{"id":1760,"date":"2009-11-04T00:04:42","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T05:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1760"},"modified":"2009-11-04T00:04:42","modified_gmt":"2009-11-04T05:04:42","slug":"beyond-pink-blue-best-boy-toy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/11\/04\/beyond-pink-blue-best-boy-toy\/","title":{"rendered":"BEYOND PINK & BLUE: Best Boy Toy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. <\/span>They railed against the board game \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Battleship\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for depicting a father and son at play while an apron-clad mother and daughter washed dishes in the background. <\/span>(One outraged mother even sent the cardboard game box to the editors of Ms<\/span>. magazine to prove her point.) <\/span>They questioned why pretend kitchens were fashioned out of pink plastic, when the majority of professional chefs were men. <\/span>And they urged puzzle-makers to depict women piloting airplanes and fighting fires.<\/p>\n

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<\/span>One of the youngest toy activists was a seven-year-old from New York City named Caroline Ranald. <\/span>In 1972, the second-grader wrote a letter to the Lionel train company admonishing them for their boy-dominated ads. <\/span>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Girls like trains too,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she explained. <\/span>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am a girl. <\/span>I have seven locomotives. <\/span>Your catalog only has boys. <\/span>Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you like girls?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/span>Caroline\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s short letter made a big impression. <\/span>Not only did the toy train makers feature girls in their subsequent catalogs, they also circulated a press release with endorsements touting the psychological and cognitive benefits of train play for girls.<\/p>\n

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Fast forward to 2009\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6and we have to ask: <\/span>what happened to the gains feminists made in toyland? <\/span>I literally did a double-take when I read that the Toy Association\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Toy of the Year Awards\u00e2\u20ac\u009d offer separate prize categories for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Boy Toy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Girl Toy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0Sure, they slot some contenders into gender-neutral categories like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Outdoor Toy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Educational Toy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/span>But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even try to airbrush the fact that when it comes to selling toys, gender divisions\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand gender stereotypes\u00e2\u20ac\u201dstill reign. <\/span><\/p>\n

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In case you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re wondering, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Boy Toy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of 2009 went to the Bakugan Battle Brawlers Battle Pack Action Series. These intricately wrought orbs of plastic snap open into dragon- and vulcan-like shapes when they are hurled onto corresponding magnetized cards. <\/span>Bakugan isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just a Manga-inspired action toy, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an entertainment brand, complete with a website, television show, and other paraphernalia. <\/span>According to the Toy Association\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s website, Bakugan beat out the Handy Manny 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck, the EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, and a few other trinkets for the top boy toy honors.<\/p>\n

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My own boys, ages 8 and 11, can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to get enough Bakugan spheres, priced around ten dollars a pop. <\/span>When I asked my younger son why he thinks girls aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t into Bakugan, he replied that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like to fight and brawl the way boys do.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/span>Maybe so, but when toy companies are so explicit about developing toys for gender-specific markets, we have to ask the proverbial chicken-and-egg question: <\/span>do boys like Bakugan because it taps into some innate affinity for competitive, militaristic play\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor because they are being socialized and culturally conditioned to prefer those forms of play?<\/p>\n

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For the record, the Best Girl Toy of 2009 was the Playmobil Horse Farm, a plastic play-set complete with stables, ponies, and equestrian figurines. <\/span>(In 2007, the honor went to Hasbro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhich raises the question of why a horse-related toys have become so feminized in recent years.) <\/span>Runner-ups for Best Girl Toy include a Pedicure Salon activity kit, a Talking Dollhouse, and Hannah Montana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Malibu Beach House\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtoys based on stereotypes of beauty and domesticity so blatant they speak for themselves. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Although most elementary-school boys probably wouldn’t beg for a kiddie pedicure set, children display more variation and boundary-crossing in their play than the toy industry might care to admit.\u00c2\u00a0 Decades after the heyday of second-wave feminism, few parents would bat an eye at a girl playing with StarWars action figures or a boy weaving a potholder on a loom.\u00c2\u00a0 But for the purveyors of playthings, pink and blue don’t make purple; they make green.\u00c2\u00a0 Toy makers have a vested interested in selling to a gender-bifurcated market, because they can make double the money selling twice as many toys.<\/p>\n

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In the spirit of feminist toy activism, perhaps it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time, once again, to argue the point. <\/span>If there are any little boys out there who have a thing for horses, maybe they can e-mail the folks at Playmobil and set them straight. <\/span>
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st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } \/* Style Definitions *\/ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. They railed against the board game \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Battleship\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for depicting a father and son […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1925,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21095],"tags":[2397,21351,21387,21395,3109,4374,1528],"class_list":["post-1760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-pink-and-blue","tag-boys","tag-feminist-history","tag-gender-studies","tag-girls","tag-motherhood","tag-parenting","tag-sexism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1925"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}