"Men Are Becoming the Ad Target of the Gender Sneer" and "Guys and Dolls No More?"

The portrayals began as a clever reversal of traditional gender roles in campaigns, prompted by the ire of women and feminist organizations over decades of ads using stereotyped imagery of an incompetent, bumbling housewife who needed to be told which coffee or cleanser to buy.

As those images disappeared, the pendulum swung, producing campaigns portraying men in general, and husbands and fathers in particular, as objects of ridicule, pity, or even scorn.

The “man as a dope” imagery has gathered momentum over the last decade, and critics say that it has spiraled out of control.

It is nearly impossible, they say, to watch commercials or read ads without seeing helpless, hapless men.

In the campaigns, which the critics consider misandry (the opposite of misogyny), men act like buffoons, ogling cars and women; are likened to dogs, especially in beer and pizza ads; and bungle every possible household task.

“You can’t routinely denigrate a given segment of the population mercilessly,” said Richard Smaglick, a founder of an organization known as the Society for the Prevention of Misandry in the Media, which runs fathersandhusbands.org, a Web site.

“In order to not cross over the line into denigration,” Mr. Straw said, the situation portrayed in an ad needs to be truthful and funny.

There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to building, action, and aggression.

Gender has always played a role in the world of toys. What’s surprising is that over the last generation, the gender segregation and stereotyping of toys have grown to unprecedented levels.

We’ve made great strides toward gender equity over the past 50 years, but the world of toys looks a lot more like 1952 than 2012.

There are several reasons gender-based marketing has become so prevalent.

On a practical level, toy makers know that by segmenting the market into narrow demographic groups, they can sell more versions of the same toy.

And nostalgia often drives parents and grandparents to give toys they remember from their own childhood.

This is particularly true for boys: parents tend to stick with gender-typed toys for boys, either because they understand that the social costs for boys who transgress into the “pink” zone are especially high in a homophobic culture or because of their own desire for gender conformity.

This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: As toys have become more and more gender segregated, the social costs of boundary crossing and the peer pressure to stay within the lines are huge, for kids and parents alike. But if parents are susceptible to the marketers’ message, their children are even more so.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a growth of “brain science” research, which uses neuroimaging technology to try to explain how biological sex differences cause social phenomena like gendered toy preference.

For example, last year the Lego Group, after two decades of marketing almost exclusively to boys, introduced the new “Friends” line for girls after extensive market research convinced the company that boys and girls have distinctive, sex-differentiated play needs.