Pick up the doll
Let’s talk about toys.
Lego has announced it will work to remove gender stereotypes from its toys after a global survey the company commissioned found attitudes to play and future careers remain unequal and restrictive.
Researchers found that while girls were becoming more confident and keen to engage in a wide range of activities, the same was not true of boys.
Yes we know how that works. Girls don’t get called “wimps” for playing with boys’ toys. To put it another way, girls playing with toys coded “boy” are leveling up, while boys going the other direction are of course leveling down.
Seventy-one per cent of boys surveyed feared they would be made fun of if they played with what they described as “girls’ toys” – a fear shared by their parents.
Sissy. Sissy sissy sissy; nobody wants that.
“There’s asymmetry,” said Prof Gina Rippon, a neurobiologist and author of The Gendered Brain. “We encourage girls to play with ‘boys’ stuff’ but not the other way around.”
This was a problem since toys offered “training opportunities”, she said. “So if girls aren’t playing with Lego or other construction toys, they aren’t developing the spatial skills that will help them in later life. If dolls are being pushed on girls but not boys, then boys are missing out on nurturing skills.”
I don’t think I’d really thought of that before. It’s sad. It’s tragic. You want people to have nurturing skills – all people. If boys grow up avoiding such skills and thinking they’re contemptible and for sissies…well, that’s terrible.
The Let Toys Be Toys campaign was launched in 2012 in the UK to put pressure on children’s brands to expand their marketing and include both genders, so that no boy or girl thinks they are playing with “the wrong toy”. But progress is slow. A 2020 report by the Fawcett Society showed how “lazy stereotyping” and the segregation of toys by gender was fuelling a mental health crisis among young people and limiting perceived career choices.
And what else might it be fuelling? Eh? Eh? Can we think of any other form of preoccupation with gender rules that’s been making the news lately? Any at all?
Marlo Thomas, her Free to Be… You and Me project, and the song William’s Doll (lyrics here) come to mind. The song tells of a little boy who wanted a doll, but people teased him, and his father foisted sports on him. Grandma to the rescue, eventually. The need for fathers as well as mothers to be nurturers is prominent.
All of this was so damned obvious at the time, the mid 1970s. And now it’s all twisted and distorted.
Of course, that’s what feminists have been asking for forever. At least since feminism began, anyway. It isn’t until the boys are perceived as having a problem that they fix the problem that has been there all along for girls.
And I hated playing with dolls. They’re boring. You can’t do anything with them. All of us – my sisters and I – played with my older brother, and we played ball, rode bicycles, and played superheroes and war (my mother decided we needed to quit chopping down her bamboo to used as swords, so she got us some old beat up broomsticks).
Lately I hear all this tragedy about boys. Boys aren’t doing as well in school. Boys aren’t entering the work force like they used to. Boys feel out of sorts and like they don’t belong (why? Because girls are allowed, too. We aren’t pushing them out…it’s society that makes them think they can’t be “girly”). So suddenly gender stereotypes have become a problem.
We knew they were all along.
Maya Forstater was one of the founders of Let Toys Be Toys. A couple years ago the organization made the mistake of promoting a trans book for children in which the main character discovered she was really a boy because she didn’t want to do all the girl things. Goes against the mission. And the entire point.
I think LTBT later backed away from the controversy and announced an official neutrality.
You can see where this is heading in another generation or two. We’ll become one of those societies where women do all of the work. Not just domestic work, but pretty much everything. That will free up barely educated men to sit around the fire drinking coffee or whatever and discuss the ‘important’ things, then tell women what they’ve decided they should do. Men might rouse themselves to fight the odd war, or possibly a ceremonial hunt once every so often so that they can claim credit for feeding the family. You can also be pretty damn sure that women will not be able to self-identify out of their role.
FTS.
How can you be truely strong if you’re not nurturing? What use is a warrior who doesn’t actually feel what they’re fighting for, who values all the members of their society and would feel their loss? Who the hell wants to be a self-puffed alpha who is actually a pig-ignorant, lazy, insecure, self-pitying shit?
But what if she wants to do part of the girl things, and not all of the boy things? Total chaos? Oh, wait, then she should be an NB, and everyone should call her they.
This is why dolls depicting Star Wars characters, G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc. were renamed “Action figures”. “Action figures” sounds manly, not like “dolls”- ugh!
On another note, Richard “Charlie Hebdo” Seymour has apparently lost his mind. Recommending attacks on Kathleen Stock written by pseudo-intellectuals Christa Peterson and Alex Sharpe, Seymour shifts into High Dave Spart mode.
“If you have the stomach for it, these essays on the proud philistinism, ignorance, and violent bigotry of Brit transphobes, and the culpable credulousness of their academic and media apologists, are worth reading…The telos of this paranoia and principled ignorance is violence. Not verbal violence, not the crass, controversy-courting rhetorical violence of mediocrity, but actual violence in the streets.”
https://twitter.com/leninology/status/1446787088335187972
This is not the writing of someone secure in his beliefs.
The irony that Richard Seymour is also echoing the bully-boy tone of his nemesis Christoper Hitchens when the latter clamouring for war on Iraq, seems completely lost on Seymour. Both men made repeated accusations that their critics on one particular issue were not merely wrong, but mentally ill, pathologically dishonest and aiding violent extremists.
Did they forget why they went to minidolls in the first place? Friends has been a pretty successful endeavor from the get go and it’s definitely “pink” oriented. Now getting more females in the main City range would certainly be nice even though they have to resort to eyelashes, lipstick, and painted boobs just to get the point across.
I posted a comment with references to Marlo Thomas and “William’s Doll”. Is it stuck in moderation? It had the dreaded Three Links, but I thought I saw it come through already.
Yes it was in mod and I was out running around in a distant part of the city so it took me until now to let it out, sorry.
No worries, I just wanted to verify it didn’t disappear. My fault for putting in the Third Link.
How is this still ahead of the curve? How sad is that? It’s been nearly 50 goddamn years!