product: toys/games

Found here thanks to tmt.

Pleasant Company started off with three American Girl dolls in 1986. Kirsten was from 1854, Samantha from 1904 and Mollie from 1944. The dolls came with scads of historically accurate and really expensive accessories, as well as mediocrely written stories in which they demonstrated how caring, assertive and morally sound they were. The Pleasant Company line soon exploded in popularity, resulting in its inevitable buyout by Mattel and the current proliferation of American Girls in all colors from all time periods.

Now a “premier lifestyle brand” containing books, magazines, movies [including the recent Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl], toys and clothing, American Girl the media machine markets not only products, but a host of problematic assumptions about race, class and gender. [See screencap above for expensive fun available at the New York City location of American Girl Place.] Not only were the first wave of American Girl dolls all Caucasian characters, but the entire American Girl enterprise promotes conspicuous consumption and an aspiration to upper bourgeois “gentility” composed of salon care for your doll and $33-a-head tea parties.

In an informal discussion on Slate about American Girls, commenter Nina made the following astute observation:

I like the idea of teaching kids that quality and craftsmanship matter and that investing in special items can be OK. But it doesn’t just stop at the dolls—there’s the outfits, and the furniture, and the tea parties. And that makes me a little uncomfortable. It feels too much like a patina of morality masks conspicuous consumption. It’s the kind of rationalization that makes it seem OK to spend thousands of dollars on, say, a mint-condition Eames chair.

If you have the time for an extended radio episode, you may be interested in the segment that This American Life did about the American Girl Places. [If you follow the link, you can stream this episode through your Internet connection for free.]

Kirsten D. sent us this link to a series of Playmobil families.  She notes how the families are all racially marked (using racial categories like “Asian” and “African” instead of nationality categories like “Japanese” and “Somalian”).  The “Mediterranean/Hispanic” category also points to the social construction of race and the way in which social construction varies across cultures (Playmobil are made in Germany).

They families are also racially homogeneous.  In the world of Playmobil (at least how it is sold, though not necessarily how it is played with) there are no interracial families and, therefore, no bi- or multi-racial people.  In this way the toys reify racial categories and naturalize racial matching in relationships.

African/African American Family:

Mediterranean/Hispanic Family:

Asian Family:

Native American Family:

Notice also that all of the families are in contemporary clothes except for the Native American family.  Ethnicized groups are often represented in “native” costume, but this is especially true for American Indians (at least in the U.S.).  It is as if, in the popular imagination, American Indians are extinct; as if there are no American Indians alive today walking around in Nikes (there are).

So, in the world of Playmobil, American Indians are, like Romans, a historical artifact:

Also, because it warrants pointing out, all the female and male children all have gender stereotypical toys.

Parents, feminists, and cultural critics often express dismay at Barbie, Bratz, and similar fashion-type dolls for girls that are often sexualized and have extremely unrealistic body proportions, leading many to argue that they provide bad models for children and may promote negative body image among girls.

As a result, every so often “anti-Barbie”-type dolls come out. They often have more realistic body proportions and aim to provide a wider range of images of women and girls in terms of activities, dress, and/or careers. One example of this was the Get Real Girl line that came out around 2001 in the U.S. (images found here):

Here’s a description from this website:

While other dolls teeter on feet formed for high-heels, Get Real Girls stand on their own two feet, have posable, fully-articulated bodies and display physical tone and definition for full-action play. The Girls’ faces have soft natural features and are dressed in authentic sports clothing.

And yet, as with so many of these types of dolls, as far as I can tell, these were short-lived. The website is basically defunct–you can go to it, but there are no working links to the supposedly interactive features. I couldn’t find any websites currently selling the dolls.

This brings up some interesting issues, particularly the fact that what parents want their kids to want and what kids actually want often do not coincide. As I’ve discussed before, kids often have their own ideas about toys and how to play with them and may reject the non-traditional toys their parents think they ought to be crazy about. They may shy away from these toys because they aren’t like the ones their friends are playing with or that they see on TV. Or they may come up against one major problem with creating new types of dolls for girls: if they have more realistic body proportions, they don’t fit into the wide array of clothing and shoes designed for dolls with Barbie’s proportions. There’s an inertia in the toy industry because of this–new, differently-shaped dolls don’t fit the clothes and accessories kids may already own and the range of outfits available to put on them is limited because the market for them is so new and small. However, this problem can apparently be overcome, since according to this website Barbie is bigger than the Bratz dolls and so can’t really wear clothing designed for them (the site also helpfully warns against over-brushing Bratz dolls’ hair), and yet they became wildly popular (to the dismay of many parents).

I just thought these might be interesting for a discussion of the toy industry generally, efforts to provide alternatives to Barbie-type dolls, and the difficulties of doing so due to the fact that kids just might not like them.

The presence of lead paint on toys made in China this year brought the threat of lead poisoning to the forefront of the American mind. Parents, pundits, and politicians called on the U.S. government to DO SOMETHING. But lead poisoning was a problem for low-income families long before the China toy scandal and there was little to no outcry in the popular press.

Lead poisoning in children can increase the risk of cognitive delay, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior. Many older homes and apartments available for rental in low-income neighborhoods still have lead paint and ingesting paint dust and paint chips is the most common way to get lead poisoning. Blood tests show that children living in poverty show much higher exposure to lead than other children.

According to William Ryan, if you are a landlord, renting out a residence with lead paint without making tenants aware of it is a crime. But, instead of enforcing compliance among landlords, the most common response to the threat of lead poisoning has been to warn mothers. Here is a representative poster:

Ryan writes that, while lead poisoning is often described as a problem involving negligent or ignorant mothers, it:

…is more accurately analyzed as the result of a systematic program of lawbreaking by one interest group in the community [landlords], with the toleration and encouragement of the public authority charged with enforcing that law.

So as long as the threat of lead poisoning was more-or-less restricted to the poor in the U.S., it was considered the problem of individuals (mothers) and the state refrained from doing much more than promoting individual responsibility. But, as soon as the lead poisoning threat affected middle class children through the toys from China, state intervention seemed appropriate.

Ryan again:

To ignore these continued and repeated law violations [by landlords who rent residences with lead paint], to ignore the fact that the supposed law enforcer actually cooperates in lawbreaking [by ignoring landlord infractions], and then to load a burden of guilt on the mother of a dead or dangerously ill child is an egregious distortion of reality. And to do so under the guise of public-spirited and humanitarian service to the community is intolerable.

CITATION: Ryan, William. 1998. Blaming the Victim. In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. See also his book.

Annie G. sent in this ad for the Baby Wee Wee doll, which was sold in the UK and Ireland for a while but was manufactured by a Spanish toy company (and is also called Piolin Pipi):

Notice that, although it’s girls who are shown playing with the doll, the parent they’re showing it to and playing with is the father, which is pretty unusual. Also, the doll is uncircumcised, which could be used for an interesting discussion of culture and representations of the body–if the doll had been manufactured in the U.S., it almost certainly would have been circumcised, and that’s the image of what penises look like that the kids playing with it would get. I find that more interesting than the gendered element of the ad–the way that the male body is being depicted, how that might be different depending on where the doll was manufactured, and how that reflects cultural norms about circumcision and what a “normal” penis looks like.

Of course, you could also discuss parenting styles and the types of parents who might find this appropriate, and why parents who might find the “girl-style” peeing dolls (i.e., those that “pee” through a hole between their legs) perfectly fine might still be offended by this doll (I’m just guessing that a lot of people would not want to buy this for their kid and might think it’s inappropriate for little girls to be playing with a doll with such a “lifelike” penis, but maybe I’m wrong). And there’s the whole issue of whether different viewers and/or regulators would find this ad appropriate for TV (I’m guessing it wouldn’t run in the U.S. Actually, I’m just gonna make a declarative statement: this ad would not run on TV in the U.S.).

Thanks, Annie!

In her book Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School, Barrie Thorne looks at how children play an active role in socializing themselves and one another. It’s an interesting insight because we often portray children as these passive, empty vessels who are acted upon by adults, the media, and so on, but who play no role in defining or interpreting the world around them (sometimes in ways that are much more rigid and cruel than what adults do).

An example of this is the way that kids often play with toys in ways that aren’t, um, intended by the manufacturers or parents. I mean, Barbie may represent a certain type of femininity, and kids may receive that message and be affected by it…but they often also make Barbie have an awful lot of casual sex, have superpowers, or become horribly deformed after being mutilated (my cousins and I played a game where we tried different ways of popping Barbie’s head off). My point is simply that kids aren’t just passive recipients of a set of messages about the world and, thus, that we can’t always assume that because a toy is “supposed” to reflect a certain cultural ideal that kids are always unambiguously getting that message.

Elizabeth Z. sent in a good example of this when she describes how her daughter plays with some Playmobil figures. Here is a picture of the Silver Knight:

A description from a website selling the figure:

The Playmobil Silver Knight is a perfect addition to your world of Playmobil Toys. He is as strong and valiant as knights come! Riding a black horse and carrying his flag of honor, the Playmobil Silver Knight is ready to take on any battles and enemies that get in his way – and of course he’ll be successful! The Playmobil Silver Knight set includes a knight dressed in silver/purple armor, a black horse in black/purple riding gear, shield, and battle flag.

While this company has very clearly gendered this figurine, on the Playmobil website, the gender is not given–it’s just “Silver Knight.”

Now, my guess is that a lot of parents buying this toy are going to interpret it as a male knight for the simple reason that, you know, knights are guys. The princesses they save are girls. I have no idea what Playmobil intended–if this is supposed to be a gender-ambiguous figure that could be male or female or not (Elizabeth points out the hair is long, and thus “feminine,” by our standards but would have been pretty clearly an acceptable hairstyle for men in medieval times).

But regardless of what Playmobil “means” this toy to be (that is, whether or not they manufactured it to be gender-neutral), kids such as Elizabeth’s daughter are going to do their own interpreting:

I noticed that my daughter’s micro castle world…had two knights, and she called them the boy and the girl. They didn’t to my eye appear to be a boy and a girl — the “girl” had hair in a cut that’s called a “pageboy” for a reason, you know — but I could see why she thought of that way…my [daughter] has an answer she’s happy with to the question about where the princess is; not captive, not sitting at home in a dress, but riding on a horse with a big sword. That works for her.

When we’re talking about kids, toys, and socialization, we should keep in mind that kids can be awfully creative and smart and might not be seeing things the way us adults do.

Thanks, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth (from Blog of Stench) sent us a link to a story in The Times Online about “disability dolls,” such as these dolls that depict Down’s Syndrome:

Here is a passage from the Times Online article:

Carol Boys, chief executive of the Down’s Syndrome Association in the UK, says: “Anything that helps to ‘normalise’ Down’s syndrome and promote inclusivity has to be a good thing. If the Down’s syndrome dolls give joy to those with the condition and their siblings, we fully support them. However, there is a range of products on the market of varying quality and accuracy, so we would advise people to purchase with care.” Boys adds that it is difficult to know with any certainty what Down’s children generally think of such toys: “We have no idea what they think of such dolls, because there has never been any research done to find out.”

However, some professionals have their reservations. Jenni Smith, a chartered educational psychologist in London, says: “I feel that children who have disabilities, including children with Down’s syndrome, tend to see themselves as ‘like everyone else’ and to offer a toy that ‘looks like them’ may only emphasise the difference.”

There are a lot of issues these images–and the article–might be useful for, most obviously depictions of people with disabilities and arguments about whether they “should” (or “want” to) be shown as “normal” (?). I thought it was fascinating that an opponent of the dolls used this analogy:

“In early research into race stereotypes, in which black children were asked to choose from three dolls – one black, one brown and one white – and say which doll they would be most like, almost all chose the white doll,” Smith says.

The use of that example to argue that kids like to associate themselves with “a positive, generally accepted image,” as she goes on to say, might not be all that comforting to a lot of people.

The other thing that hit me when reading the article is the way adults were discussing whether or not children with Down’s Syndrome would like the dolls…but (as Boys says in the quote above), apparently no one has bothered to just go out and ask some kids with Down’s Syndrome if they like the dolls or to watch and see if, given the option, they actually play with them. Wouldn’t that be more effective and respectful of the children under discussion? In general adults often discuss children as though they would be incapable of providing input or expressing desires, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this tendency is exacerbated when the children have a disability or are otherwise considered “extra sensitive.”

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.