in the way we raise our boys and our girls. We had a great time discovering the influence of static ads and we had just moved onto online, multimedia ads, where the addition of sound effects and music lend considerable extra weight to the impact of advertisements. Our first ad was a multi-media presentation by a well-known building block manufacturer, targetting mainly boys. The ad started out with very loud booming sounds and then proceeded with ‘the man with the very deep voice’ exhorting viewers to engage in a hero-like fashion in the narrative constructed around the product. The change that came over the beautifully tender, sensitive little boys at this point was extreme. All, bar two of them, ...