Interesting, well thought out, but ultimately wrong because it's based under a flawed premise. The entire argument is based around the behaviorist school of psychology that has largely been disproven, that posits that people are entirely influenced by their environment and what they are taught. That's really not true. See human beings are not some kind of magical, mystical, creatures that obey our own rules and exist entirely apart from science. We'd like to project that onto ourselves to an extent, one of the curses of our advancement I guess, but in reality we're pretty much bundles of instincts and chemicals just like any other animal. Indeed a human being can be literally programmed like a computer with the right techniques once you know how people work, though you generally have to work with the basic creature that is already there. Hypnotim, deprogramming, chemical modification of behavior, and other techniques all work for a reason.
At the end of the day it's like the old book said "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" we might be part of the same species, but at the end of the day are pretty different in terms of how nature hardwired us, and what our desires, goals, wants, and needs are. Something that for the most part acts in a complimentary fashion for the survival of the species.
Something like "The Pink Aisle" is not some behaviorist construct that has come along due to centuries of repression and reinforcing gender roles and the like. Rather it exists as a simple way of helping people find what they are looking for. Girls tend to gravitate in one direction, boys in another, occasionally the genetic soup goes a bit awry and you see the instincts mix up or reverse to an extent, but this is how it is for the overwhelming majority of people in society, without needing to be told anything or even remotely conditioned. In fact society pretty much organized along these directions on it's own, even the much accused "oppressive patriarchy" is itself more or less a predictable construct of who we inherently are more than anything else.
The pink Aisle exists so parents and young girls can easily tell "this is where stuff girls are going to tend to like is" so they won't have to wander around in a toy section for hours with everything mixed up looking for the right stuff. It's sort of like how grocery stores organize the different types of food into sections, as opposed to just randomly slinging everything onto shelves.
Now, the thing about humans as opposed to lesser animals is that we can to some extent control and override our instincts and what we have been intristically designed to do. One of the big problems in society that Bob is correct about to an extent is the demonization of traditional roles, and pretty much telling girls "you should suppress, and oppose this". The thing is that a good portion of non-militantly feminist literature, movies, etc... addresses the whole problem of being a woman in a society that tells you to actively try and repress your instincts to live a specific way. Namely plotlines where say some career woman who has been pretty much putting almost everything feminine aside for decades feels her biological clock ticking (a matter of instinct) and winds up becoming happier by meeting the right guy, settling down, and raising a family. With various comedic mishaps along the way usually, and some offhanded compromises being made along the way. Something that guys like Bob tend to see as being inherently offensive and reinforcing a patriarchy, until you consider that the majority of this stuff is created by women, for women.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that women need to be "forced" to conform to certain gender roles or anything. On some levels I'm agreeing with Bob on certain side points. I'm just pointing out that there is no real "societal construct" here created from the outside to force instinct in the wrong way, rather it's pretty much the society we instinctively create sort of like how animals of the same type more or less live the same way, build the same kinds
of dens, and similar things. When you get down to it, what Bob seems to be involved in a degree of existential angst, able to see a state of being that he feels might be better, but really isn't grounded in who we are, on a lot of levels a classic manifestation of the "curse of reason".
By all means, tolerate most of the examples where someone violates a gender role due to their entire genetic cocktail having misfired to an extent. But don't try and act like the entire concept of gender roles and tendencies isn't natural, because it is, for humans just as much as it is for lesser animals. The soul only goes so far so to speak.
I'll also point out that Bob seems to miss the point inherent in the imagery of Xerxes, The Hunger Games, and similar things. It's less gender oriented, than a portrayal of decadence. The overall line being drawn is between people who actually do everything, the farmers, soldiers, workers, etc... and the existence of a class that does very little except lead, manage, and tell other people what to do. The division between a working class where the practical is the rule, and a ruling class where appearance matter more than anything. A guy who needs wear clothes that are tough and functional, and a guy who wears clothes that are simply comfortable and pretty, yet would be ripped to shreds if he did anything other than stand around and socialize.
Your pretty much looking at the projection of class war images into various kinds of cinema. The same basic messages that caused the Nazis to rise up in a rage as a socialist revolution, and turn genocidally on what they saw as an abusive class of ethnic rulers. Groups like the Khymer Rogue echoed the same sentiments, and on a lot of levels are scary closed to the message of "The Hunger Games" the way the division was expressed there was to have the farmers and workers from outside the cities, murder all the city dwellers. In the USA right now an ethnic or "living space" oriented argument is not being made to define the enemy, but you are very much seeing outrage against the ruling class of bankers, corporate heads, and of course the career political class, though it has yet to turn to outright violence,
this is fundamentally what things like "Occupy Wall Street" were about.
To be brutally honest, I see more analogies to the popular depictions of pre-revolutionary France, and Roman decadence than outright gender judgement in most "fantasy examples". Oftentimes chosen for their outrageousness and the differences in order to illustrate a point that can be harder to make visually in a current sense when both the oppressed and the oppressor might be wearing the same basic kinds of clothes. Visually the difference between a suit bought from SEARS for $100 and one that was bought from a tailor for a thousand times that much doesn't exactly pop out. Ditto for situations where the value of a T-shirt can be based on little more than the logo someone stamped on it, and maybe the material it's made from, despite how it looks.
The point about Xerxes was that no matter how he gets off, this was something that was a major concern for him during a military campaign, as was showing up with enough bling to buy most kingdoms. Compared to say the Spartan soldier class which (in the context of the movie) were all entirely about function. In The Hunger Games the point is that the working class works, and might be forced to illegally poach deer for food, the ruling class on the other hand are primarily concerned with pleasuring themselves and showing off. The makeup, lace, elaborate dinners... I was thinking French Nobility being the obvious analogy, and I've was waiting for the analoty to the Bastille to be stormed. There might be some value judgements about homosexuality in both cases, but understand even in the US there isn't even close to a majority consensus on that, with the entire gay rights thing (spread across all issues) is divided more or less 50-50. That said, I suppose a point could be made that the bastions of liberalism have generally been the wealthy coastal regions, with the biggest public proponents of this kind of stuff being wealthy media tycoons, decadent Hollywood celebrities, and the ilk. A lot of the opposition? Well that comes from the more rural working classes in the south, and pretty a lot of what are dismissed as a "flyover state", the term which also tends to sort of illustrate the problems. That said despite my personal opinions, I never really felt this was a big part of the message in "Hunger Games" at least. There is a difference between being simpering, and acting "flaming", albeit I can see where they overlap and how some people might want to project other issues onto it.
Such are my thoughts. For the record, I recommend reading about Freud (and by extension Jung), Skinner, and Rogers and comparisons between the three psychologies (so to speak) and how behaviorism/environmentalism has kind of taken a huge beating. None of them are perfect, and all of them have been slammed, but that one worse than many others due to it's central points. An environment can influence someone, but isn't going to act entirely as the foundation for a personality and it can't typically alter fundamental human traits (which is what this comes down to), though it can temporarily bring certain ones that are usually repressed to the forefront.