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| The new model of Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven |
Even if the end of the Mayan calendar cycle doesn't bring
forth the apocalypse, a shopping centre in the days just before Christmas
resembles something close to the end times. Many poor souls are buying up toys
for their children or child relatives, the happiness of their innocent hearts
depending on the right purchase. The world toy market in 2010 was worth over 83 billion US dollars, with 2.6 billion spent in Australia alone.
Last month I gave a talk at Melbourne Free University about sexism in popular
culture. In one brief sentence I mentioned the popular
Lego Friends range for
girls. The question time of almost half an hour afterwards was almost entirely consumed
by debate about the girls' Lego. I talked about Prime Minister Gillard's media
representation and popular culture's fixation on women's appearance and sexual desirability,
but the audience was most fascinated by toys. We have all played with toys as children and
continue to interact with them if we have our own children or grandchildren: toys
are ubiquitous. They are also often seen as having no broader significance or
importance (i.e. not important enough to warrant serious discussion). Yet
attempts to influence the kinds of toys that are sold, their colours and
marketing so as to minimise gender stereotyping always attract negative
responses about social engineering that seeks to upend innate gender differences.
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The 'old-school' Easy-Bake Oven in its Betty
Crocker incarnation |
In the past month, an American girl named McKenna Pope has
petitioned Hasbro to
manufacture an Easy-Bake Oven that her four-year-old brother, Gavyn, who likes
to cook, can use without feeling like a traitor to his sex. The Easy-Bake has
been sold since the 1950s and enables children to actually cook small treats,
formerly through a light bulb that generated heat and now via an electrical
element inside. Though it has always been explicitly marketed to girls, as
advertisements and packaging from past models make clear, the oven used to look
much like a regular household oven. The new model gives up verisimilitude for
pink and purple colouration, giving off the signal, along with the girls
featured on the packaging, that this oven is not a toy for boys. McKenna's
petition now has 43,000 signatures and some leading chefs have put together
a video in support of the cause, all championing the idea that cooking is
something that both boys and girls should be able to enjoy. And so should Gavyn
feel able to whip up some cookies, but the total saturation of male chefs
featured in the support video suggest that perceptions about home cooking being
a role for women has not impacted upon the prevalence of men in the more
respected realm of professional chefs. With this employment reality in mind,
the pinkified Easy-Bake Oven seems more about hemming girls in than stultifying
the ambitions of boys.
While many seem supportive of the idea of toy ovens for both sexes—after
all most chefs are men, and many celebrity chefs are quite coarse, like Gordon
Ramsey, so it's not as if cooking is seen as inducing effeminacy—a Swedish toy
chain's recent gender-neutral catalogue has been reported with a greater degree
of scepticism. Sweden is the model nation with its aims to minimise the effects
of gender stereotyping, and not to mention its progressive laws on
prostitution, which criminalise the buyers of sex, not the sellers. The Egalia
pre-school in Stockholm caused an international fuss when news of its aims to
reduce the effects of social expectations of gender were
reported in the media.The school encourages children of both sexes
to play with all kinds of toys and the teachers do not use gender-specific
pronouns, but refer to children as "friends" or use a gender-neutral
term borrowed from Finnish, "hen".
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| A page from the Swedish Toys R Us catalogue |
Top Toy, the
franchise holder for Toys R Us in Sweden, was given training and guidance by
the country's advertising watchdog for the gender discrimination it perpetuated
in its catalogues, which replicated the standard segregation of toys along
gender lines. This nudge encouraged the chain to produce their latest catalogue
with a girl shown deftly working a Nerf gun, a small boy nurturing a baby doll,
and both a boy and girl playing with a doll's house (though the boy is perched
precariously near the end of the house where a male doll appears to be
luxuriating in a spa). When the UK's
Daily
Mail reported on the catalogue, it placed "gender-neutral" in
scare quotes, presumably to emphasise the ridiculousness of such a concept, and
described the toy retailer as "forced" to show boys and girls playing
with all kinds of toys, as if such representation went against all that is
logical and natural.
Unlike the Easy-Bake Oven, which may prove a gateway to an
acceptably male career in the male-dominated restaurant industry, boys cuddling baby
dolls and rearranging the furniture in a doll's house were presumably seen as
perverting the natural order, in which girls are meant to desire these things
because they will become mothers and homemakers. Though young boys seem equally
attracted to dolls, as Cordelia Fine's
Delusions
of Gender explains with reference to studies that have measured young
children's reactions to them, they are taught that it is only girls who may
play with them. "Action figures" like G.I. Joe are distinguished from
"dolls" that are about fashion and make-up, like Barbie and Bratz,
and mothering, like Baby Born and Baby Alive.
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| 'Lottie', Arklu, 2012 |
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| 'Black Barbie', Mattel, 1980 |
As Dolls are understood as central to girls' play alone, and hence some parents and
professionals are concerned by the unnatural proportions of the likes of
Barbie, who was modelled on the German Bild Lilli (an adult novelty, moreso
than a children's toy). A new doll named
Lottie, who resembles a nine-year-old girl,
rather than an adult woman or a baby, has been released by a UK
company, Arklu, and has been praised as
"a healthy alternative" to Bratz, Barbie and Monster High. Lottie has a flat chest, does not appear to be wearing make-up,
has normally proportioned legs and wears typical girls' play clothing, rather
than focusing on high fashion or a sexy appearance. Lottie is probably
not the type of nine-year-old who is going to grab hold of a Nerf gun, however.
In addition to two dolls dressed for playing in the garden, two of the
incarnations come clothed in ballet and horseriding outfits, while another is
wearing a party dress to wear to a masked ball. "Lotteville Festival
Lottie" has black skin, though as with Barbie's "Colored
Francie" who debuted in 1967 and "Black Barbie" of 1980 and
onward, her features are still those of a white girl. (Colored Francie was made
using the head mould of the regular white Barbie.)
As the examples of the Easy-Bake Oven and boys playing with dolls show, we
place great strength in the idea that what kinds of toys that children play
with helps to determine the kind of adults that they will become, especially in
terms of how appropriately masculine or feminine they will be. Another clincher
for this argument is the recent release of "Breast Milk Baby", a doll that enables girls to play at breastfeeding and which comes complete with a
function that enables it to make suckling sounds. Predictably,
some have seen
the idea of breasts being used for their primary function of feeding children
through doll play as "sexualising" girls while others have emphasised that
we should be normalising breastfeeding to girls to ensure that breastfeeding rates
do not continue to fall.
