Gender norms are enforced so profoundly in our daily lives, that is has become almost routine to purchase products such as “his” and “hers” towels, razors that are advertised as “just for women,” and to watch a commercial in which the strong male rescues the helpless female. As careful as we are to distance ourselves from animals, we act to enforce the binary and gender stereotypes on to animals as well. The act of anthropomorphizing, in which we enforce human characteristics onto them and focus on how they can relate to us, is seen often in popular culture.

What is most disturbing to me is its use as a marketing tool for children, enforcing this way of thinking early and persistently. “Babar the Elephant,” an illustrated children’s book, was once a favorite book of mine as child. However, like most things I read as a child, I now have the ability to dissect the meanings behind this book, and how harmful its messages are.

It is hard to deny that “Babar the Elephant” acts as an agent to enforce gender norms in our society. Originally published in France in 1931, "Babar the Elephant" tells the story of an elephant that inhabits a jungle, amongst many other elephants. They wear no clothing and have no significant marks to set them apart from each other. They appear as elephants do to us in reality, their gender unpronounced by physical markings. Destitute after poachers murder his mother, Babar flees to a big city. He arrives to the city, which although never named, the illustrations elude that the city is in France. Upon meeting a woman named “The Old Lady,” she adorns him in the finest clothes any “man” would wear, and hires him as a tutor. She acts to “civilize” him, teaching him about the typical lifestyle of a wealthy European person. By dressing him in a fashionable suit, which is described as “a very French form of Western civilization,” therefore “taming” him, we associate fitting Babar into the binary as an act of normalizing him. The characters now civilized and prim nature is associated with his newfound bold expressions of masculinity, as opposed to his upbringing, in which accentuating his gender was unnecessary.

Besides during mating season, there are rarely any other accounts of males and females abiding to gender roles. During the mating season, a male elephant goes into a faze named “musth” in which “he will have as much as 200 times the normal level of testosterone pumping through his system.” That makes him viable to fight other male elephants, but as well helps them with the mating process itself. As well “The whole herd will often try to chase off large numbers of excited males...When a bull in “musth” turns up, however, everything changes. The other bulls back off, and the female in season will attach herself to him so as to be left alone by all the others.” Consequently, one may argue that playing into these roles is necessary for the sake of the elephant species. Besides this, elephants function, healthily and happily, without any their gender being physically pronounced.

Later in “Babar the Elephant,” Babar returns to the jungle in which he was raised. He is affluent in conforming his peers to the ways of Western civilization, which include but are not limited to, the type of attire. The female elephants wear frilly skirts and berets, while the men wear suits, accurate to the way in which we expect men and women to dress. As well, every elephant now walks and stands on two feet, the one physical marker in which humans truly set themselves apart from every other animal on earth. Upon being crowned king, Babar wears what a traditional European king would: a gold crown, long red cape trailing behind him, draped over his green suit.

Enforcing gender norms on animals may derive from the fact that we only attach ourselves to mammals when they look and act similar to as we do. As observed by Jane Desmond, a professor of Anthropology and Gender studies as well as the author of “Staging Tourism”: “Like us, they have intercourse, give birth to babies, nurse them, have warm blood, and have skin/hair/fur analogous to ours.” By looking at a female animal that cares for children similar to the way we do, we associate with her a female we may know: our mother, our aunts, even our grade school teachers. We have to equate the animal with these people in order to believe that it is good, worthy of our attention or affection. Without these associations, it is difficult for us to believe that animals are deserving of fair treatment. Therefore, our need to enforce norms on animals comes from the conviction that conforming to the binary is what makes us human.

Although not unique amongst children’s books in acting as an agent of binary socialization, the story of Babar strikes me because it dually infiltrates in its story line that anthropomorphismas a normal way of viewing animals. Starting at an early age, we are trained to view gender stereotypes as not stereotypes, but a reality, and our association with animals is to only love them if they are like us.

One may hope that in the future children’s books function to educate children on the distinctness of the animals around us, and that instead of enforcing the binary way of thinking, they advocate more for the celebration of human differences.