I started a blog about this sort of thing over here: http://whatarewetraining.wordpress.com/

However, I don't have the time to keep it up. Anyone who is interested in taking over the blog, send me an email: whitneyarlene@gmail.com

I just want to see the idea go somewhere...

I noticed one of the saddest (to me) examples of this a couple of weeks ago when visiting a Target toy section with my mom, to pick out presents for two of my young (10 & 7) girl 2nd cousins. This was probably the first occassion/need I've had to shop for toys since I was a kid 20+ years ago....anyway, I went straight to look for the lego section, as such were some of my favorite toys back in the day. I was dismayed to see, at least in this particular Target store, the only lego toys available were very gender-specific boy toy sets, designed to build star-wars (& other supposedly boy-themed pop culture examples) play sets, and the likes. This was so disappointing, partially just to see legos so pop-culturally co-opted, but especially to see legos completely co-opted, and marketed explicitly to boys only. What happened to the comparatively genderless, uncommercialized primary colored blocks from when I was a kid? And when did legos decide only boys like playing & building with the blocks & sets?? So sad to see a toy like legos gone by the way of gendered marketing strategies....

what is the saddest part is that most people dont think twice about this stuff or buying such gendered toys for children. its horrible. they are like well of COURSE you get a pink kitchen set for a girl. duh. thank god my parents werent like that, and i grew up playing with trucks.

I work at a small independently-owned toy store and most things are just catorgized by type, not sex segregated. But people come in and look for very specific things for girls and different things for boys, it's sooooo frustrating. You can't just blame the store, frankly. If there was more of a demand for gender neutral toys and for less pink princesses, Target would be arranged differently. A woman a few weeks ago was looking for a toy for her 3 year old granddaughter and I went on and on about these great new remote control cars made for younger kids and she gave me SUCH a look of complete horror and said, "She's a girl."

And of course, it's not just little girls whose choices are limited. Why don't we let kids decide what kinds of things they want to play with and how they want to explore before they're bombarded with propaganda about boys vs. girls? It's EVERYWHERE. Grr.

personally, i would also like to add that girls toys arent things i wouldnt generally give to ANY child bc they are vapid and usually involve things like barbies and other stuff i dont consider to be a good message for EITHER gender. so no, i wouldnt want boys playing with "girl" toys either really.

The pink is hideous. When my son was 2 (he's 15 now), kitchen playsets came in teal green and beige--a bit more gender neutral. We had one. He loved it. He was really into cooking shows and wanted a kitchen. He played with the kitchen, dishes and food for hours.

Legos were my favorite toys ever. Stuff from their catalog only took TWO weeks to come. The best Lego set of all time was the pirate ship. And no, it wasn't some movie tie-in. It was a pirate ship that you built out of legos, and it just don't get any hotter than that.

Yeah, I'm female. But my mother kept my hair cut really short when I was little and so people used to think I was a boy. The nice thing about that is that nobody ever thought it was weird that my favorite toys were blocks. When I got older, I loved my electronics sets.

Oh. And now I do applied physics.

This is one issue that really burns me up. OK, fine, there are A LOT of issues that burn me and this is one of them.
My guess is that independently-owned toy stores might be slightly less gender-segregated. But attitudes of the public are still so traditional; it's depressing.
I rarely eat fast food but the other day I stopped in a McDonalds while on a long drive. The woman in front of me in line was with her two sons. She ordered a Happy Meal for one and the girl taking her order asked, "Boy or girl?" The answer was boy, obviously; my heart sunk when I heard her say it. I'm sure it's probably what McDonalds makes everyone ask. So my frustration is with a system that asks "boy or girl" when giving toys to children. How about, "Hello Kitty toy or Transformers toy?" Gah. It probably won't happen in my lifetime.

(Where, oh where did the girl-pony phenomena originate?)

A friend of mine had a theory about this. Let's just say, it involved a memory she had of riding her horse, and an orgasm...

I worked at a McDonald's right out of college (English major, of course), and they trained us at the time to ask which Happy Meal toy parents wanted by name (Hot Wheels or Barbie?), not by gender. But that was the nineties, and things may have backslid by then.

I do think it's good, though, that the toys themselves aren't as relentlessly gendered as they once were. I can get my nephew a toy kitchen that's not pink and frilly, for example.

I can sort of empathize with the folks who build the Target website, though. Gender norms are a fairly accurate reflection of the majority, and there's really nothing wrong with that, as long as description doesn't become prescription.

But how do you build a website that serves the needs of the many without making the few feel marginalized? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm pretty sure there's a better one than big banners that'd make you think that girls wouldn't like a remote controlled car, or that boys don't like toy kitchens.

Speaking of, why is the toy grill under "Girls' toys"? Every good chauvinist knows that girls don't grill!

(Where, oh where did the girl-pony phenomena originate?)

A friend of mine had a theory about this. Let's just say, it involved a childhood memory she had of riding her horse, and an orgasm...

I'm totally not arguing with you about the fact that gender roles are conditioned... but as far as argument technique, I'm not sure how well Target.com is going to work. Won't most people who don't think gender is conditioned simply argue that there is pink stuff for girls because girls like pink?

speaking as someone who horseback rode for 10 years, i think the notion of a girl and a horse is far more innocuous then driving home the point that women should be in the kitchen. girls and horses do have a special bond (not sure if its moreso then boys and horses) but until you know what you are talking about in terms of that lifestyle and love of an animal i am not sure its something that is condemnable.

as for the orgasm thing...i HAVE heard its possible lol.

Girls may or may not like pink - this is likely HIGHLY related to people like the grandmother in lilaeden's toy store. If you're taught that girls like pink, lo and behold, they end up liking pink! I explored the target website a bit and was so disheartened - they create this false split of "for boys" and "for girls" - when it might not even be there after you click the link. Example: under the 'sports' link (CLEARLY only for boys), there are girls in the ads (i.e. for swimming accessories). I don't know what kind of mixed message this is sending. And I was the most sad to see 'science' under the boys column only. Sigh. I miss my ant farm.

On a related note - my best friend has a 6 month old daughter that she regularly dresses in green and blue, because well, she LIKES those colours. It doesn't bother her when people mistake the baby for a boy (why would it really?), but what bothers her is the look of shock and confusion when she tells them the baby is a girl... we don't expect grown women to dress in pink all the time (I would guess that a ton of women's fave colour is blue actually...) - so why do we expect the same from babies? Oh right, because we gotta get them while they're young ;)

*cough*

i still buy "my lil ponies." for myself.

but when i was a little kid, my ponies went on world-saving adventures with my brother's ninja turtles. i also made my own swords, because while my mother would buy toy swords for my brother, she wouldn't for me.

you can still find non-gender legos, but they're for small children.

I would venture to guess that historically the girl/pony thing goes back to some sort of upper class gendered expectation. When families were "landed" or "planters" they typically had an equestrian portion to their estate. Boys were taught to ride to hunt, be overseers, etc....girls were given ponies at a young age and taught to ride sidesaddle like proper "ladies." Just an educated guess.

On the note of the McDs toys - this really bothered me when my daughter was young. We don't go to McDs much anymore, and rarely when she was little - but when we did, she would get a Happy Meal. I would ask Emily what toy she wanted and she would typically answer Hot Wheels over Barbie....I never posed the question to her, "girl or boy?" But sometimes would have to answer the drive thru person "boy".

Think about those McD toys and the expected "place" of boys/girls.....take the theory that men act/women appear - and those toys fit right in. Most of the boys' toys move, have wheels, or somehow have motion and moving parts. The girls' toys are generally motionless and more for looking at that actually playing with. That isn't ALWAYS the case, but I could make the argument for it based on statistics. Interesting.

Of course Bratz and Barbie dolls take the conversation to a whole new level - but that's a conversation left for another day.

I don't have children yet, but hopefully by the time I do there are plenty of toys aimed at boys and girls. I know already my kid won't get anything princess for one, I find that the most annoying thing retailers are trying to get little girls to buy into. And definitely will have a very limited supply of pink in her room.

My daughter calls this the "sea of pink" whenever we are in one of these stores. Did you all know that when you get a happy meal from McDonalds (ew) that they ask whether the meal is for a girl or boy in order to determine which toy to include? My daughter reported this to me a couple of years ago and I've since asked around. Seems it's pretty typical.

Not too long ago, a friend and I browsed the children's section at Target and found that 95% of "girls' toys" look (and often fragrantly smell) like whores, while any "boys' toys" have age-appropriate features, clothing and physiques (i.e. no huge tahs with unrealistically curvy figures, over-sexualized lips and eyes, and revealing clothing). If I ever decide to put myself through having children, you can guarantee I will scrutinize their play-things.

Not too long ago, a friend and I browsed the children's section at Target and found that 95% of "girls' toys" look (and often fragrantly smell) like whores, while any "boys' toys" have age-appropriate features, clothing and physiques (i.e. no huge tahs with unrealistically curvy figures, over-sexualized lips and eyes, and revealing clothing). If I ever decide to put myself through having children, you can guarantee I will scrutinize their play-things.

“If there was more of a demand for gender neutral toys and for less pink princesses, Target would be arranged differently.�

“Gender norms are a fairly accurate reflection of the majority, and there's really nothing wrong with that, as long as description doesn't become prescription.�

I think there’s a reciprocal transaction between demand and supply and description and prescription. The supply creates a demand as well as vice versa. Gender norms ARE prescribed and most people go along and thus the normative also reflects the majority.

My kids (a girl and a boy) always wore greens, reds, yellows, browns, etc. which were readily available, but now when I buy gifts, I’m appalled at how much more gendered clothes and toys are. Is it a backlash? Is it a misrepresentation of what 3rd wave feminism is all about? I don’t know, but I know I don’t like it.

p.s. the little toy stove looks so 1950s.

All the toys I've seen at Ikea are pretty gender neutral, and they have some of the best play-kitchen ware I've seen. In case anyone's looking.

I played with Legos as a kid and my mom and I actually wrote a letter to the Lego company asking why there weren't girls in the pirate and space ship sets. They wrote back that there wasn't enough demand to justify making all the sets with girls, but they sent us girl lego-people to go with the sets I had. So, basically, if you want better girl legos, write letters! And the boy legos work for girls too, just get the Harry Potter ones or hell, any of them. I played with pirate ships, space ships, gas stations, all sorts of boy legos and it was great!

I can sort of empathize with the folks who build the Target website, though. Gender norms are a fairly accurate reflection of the majority, and there's really nothing wrong with that, as long as description doesn't become prescription.

This is circular reasoning. You are defending a behavior by saying that's what the majority wants, but in fact the majority may want that precisely because of the behavior you are defending. Target does not *have* to market its toys that way; I am sure they could come up with many other more creative ways to market toys other than by girl and boy, that would bring them just as many sales.

The splitting up of the toys into boy and girl is so blatantly sexist it just drives me crazy. I can't believe it is 2007 and all the major retail stores still promote the stereotype that only boys play with construction toys and only girls play with dolls. And people wonder why there are so many more male engineers than female. Arghhhh!

There is a good alternative toy store in my hometown called Bennett's Educational Toys. They do not split their toys into boy and girl and they appear to have some good generic lego sets (that you can even buy online): http://www.bennettseducational.com/

I had one of those "play" kitchens in the 80's. Someone gave it to my mom secondhand to give to us (her 3 daughters). We never really used it. There's no fun in it, especially when our chores from a very young age were washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen.

If I remember, I'll have to ask my mom about that. I bet she kept it in the hope that it would make our actual kitchen duties more attractive - nice try, mom. :) We were certainly never encouraged to be housewives!

I did get very excited seeing the tool belt set under girls best sellers for ages 2-3... though sad because of how it stood out amongst the others.

Yeah, McD's routinely asks "Is it for a girl or a boy?" if the child isn't present in my experience. Since my daughter is not awfully into gender roles (though she does have a few My Little Ponies) I always make sure to ask her which she wants beforehand, and specify the toy and not the gender.

Since I have a son (5 yrs) and a daughter (2.5 yrs) I see a real mix of what they like to play with. Neither of them likes dolls, but they both love the train set, trucks, the miniature workbench with tools and legos. Oh, and flashlights, for some reason!

I usually have them both help me in the kitchen, so I didn't bother getting a toy kitchen set, but when I was doing research for good toys, I found good offerings from ALEX, Haba, and Melissa and Doug.

My husband also does not discriminate - he is as apt to teach our daughter woodworking and computers (both are his hobby) as he is our son.

Vervain: I was once clearing out an old cupboard and found a young women's magazine from the 1960s or possibly the 1950s, and on the problem page someone had written in to ask "I think I am in love with my horse. Is this normal?" Seriously.

oh, and one other thing...what is with those freakin' Disney Princess offerings?!!

I had one of those "play" kitchens in the 80's. Someone gave it to my mom secondhand to give to us (her 3 daughters). We never really used it. There's no fun in it, especially when our chores from a very young age were washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen.

If I remember, I'll have to ask my mom about that. I bet she kept it in the hope that it would make our actual kitchen duties more attractive - nice try, mom :) We were certainly never encouraged to be housewives!

oh, and one other thing...what is with those freakin' Disney Princess offerings?!! It is EVERYWHERE. Do I want my daughter thinking she is a princess? And why does she get to be so special and not my son? Also, why princess and not queen? Is she also supposed to be conditioned to think she's supposed to be young forever?
Okay, I'm sure I read WAY more into that, but those toys really bug me.

On a related, oh-so-timely note...

From the don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out and/or the ain't-karma-a-bitch department: Hasbro recalls Easy-Bake ovens "because children could get their hands caught in the front opening and suffer burns."

I've strived really hard to teach my daughter that just because she's a girl she don't have to play with so-called "girl" toys, and she has every right to play with toys so-called designed for boys. Well her 4th birthday is coming up, and I asked her what kind of theme she wanted? Her reply "Ninja Turtles" and so that is what we are having. I also asked her what she would like to be for halloween (never too early to start planning her costume), and her reply "Spongebob Squarepants". And when some of her friends tell her she cant do something because she's a girl, she replies "That's stupid, I can too, just watch me!"

Also, yes, lego is awesome. I used to play with lego and so does my daughter now; it doesn't impose any ideas on what you should build and lets you do whatever you think.

Or so I thought...

A few years ago when I was working for an engineering firm, a coworker won £100 in a competition. He had promised beforehand that if he won anything he would buy us a copy of a program called "LegoCAD" which let you make lego-ish things in your computer. But when it arrived, I was sad to see that it was all about cogs and wheels and pulleys and belts, and there was only one kind of brick and it only came in red!

So I think that even lego now is divided into sets for building civilisations with (as I always did as a kid, and as my daughter does) and sets for building machinery. I hope they don't further identify these with girls and boys respectively, but I suspect they may.

it's strangely coincidental that this story was posted today. i work at target (stocking shelves at 4 a.m. hooray!) and this morning i noticed how even on the shipping/schematic tags they label things "boy" or "girl." for example, all of the pink cinderella lunch bags are called "girl lunch bags" and the blue/red spiderman ones are "boy lunch bags." i was bewildered by the fact that they just didn't the licensed character names on the labels instead. it seemed like slap in the face to realized that even shipping containers prescribe to gender stereotypes. i almost threw up in my mouth when i saw it. tomorrow i'm going to put a mix of each in the different bins mwahahaha.

anyway, my point is that target sucks. even the shipping labels suck.

I refuse to be outraged until they add a military play set for boys. You know, so they can prepare our future brave fighting men to defend the free world by fighting yet another half baked conflict that we will inevitably lose.

When I was a kid, the church we went to had a Wednesday night activity for kids that was sort of like Girls and Boys Scouts for Jesus. I remember being SO PISSED that the boys always got to do the cool and fun things like camping, derby racing, knot tying, wilderness skills and so forth. And we girls got to do childcare, cookiing, etiquette, meal management, and so forth. Basically how to be good little Christian mommies and wives. THEN, the last year I was forced to be in it, they did away with the final year awards for girls. We used to get a "Susan B. Anthony" award for completing K-garten through 6th grade in this program. They ended up giving all the kids the metal with the MALE founder of the denomination's likeness on it. I had a BIG issue with that.

I swear I've been a feminist my whole damn life.

This post reminded me of when I visited my cousin's house last year. He's has a young son and daughter and my head almost exploded when I saw their rooms. The boy's room has blue walls with sport motifs everywhere. The girl's was painted pink, of course, with Disney princesses everywhere.

I do have a confession to make, though. When I was a kid I went to McDonalds every week and never, ever would have picked the "boy" toy. I'm sure my toy collection (think Barbies and teasets) have been the perfect ad for Target's girls' toy section. I grew out of that phase around age 10, thankfully. (I'm an engineering major and have a curiously strong aversion to pink, no doubt caused by my earlier overexposure to it!) I can only hope that the same will happen to my cousin's daughter.

I refuse to be outraged until they add a military play set for boys. You know, so they can prepare our future brave fighting men to defend the free world by fighting yet another half baked conflict that we will inevitably lose.

Um, that's called GI Joe.

The way in which toys designed for boys encourage violence and aggressive behavior is a whole other issue that I could go off on. I am not saying that the toys directly cause violent behavior later in life (my brother and I played with GI Joe but we were raised in a peaceful, non-authoritarian environment and we would often make the figures cooperate with each other). But if the child is not exposed to other more appropriate outlets and models of non-violent behavior, then the toys can be a contributing factor.

My sons want rainbows and kittens for their shirts and my daughter wants a pink martial arts uniform - not clothes they are gonna find unless I make them myself.

Legos have more gender neutral stuff on their website and there are often mixed use block sets even at target.

Fast food - we specify the toy not the gender - so cute things appear frequently in the boys lunches by their choice and the girl has her precious trucks. And they promptly fight each other for what they don't have themselves and then do it again to get the original item back.

Has anyone here heard of the Barbie Liberation Organization?

You know, we really started with the best of intentions for my daughter. We didn't know if we were getting a girl or a boy, and we are not big on forced gender roles anyway... we bought plenty of greens and yellows and other nice neutral colours.

Then she was born, and we were flooded with pink. We have spent a grand total of maybe $40 on her clothing, getting just four or five outfits (all used). But all our relatives, co-workers and friends buy her all this pink.

Pisses me off, because it's not like we can afford to refuse it. Our immediate family is easy to correct, but my wife's stepmother... not so easy.

Hopefully she'll grow out of the pink soon and we will get back to mostly neutral clothing until she's able to decide for herself what she likes.

I have a huge stash of lego that my parents saved, and my old wooden blocks and wooden train set (enough to fill our condo, easily). She's certainly going to be offered those to play with. With any luck she won't get too many "girly" toys from others; we're only giving them to her if she really begs and pleads for them.

Actually, I don't find target to be too bad--even on their website, although they do have "boy toys" and "girl toys" sections they also have a "kitchens and play food" section which has not only the pink kitchen sets but a number of very colorful sets, grills of assorted types, and so on. And the target store has a wooden, colorful kitchen set which I would buy for children of either sex (and do indeed plan to buy for my son, if I don't find one I like better by the time he's old enough for one). Target has their issues, but I'm not going to take so much issue with them having sections for those parents who want stereotypical toys for their kids as well as more generalized sections for the rest of us =)

Whether or not my little boy ever has a sister, he will be able to play with dolls as well as trucks, just like my brother and I played with each other's toys.

And non gendered Legos are still available. You can even go to Lego stores and buy bags of them sorted by color and size.

There's certainly room for improvement, but there's some good stuff out there, too.

Now if only I could find a "real men wear pink" shirt for my toddler...

Matthew: black dye might be one way to get away from the pink, assuming you don't mind raising a goth. :)

Marnanel: Heh. I did joke that I was going to raise her to be goth, so she'd rebel and become normal (not that it's really an option for her to be "normal" given that both her mother and I are complete weirdos).

It's telling that the best picture I have of her is beside a pair of sai, and she likes playing with my wife's practice nunchaku. She's only 9 months old and already likes weapons as much as her mother...

There is a TV commercial showing now for Tonka trucks. It says, "Built for Boyhood".

How sad. My daughter had Tonka trucks. She'd stuff her Barbie inside the cab and shove it off the porch. "Barbie is a stunt person, Mom."
My son plays with dolls (they are not action figures, they are dolls) and has a stuffed polar bear that he babies. I'd get him a baby doll if he wanted one, but he likes Roger.

Christina: How cute is your son? A stuffed bear named Roger! That is precious.

My kids don't like dolls, but they are AGOG over real, live babies. I watched a friend's infant for several months, and the kids loved being able to hold his bottle, make funny faces at him and hand him different toys.

On a different note, when my family (parents and two sisters) found out I was pregnant with a girl, they practically made me swear on a bible to 'let' her wear pink, frilly stuff if she wanted. My older sister even told me that my daughter had no chance of being a 'girl' with me as her mother. Ouch. My family's conception of 'normal' for girls clearly doesn't include me. I know they have always considered me a little 'different' but to hear it said so baldly from my own flesh and blood...*sigh*

Where I work we have a lot of Dora the explorer stuff. Dora is such an awesome role model. Not only is she Latina (which you don't see a lot of in children's programing), but she is an explorer (and she's bilingual). So you can imagine how pissed off I was when I saw a Dora the explorer backpack where Dora was wearing a princess dress instead of her explorer gear. What the hell? How can she explore in a princess dress? And parents actually bought that crap for their children. I actually asked one parent why they had to ruin Dora by putting her in a princess dress, and she said, "All girls want to be princesses, I guess." UGH! It's infuriating!

I really like more oddball toys, although within limits.

A legendary toy I have only heard and read about was a set "small distiller", like you could have "small doctor", "small chemist" etc. It allowed to go stage by stage from potatoes to ca. one tea-glass of vodka.

I personally have seen, although only once, a "riot police" set that stood besides Roman gladiators, mediaeval knights etc, complete with shields, long clubs, eye shields and a little water canon. Perhaps one could add a set of "anarchists" with little Molotov cocktails, signs against globalization etc. Add a set with a street and stores, and you can wage non-gendered street battles for days.

Unrelated complaint: an ordinary size of after-shave lasts ca. 5 years, which is boring, while it is hard to get tiny travel sizes apart from free samples (
of which you have few when you buy a bottle every 5 years or so). At airports I noticed toiletries for Barbie, but --- none for Ken. So, my next proposal: tiny shaving set for Ken (the way Barbie dresses, she could shave her legs too, but after-shave could be gendered).

When I was little my parents bought me a pink Barbie-themed kitchen set. Rather than using it for cooking, I would catch giant toads outside and keep them inside the cupboards.... >:)

(Oh, I always let the toads go, though!)

piotrek: what, like this one?

Re ponies - As far as I can tell, the ponies/girls relationship is similar to the dogs/boys relationship. The fiction is very similar and you get similar amounts of crossover.

One reasons for ponies (or large dogs) in specific though may be that it's a chance to boss around someone/something much larger and stronger than yourself.

Continuing the "pink, pretty, and passive" theme, did you notice that where boys get "spy" toys like periscopes and fingerprint kids, girls get "privacy" toys like doorknob alarms and locking diaries (with completely ineffective locks)?

Even the "boy" toys at our local stores are pretty passive though. At our local chain toy store, they've ripped out most of the Lego section in favor of WWWF and GI Joe logowear. Ugh.

My three-year-old daughter insists her favorite color is pink. She loves dressup. She is a big fan of dolls. But, I've noticed some of those things are simply an imitation -- she sees me taking care of her baby brother, she takes care of her baby doll. She sees me cooking in the kitchen, she putters around with her toy dishes and toy food. And right now, she's building trucks out of Duplo blocks. A little while ago, she had her Brio train set out. She just plays with whatever she enjoys, and we've got "girl toys" AND "boy toys" around for her to choose from.

The key to finding good kids toys is not shopping at Target or similar department stores; look for higher-end shops that stock Brio, or Playmobil, or Lego. Order direct from the catalogs/web sites of those companies. (Although, if anybody has advice on how to diplomatically stop grandmothers from buying cheap plastic idiotic crap for the kids, I would loooooove to hear it.)

Thank you to various commenters who mentioned that kitchen-related chores reduced a child's interest in having a play kitchen. My daughter has been nagging me endlessly to get one, and we just don't have room for it. She will now get to help with dishes and cooking instead >:-)

Marnanel: this is it!!

I did not see the box, but it is a delight to authoritarian and anarchist parents alike!

Making tiny protest signs would be a nice play all by itself.

My three-year-old daughter insists her favorite color is pink. She loves dressup. She is a big fan of dolls. But, I've noticed some of those things are simply an imitation -- she sees me taking care of her baby brother, she takes care of her baby doll. She sees me cooking in the kitchen, she putters around with her toy dishes and toy food. And right now, she's building trucks out of Duplo blocks. A little while ago, she had her Brio train set out. She just plays with whatever she enjoys, and we've got "girl toys" AND "boy toys" around for her to choose from.

Frankly, I'm terrified that she will be girly despite my influence -- I don't know shit about how to be a girl :-P

i was lucky enough to grow up with a brother to play with so that even though we both received gender specific toys, we spent equal time playing with my barbies and beanie babies and his hot wheels and tool chests. and yea that lego pirate ship did kick ass.

THis is a good post and an INCREDIBLY annoying trend.

FWIW, Pottery Barn (I think) had some non-pink stoves. But they were stainless-steel-look units (looked like a Viking range, if I recall) and cost in the range of $600-900 for a full set. I loved them though :)

And for other play-kitchen-fanatics (boys like them too...) you may like these links:
http://www.1st-quality-school-supplies.com/kiplseap.html
http://dallas.kijiji.com/c-For-sale-Toys-games-FIVE-PIECE-MINI-CHEF-STAINLESS-STEEL-LOOK-PLAY-KITCHEN-W0QQAdIdZ17583045

I think that really the best way to go is educational stores. Schools buy "toys" as well, but they're much better about gender shit.

Ugh! I'm currently pregnant with a girl (who is due today) and I have had one hell of a time finding clothes and 'baby gear' that isn't the usual baby pink. Sure there is the nasty pastel green color, but it always reminds me of phlegm. Then there are all the one pieces that have 'Daddy's little girl' and 'princess' on them. Every time my partner and I go shopping for things for the baby, we get a little sick because we know that our troubles finding non-pink stuff are just the tip of the iceberg. I can't imagine what kind of response I will have the first time she requests a Bratz or Barbie. I guess I should start practicing now though...

Off to make her a 'This is what a feminist looks like' onesie.

I've been skeptical of the "no war toys" thing since I was a kid and my (Republican, oddly enough) grandmother refused to buy me the G.I. Joe tank I wanted. I still haven't quite gotten over that.

Also there was the kid down the street whose Mom wouldn't buy him a toy gun, so he made a bow and arrows and kept them stashed behind the neighbor's garage. Toy guns would have been a lot safer.

My 27 mo old daughter likes pink. I like it, too, even on me. She also insists on wearing pants all the damn time. She likes baby dolls, which I think is a way of imitating me. She and one of her buds, a girl, had little strollers that they put their dolls in and then did furious laps around the house in a game we called 'baby NASCAR.'

I buy clothes from Target and Old Navy for her but am careful to get a wide palette, inc from the boys section. The gender-stereotyping does indeed start sooooo young!!

Here's a story for you: my kid was at the playground. She was climbing something tricky, as she often does. I didnt hover. I have seen how other kids are on the jungle gym, and I am proud of her courage.

A mom of 2 boys came up to me and said, 'Oh your daughter is so gorgeous.'

Me: Thank you.

She (watching my daughter climb): And she's quite brave for a girl.

Me: (stammering a bit) Why, uh, yes. Thanks.

pause

Me: Come to think of it, she's quite brave for a boy, too.

She: (stammering a bit) Why, of course.

Me: (thinking to myself) And she's gonna kick your beefy kid's ass some day.

Yep this gender stgmas are culturely condition in people when they're children. Luckily for me, I used to play with Barbies and GI Joes..Except I would shave of her head and dress her in camaflouge in a "GI Jane" type situation. Maybe a group of liberal business people should start a gender netural toy store.

I remember when I was in kindergarten, my favorite color was red, and when I told that to some of the boys in my class, they told me that I: "Only like it because it's a boy color." My response: "No, I just like it." I played with Barbies a lot when I was little, but really, my sister and I would play with ANYTHING that we could build complex stories around--Barbies, plastic Disney-themed toys, dinosaurs, Lego people, paper dolls--when we played with Barbies it wasn't a 'dress-up' thing as much as it was: "Hey, let's use the Barbies to act out stories based on that new book we read/show we saw/movie." And then there were the completely-made-up storylines, which were even weirder. I think girls can have fun playing with 'girl toys,' but I think they can have just as much fun with 'boy toys' hence why toys shouldn't be gendered.

I am an adult and I don't currently have children, so this isn't really something at the forefront of my mind, but it does seem like things have gotten worse.

When I was a kid I had a kitchen set but it was blue, and I had dolls, but they didn't have florescent purple eyeshadow painted onto their faces. I also had legos, which were generic and primary colored, and matchbox cars and a Tonka dump truck. When I do manage to find myself in the toy section of a store (which is rare) I definitely don't see as many neutral things as I had as a kid, but many my parents just put a lot of effort into finding them for me.

Recently friends and family members have begun reproducing and I've been invited to showers, birthdays, whatever. In buying a gift for a soon to be born baby girl, I was horrified not just by how much pink was available, but by the lack of anything else. I almost purchased a "boy" onsie because this was so distressing, but I didn't want to inadvertantly offend my friend. (Recently my go to has been Gap's Product RED baby clothes - here).

In regards to the fast food toys, my first job was at a local fast food restaurant, Taco Time (not to be confused with Taco Bell - ick!). We started offering to substitute a desert instead of a toy because so many adults ordered our kid's meals. I had to ask customers which they wanted and often I would people would request a toy "FOR A GIRL!!!!" like it was the most super important part of the order. It always made me laugh because we had gender neutral toys. Sometimes they were really cool, like dinosaur sticker sets, or plush baseballs and basketballs.

i was OBSESSED with horses as a kid, my friend had pony rides at her birthday and i thought horses were the most beautiful creatures ever. i had model horses, my little ponies, novels about girls and their horses. i think its pretty common, there was even an article about horse girls in either the rollerderby anthology or the bust anthology, possibly in both. i drew pictures of horses, and i kept trying to convince my mother we could keep a miniature pony in our backyard. she didnt so much agree. i dont think the horse thing is anything gendered the way princesses and cooking toys tend to be. afterall, boys and girls have those toys where its a plush horse head on a stick and you pretend youre riding around the house, and boys and girls like to ride the coin operated pony toys, and boys read books like "the black stallion" too.

i just became a super defensive horse girl. weird.

i saw the coolest toy the other day, it was in a white box with red and blue text, didnt seem terribly gender specific either way, and it was a toy tattoo gun that had little platic reusable stencils and used washable non-toxic markers. i kno alot of kids, if their parents have tattoos want to look like them too with their own tattoos, and it just seemed neat cos it encouraged creativity and individuality. it made me wish i had my own kid to get one for.

Jessilikewhoa:

Where did you see this tattoo gun toy? I think I need to buy it!

Thanks for posting on this, I was walking through Target and gagged noticing the exact same thing. Can we really claim that's just 'what the kids want' when it's so obviously being jammed down their throats from birth?

Also, I had a nice neutral green and orange play kitchen. I never washed dishes, but I loved cooking and eating that fake food. Twenty years later, I'm exactly the same...

Dude, when I was a kid, I had this totally awesome kitchen set thing. This was before pink and purple really kind of attacked the world, and it was in primary colors. I was always kinda freaked out by the pinky stuff--I mean, I wasn't exactly a fan of primary colors, but whats wrong with a nice teal?

I loved this thing. I loved my fake food. It was totally cool. Way cooler than the toy kitchens they have now. Incidentally, I still love to cook. But my mom says that when I was a little, the boys next door would come over to play, and they were the ones who always suggested playing house, and wanted to use the totally awesome kitchen set. This was, she postulated, because they did not have one.

My childhood was strangely gendered. I had a totally awesome Tonka dump truck (When they were still metal!!!) that my little sister and I used play in the sandbox with them. I always wanted a backhoe, but I never got one. I think my mom probably thought one truck was enough. My little sister got the cement truck she wanted, though, and so I was jealous. I also had about five hundred dolls, that I would attempt to breast feed, sometimes in public places, which my mother also thought was weird.

Kids turn out okay with gendered stuff, as long as you mix it up some. I wasn't really interested in the tiny cars or war related things, but I liked construction stuff. I also liked dolls, and cooking, and crafting. I wanted to be a backhoe operator, a ballerina, a teacher, ruler of the world (in polite society 'second woman president of the US' because I realized at five or six that there had damn well better be another woman president before I got old enough) and an archaeologist.

Incidentally, I just got my degree in archaeology, and I'm out in the 'real' world doing archaeology, and today we used a backhoe to dig trenches, and it was very very awesome.

mightyninjamom:
Flashlights are really cool. I can't really explain it, but it -is- a neat opportunity for a physics lesson. (I'm my father's daughter, all the way). I was always fascinated by the light, and how the flashlight itself worked.

Gender is a weird animal. On one hand, it has some genetic basis. On the other hand, it is very effected by social standards. I know plenty of people who don't fit into the social standards, and therefore, I reason, it can't be entirely due to social conditioning. I think the concept of 'feminine' and 'masculine' are dumb, but that's another rant that I don't have full grasp of linguistics/philosophy to explain. Anyway, most kids, in my experience, are just little kids (aka, not little girls or little boys) and so the gender categorization is being done by the parents. By the time the children reach kindergarten, many of them have started subscribing to these ways of thinking, and so it is reinforced by their peers. If parents resist genderification, and encourage their kids to do what they like, then they can more comfortably grow into their own gender, even if that fits the norms. On the other hand, if a kid does not fit into the gender norms, excepting extreme social repercussions, they will -still- grow into their own gender, albeit more painfully.

"What happened to the comparatively genderless, uncommercialized primary colored blocks from when I was a kid?"

My little brother inherited mine. Maybe a whole bunch of little brothers inherited them from big sisters and a whole bunch of little sisters inherited them from big brothers...and the toy merchants figured little kids were more likely to bug their parents for new toys if they were less likely to be happy with their older siblings' toys?

"(Where, oh where did the girl-pony phenomena originate?)

"A friend of mine had a theory about this. Let's just say, it involved a memory she had of riding her horse, and an orgasm..."

For a short while I thought it would be neat to have a pony. I was years away from my driver's license and miles away from the library, but horseback riding has no age limit...

Oh yeah: Klutz Books are pretty good for kids' science, crafts, and games that (for the most part) are marketed to both sexes.

(Although, if anybody has advice on how to diplomatically stop grandmothers from buying cheap plastic idiotic crap for the kids, I would loooooove to hear it.)

Exchange the stuff and send her a note thanking her for whatever you exchanged it for. She'll twig to it eventually.

I personally have seen, although only once, a "riot police" set that stood besides Roman gladiators, mediaeval knights etc, complete with shields, long clubs, eye shields and a little water canon. Perhaps one could add a set of "anarchists" with little Molotov cocktails, signs against globalization etc. Add a set with a street and stores, and you can wage non-gendered street battles for days.

Wow, the Crush The Proles set? I didn't even know that was out yet!

oliviab, the tattoo set was at meijer which im pretty sure is just a midwest chain, but you can buy it from amazon here-

http://www.amazon.com/Spinmaster-6006830-i-Tattoo-electronic-tattoo/dp/B000EULZ50

My three-week-old daughter looks stunning in pink, so I see no reason to refuse the hundred and one pink onesies we received just because our culture has decided pink is a "weak" color. Fie on that! That said, a little variety in newborn clothes would not go amiss. That said, when the pink onesie has "The Angels Have the Phone Box" on it, I think the geek cred balances things.

OTOH, I have already started telling her that when people call her "princess," she should tell them that she's not a princess, she's a gunslinger (long story; she shares the name of a character from Stephen King's Dark Tower series). This may cause problems in daycare, dunno, but the only princess in this house is our cat.

I grew up with an older brother and two older male cousins that were around a lot, so I played with plenty of "boy toys" like Micro Machines and Transformers in addition to my Barbies (who, btw, I don't think are necessarily bad - the big plastic tits may be problematic but I never had any other doll that portrayed a female doctor), My Little Ponies, and other pink "girly" stuff. Actually, my male friends have commented that it's cool how I can kick their asses at Mortal Kombat.

I did have a kitchen set, though. It wasn't pink, but I thought it was really cool.

We could get rid of all pink kitchen toys, but then how would girls learn that it's their God-given duty to cook for me?

In all seriousness, Target deserves some, but not all blame in this situation. Gender norms existed before Target designed the gender-specific toy sections, but Target is perpetuating these norms. In a previous post, someone (t6283798) mentioned LEGO sets and how they are marketed specifically toward boys. Again, LEGO doesn't deserve too much blame here. They are a business, and like any successful business, they have done plenty of research to determine the audience for their product. If more parents bought LEGO sets for their daughters, LEGO would advertise more to girls. You cannot say that LEGO has been "co-opted" if they are doing what is best for their shareholders. Now, if LEGO and Target were more culturally progressive, they might see value in breaking gender norms, and advertise gender-neutral products evenly to both genders (although this would undoubtedly hurt their profits). And let's be honest, that isn't going to happen any time soon.

One thing that nobody has really mentioned is the effect TV advertisements have on young kids. Children have malleable minds, and if they watch ads on TV for hours per day, you can be sure it will have an effect. I'm certain that those ads reinforce gender norms and market "girl-specific" toys to girls and "boy-specific" toys to boys. Subsequently, little girls and boys will nag their parents for those toys. There is an decent chapter about this in the book Affluenza (de Graaf et. al), although they refer more to the effect that fast food and sugary cereal ads have on children.

The system is self-perpetuating. Parents do not buy "boy-themed" toys for their girls. Manufacturers and retailers see this and make these toys even more "boy-oriented" and advertise them as such. Then parents are even less likely to buy them for girls.

My play kitchen when I was a kid (late 1980s) was from Fisher-Price...durable plastic, red, yellow and white. Come to think of it, a lot of Fisher-Price toys in the 80s were pretty gender-neutral. I had the barnyard, and the Little People playhouse (also in the yellow-white color combo, if I remember correctly)

I must confess though, my five-year old self absolutely ADORED the My Little Pony Estate, in all its purple-and-pink plastic glory. It mostly served as a home for my cat, though.

"I hate anybody who had a pony growing up."

"When I was a little girl in Poland, we all had ponies. My sister had pony, my cousin had pony. So, what's wrong with that?"

Seinfeld is always the first thing that comes to mind when I think of ponies, cupcakesofdeath. Haha

This reminds me of my kid sister when she was a preschooler. She wasn't raised "girly" at all. She often wore hand-me-downs from my brother and me, and preferred our toys to the dolls and things my parents gave her (the only exception being stuffed animals). She even liked cap pistols, going through roll after roll of paper caps. But she made our Dad paint her pistols pink.

Check out this awesome book on the subject:

Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes.

It is geared toward parents, but is good for anyone with a young girl in her life. I have a 5 year old niece who has been thoroughly "girly"-brainwashed already. I try to be a strong feminist voice in her head- like telling her to take off the play high heels because they're the tools of oppression- but i am always criticized by the rest of the family. I read this book and felt vindicated.

When I was little, they first started the whole Boy-Girl Happy Meal at McDonald's. I went in with my mom and little sis and the lady was going to give us two girl Happy Meals with Princess Barbie, but I wanted the one with the Hot Wheels. My mom made her change it. I still remember the weird look on the cashier's face! =)