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Someone just commented on my article about gender stereotypes in toys and it got me to thinking about how ridiculous the whole idea is anyway.
It has always been strange to me that there are “woman things” and “man things”. Let me try to explain. “Cooking is woman’s work!” “Hair styling is gay.” “Dolls are for girls.” And yet, for ages, the best (if not the only) chefs, stylists, clothing designers, mannequin makers and jewelry designers were men. It’s still that way in some cases.
So, wait… What? Okay, I get it! It’s woman’s work until you want to be a professional and get paid, then it’s a man’s thing. Right? And since men ruled the world for so long, every profession is basically a man thing and women trying to be professionals are just silly little things playing at men’s work, right? Uh-huh. Keep on trying to make that work in your head.
It’s all ridiculous. All of these gender roles need to be abolished. There are so few jobs that can’t be done equally well by either gender that I can’t actually think of even one. Can you? Probably not. With time and training either gender can do pretty much any job. With that in mind, toys don’t need to be gender specific, they can just be toys, and be available to any child.
It’s interesting to me too that after all these ages, boy’s toys are still centered around sports and violence but girl’s toys are about mothering and sex. Well, the sexiness and shallowness of girl’s toys is a more recent thing. But where are the good dad dolls? Where are the household repair playsets? But people would find that silly, wouldn’t they?
The whole issue is ridiculous. After all this time we should be able to look at people as people and not antiquated ideas of gender and status. I think a lot of it stems from fear of kids growing up to be well-adjusted, open minded people. Better to keep them confused, closed-minded and mindless. They’ll make a better generation of consumers that way.
