NOW bemoans marketing of toys for girls
My son is four. Even at that tender age, I’m pretty much determined that he is all male.
Take him to a toy store, and he avoids the pink girls’ section like the plague. No, that boy wants trucks, cars, robots, army stuff, and anything else that shoots, races, flies, or destroys other things. His favorite movie characters are Transformers, robots that fight each other, shoot cannons, and turn into fast cars. What more could a little boy want?
When I do try to introduce a more feminine toy item to him, he runs the opposite direction screaming, “NO! That’s for girls!”
With that in mind, I read with some amusement this piece on the National Organization for Women website, entitled “Below the Belt”, by NOW president Kim Gandy.
Products like the Rose Petal Cottage and the marketing campaigns that accompany them perpetuate the notion that cooking and cleaning are women’s work, and girls might as well start getting used to that fact at an early age. C’mon Susie, this scrubbing and ironing look like fun!
Of course the message of the Rose Petal Cottage would not be complete without its flip side . . . the Tonka 3-in-1 Scoot n’ Scoop truck. This commercial states its theory right up front: “Boys. What can you say? They’re just built different!”
As the father of a little boy, who talks regularly with a friend who has two little girls of comparable age, I can assure you that boys and girls are built differently.
The not so subtle concept is that boys are adventurous and unpredictable. Playing “their way” involves mischievous acts like pulling flowers out of the garden and tracking dirt across the kitchen floor. But thanks to Tonka, a boy can channel “what he does naturally” into sorting shapes and learning to walk. Yup, those sure sound like boys-only activities to me.
The idea that a girl might want to ride on a truck, or a boy play house, well, that’s just too radical for most toy manufacturers. They prefer the status quo, thank you very much.
Look, there very well may be little girls who want to play with trucks in the mud, and little boys who’d rather be playing at cooking, but neither lives in my house - nor in my buddy’s. Even when I look at adult women in the Army, while it’s true that they are in a potentially dangerous profession, it’s hugely apparent to all that they do not think the same way as the men. I’ve had one who had perfect nails at all times - no matter the living conditions. Even in Iraq, I could swear she was seeing a manicurist on a regular basis. Could she hang with the guys? Sure, for the most part, but she definitely did not have the same thinking patterns as the typical male.
Through the world of toys, girls and boys are given separate dreams to follow. Girls are prepared for a future of looking pretty, keeping house and taking care of babies. Boys are given a pass on that domain, and instead pointed toward the outside world of challenge, physical development and achievement.
Yeah, well, hand a baby doll to my son and he’ll throw it across the room.
A lot of this has to do with making money, I’m sure. After all, if girls and boys don’t share toys, families with kids of both genders have to buy twice as many products. But it’s also about promoting difference between the sexes. Our society, heck, the whole world, still isn’t ready to give up the standards that define gender and all the rules and customs that go with it.
Maybe the world’s not ready to give it up, because it’s essentially hard-wired into nearly every child that’s born. Sure, there’s plenty of kids who act outside the “norm” for their sex. I get that. I’ll even accept the concept that they were born that way. But I don’t believe television commercials told my son to play in the sand box with trucks. He did that all on his own. At age 1, he was digging in that box.
Women will never be fully equal until we, and all of our society, stop restricting our children’s aspirations based on their sex, and constantly directing them toward predetermined roles. It starts with pink and blue baby clothes, then dolls and trucks. Next thing you know, boys and girls are being segregated into separate classrooms and schools because they “learn differently.” Then, they enter the workplace with an outlook that can only perpetuate division and derision.
Girls and boys both will benefit if we offer them limitless options. They will grow up to be more fully developed people if we give them the freedom to discover who they are, without the stress of tightly patrolled gender borders.
A relative of mine had a wife who insisted on “gender neutral” toys for their newborn boy. Over the Christmases and birthdays we weren’t allowed to give him toy guns, swords, or anything else that screamed “male” (I thought it was a load of crap, so I did it anyway). It didn’t work. The kid LOVED those “male” toys. And if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have played with them - right? If he really wanted the “female” toys, he would have asked for them - correct?
And what was the point? To make him more feminine?
Why do we want that? Why is metrosexual so good? I thought the point was to give them choices, not push them to be something they are not. Most women I know, even the ones who consider themselves liberated, want their male partners to be masculine. They don’t want panty-waisted wussies, they want a man who can take care of them - even if they don’t need him to.
Yes, I know the NOW article was trying to get little girls to think of career choices other than being a happy homemaker. But I think people’s personalities and the goals they set out for themselves have a lot more to do with how their brains are wired and how their mentors guide them, rather than some TV commercial they see between Barney segments.
UPDATE - Why is NOW even bitching about advertising for kids, when they really should be working on fixing the real feminist problem in the world - The Failure of Western Feminists to Address Islamist Abuse of women
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“Even in Iraq, I could swear she was seeing a manicurist on a regular basis. Could she hang with the guys? Sure, for the most part, but she definitely did not have the same thinking patterns as the typical male”
Kick ass and look good at the same time - my kind of woman.
Seriously though, a lot of the problems in this country can be solved by simply having a real father around. Why they refuse to see that and continue to undermine anything that is remotely masculine is beyond me. I’m not even sure they can claim ignorance of the results anymore.