As per our discussion in class, our society is clearly in need of toys that shattered gender stereotypes and let children explore without feeling the tight constriction of gender norms. Ida introduced us to GoldieBlox, whose website I encourage you to visit. I'd like you to do one of the following:
1) Conduct some research of your own and find toys that do not limit themselves to gender stereotypes, perhaps working towards introducing children to iconoclastic concepts that may exceed gender norms.
2) Show us some of the worst offenders in marketing shamelessly towards a particular gender such as the controversial "Lego's for Girls".
Be sure to provide a link and an explanation. Also, read your classmates' comments and chime in on the discussion!
In general, the majority of non-gendered toys are so-called “thinking” toys, toys which require children to solve a puzzle or create something. More gendered (and in general more popular) toys usually revolve around role-playing in some form: things like Nerf guns or action figures for boys, to practice power-play and violence, versus things like dolls or houses for girls, which teach mothering and domestic behaviors. Role-play toys aren’t in and of themselves the problem; the problem is that, almost as a rule, they condition children to role-play gender stereotypes.
ReplyDeleteCompanies will claim that they have done “studies,” and that they design these products based on what boys and girls have “tested” to want. But this is a cyclical argument, since children learn what they should want based on the advertising they are force-fed literally from birth. Like everyone on Earth, little kids are narcissists who want to see people that look like them on boxes and TV ads, and when, invariably, the action toy commercials all feature toys being played with by groups of boys with male voiceovers, while the “girly” products depict girls and have female voiceovers (let alone the fact that these girl toys such as Barbie actually involve girls, while action figures are overwhelmingly male), kids are drawn to the product that seems to relate to them. The supposedly innate interest in guns or shopping only develops because of the constant repetition of the relatable aspect of the ad (the people shown) in conjunction with guns or shopping.
Strangely, when I did a search for “non-gendered toys” to get some inspiration for this project, almost all the pictures on Google Images were of highly gendered toys being played with by a child of the gender other than the one it was marketed to (for example, a girl playing with a Nerf gun, a boy playing with a very pink, very frilly dollhouse).
Anyway, here is a non-gendered toy I came across: http://www.magnatiles.com/
It’s called MangaTiles, it’s basically magnetic tiles that stick together and that you can use to build things (again, a non-gendered “creative” game). They are mostly meant for younger children.
My example of a highly gendered toy would be Ello, something that I had when I was a kid (and still have buried in a box somewhere): http://www.everythinggirl.com/ello/
Ello was, interestingly enough, a building set, but it was an extremely gendered one marketed exclusively to girls. Everything was sparkly, pink, purple, or some pastel shade of green or brown reminiscent of the colors of ice cream, and the sets were to build things like bakeries or shopping malls (that particular one, the biggest and most elaborate, was the one I had, and I have to say, it was pretty awesome, though in my mind my creations were never “shopping malls”). Perhaps that is why it was discontinued so quickly– after being on the market only a few years, the building set concept was ditched and Ello was repackaged as a custom jewelry kit. Eventually it was abandoned altogether.
If you feel like injuring your eyes, you can check out the rest of the Everything Girl website, the division of Mattel (Barbie’s parent company) that vomits pink and sparkles: http://www.everythinggirl.com/home/home.aspx
More gems from Lego: http://reelgirl.com/2013/04/little-lego-men-are-harassing-me-wtf/
ReplyDeleteThe moment I got onto the Toys “R” Us website the first thing I noticed was that there are two sections for toys: Boy’s Toys and Girl’s Toys. When you click on the two links there are many obvious differences. While girls have another option for “Dolls”, boys get “Action Figures”, just as girls get a section for “Bath, Beauty and Accessories” and boys get a section called “Vehicles, Hobby and R/C”. These differences aren’t only seen on the Toys “R” Us website, but on many other major toy sellers. Although Walmart doesn’t have two separate sections that separate the genders, they have many obvious signs of who should be buying what on their site. The “Pretend Play” section pictures a young girl playing with a pink kitchen set, while the “Vehicles, Trains and Remote Control” section shows a small boy playing with a car set. Walmart does not need to blatantly state anything, the gender stereotypes are clearly implied.
ReplyDeleteNot surprisingly the Toys “R” Us gender classifications have brought up many concerns throughout the United States and Europe. An article in the Huffington Post “Toys 'R' Us U.K. Agrees To End Gender Marketing In Response To 'Let Toys Be Toys' Campaign”: (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/08/toys-r-us-uk-gender-marketing_n_3890599.html)
talks about how while the Toys “R” US in UK and many other European stores such as Tesco and TJ Maxx have agreed to stop classifying toys by gender, the United States Toys “R” Us has not yet been able to make this change. However, there is currently a petition made by a site called “A Mighty Girl”.
While the toys themselves are just regular toys, when stores such as these that have a lot of influence over what children want and their parents are buying, making categories like these creates a much larger problem. Toys that were created as gender neutral are turned into toys for a specific gender by the company, which has a much greater outreach. A boy who goes into the story wanting a doll, would faster come out with an action figure because the dolls weren’t in the “Boy’s Toy’s” section. The store not only creates a gender discrepancy, but encourages it.
As a kid I’ve seen plenty of girls play with the Barbie styling head or playing pretend. One of the worst offenders in gender stereotypical children’s toys would be the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven. This toy seriously supports the 1950’s idea that the women are meant to be cooks. The toy itself is decked out in pink decorations and utensils. When the Easy-Bake oven is advertised on television, the commercials often only show little girls prancing around in pink aprons playing with the oven. In the earlier years, when the toy first came out around 1963, the toy was a turquoise color. As decades rolled by, Hasbro changed the exterior color to orange neutrals and eventually to the present day purple-pink pastel. The “girly-ness” of the toy sends the message that women are the home-makers, they bake, they cook, and they do the household chores.
ReplyDeleteWhen I tried to research “toys that break gender stereotypes” I came up with not actual products but articles about retail stores’ attempts to equalize the disparity in toy categorization. One of the more notable articles was an article about one of Britain’s largest toy store chains: Harrod’s. (http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/27/living/harrods-gender-neutral-toys/index.html)
The article says that “it's a step in the right direction toward breaking down the gender divide.” I feel that though this step is considerably small compared to the differences non-gendered toys could have made, Harrod’s is moving in the correct path. As Othilla mentioned in her E.C, toy stores separate toys according to gender and each aisle holds toys that are marketed towards either females or males. Because there is a physical divide, it would seem unacceptable to break the boundaries by entering a different aisle with toys geared towards the opposite gender. Harrod’s new “Toy Kingdom" is broken into six interactive "worlds." This allows kids to choose toys according to their properties and their genre rather than according to the gender it was specifically made for.
On the day we discussed toys, I actually thought of Goldieblox because I read about it somewhere, but I only remembered it was some girl's toy created by an engineer. So I Googled something along the lines of "engineer girl toy" and I found this other similar approach to help break the stereotype of girls just playing with dolls and dollhouses.
ReplyDelete(http://www.roominatetoy.com/)
Two female engineers (also from Stanford, interestingly) created a toy called Roominate in which children are given a kit with parts to build their own miniature room, or dollhouse, or whatever they want to make. What's interesting about this toy is that children are given parts to build and decorate a doll house as well as a motor, switch, and battery pack. It is suggested to build a fan, but the creators also include other ideas for the electronic part of the toy such as washing machine and fireplace.
Roominate manages to make their packaging very gender neutral as well. Instead of pinks and purples or flowers and kittens, it just shows images of the toy. There's also no picture of a child playing with the toy on the box anywhere, which tends to be the case in many other toys that are classified by gender. I'm not sure how great Roominate actually is but the idea is good and I saw on the site that there are actually a few boys who played and had fun with it as well.
When I was trying to remember what toys I had played with as a child, I was having a hard time because all I could remember was Barbie (even though she wasn't even significant). Her hair was gross and playing with her was very boring. It was more fun for me to twist her arms and legs into weird positions and pull her head off. I lost her and I never really missed her. The toy that I do I remember playing with was something similar to Mega Blox, which is like a magnified lego piece. When I looked it up, the product is marketed like this: http://www.amazon.com/Megabloks-80pc-Lrg-Mega-Bloks/dp/B000M8H8Y6. The boy on the packaging will make girls not want this toy. But I guess that's okay because they have a pink packaging version for all the girls. I remember that the packaging for my blocks were just in a clear plastic container, gender neutral. And the blocks were yellow, purple, green, blue, pink. I think this is just one case of how companies are now trying to be "smarter" with packaging and aiming at a specific gender. But their gender biased packaging is affecting the mind's of kids at an early age.
ReplyDeleteBut not Riley's mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CU040Hqbas). This is a video of a toddler ranting about marketing. She questions why girls had to buy princesses while the boys could by superheros. And she says that companies were "tricking" girls into buying everything pink. She argues that some girls are interested in superheros, while some boys are interested in princesses. Interestingly, she asks why girls had to buy pink stuff, but boys could buy different color stuff. This idea that girls are limited and restricted, while boys are given options and a lot more than girls. It makes it easy to sell stuff to girls. Just make it pink. Do girls really like princesses or is it the companies that have "tricked" generations of young girls into believing they do? The companies limit girls immediately to what they think they have the potential to do.
I also found that Lego has finally released a the first ever female scientist mini-fig. But Lego could take some pointers from a 3-year old, Cecilia.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/badass-lego-girls_n_3975818.html
She has been mashing up mini-figure parts: female head + male body + male accessories. The Huffington Post calls them "badass." Lego has been discouraging for girls who play with male toys because there are few female mini-figs. But I also think it is really empowering for all these girls who are able to mix up what they are given. Physically taking a part a woman head and putting it on a man's body is saying that a girl's brain is capable to handling the man's job. It seems to say: Girls can do whatever a boy can do. Maybe these images will show Lego the proper way of making female mini-figs.
I am surprised to find that girl toddlers were saying and doing something about what they were being marketed to. Sometimes even parents don't seem to notice that they are encouraging stereotypes with the toys they buy their children.
I would imagine that sexist toys hardly pile up on the store shelves in our generation, but apparently, that’s a far off dream. Toys, especially those targeting young girls, continue to perpetuate the female stereotypes of hypersexuality and domesticity. In this particular website (http://peanutroaster.hubpages.com/hub/The-worst-toys-for-girls), the advertised toys dispel any vision of a world free of gender categorization.
ReplyDeleteThe toys marketed in this page include a pole dancing doll, a Disney princesses broom and dustpan kit, a breast-feeding doll, and a pregnant Barbie doll. Given this list, these toys appeal to stereotypical roles of what society expects women to be. Particularly the poll dancing doll, it is disheartening to see that it is a toy targeted for young girls. At such an early age, girls playing with this toy would be impressed upon the conception that pole dancing is fun and normal. They, however, would not know the underlying sexual nature of this toy and that they are being conditioned to a certain extent into sexual objects, conforming into the reductive role of a being without a mind. On the other hand, the broom and dustpan kit and other two dolls perpetuate the idea that women belong in the house as mothers and housewives.
Toys are items used for play. Yet, they can be manipulated into propaganda, influencing children to believe in the various classifications of gender stereotypes. Since the goal of marketers and businesses focus on making profits, they fail to be concerned of these marginalizing toys. It is up to the ones who value living in a world without bias and prejudiced to resolve this issue.
Last week when we were discussing the topic of toys for specific genders, I remembered the times when I was young and my sister and I would each play with toys. While I played with race cars and knights with swords, my sister would be playing with her dolls, grooming and caring for them. We've pretty much learned what would be considered a "boys" toy and what would be a "girls" toy.
ReplyDeleteThis is similar to this article: "http://www.newdream.org/blog/2011-10-gendering-of-kids-toys".
It talks about some woman who refers to the past and to the future, talking about her experiences with gender specifications with toys. In the 70's and 80's, when she was growing up, toy choices weren't limited because of gender. Girls played with "dolls and trucks" and vice versa. However, she tells us that for her daughter's (born in 2002) generation, children's toys have become very specified for each gender. She takes us through time, showing pictures and her own argument about toys targeting a specific gender. I agree with her when she mentions how toys today are also very "color-coded." She tells us about the time when she saw a pink crayon set (meant for girls) and a blue crayon set (meant for boys). I can relate to this because everytime I walk into any store, I notice how items are color-coded for specific genders, whether it would be clothes or accessories.