There is no "War on Barbie": Toys, Gender Inequality and Domestic Violence

Uncredited image

Last week  marked White Ribbon Day in Australia, a focal point for the male led campaign to end violence against women. On the same day, a Senate inquiry into the relationship between children’s toys and entertainment and the gender stereotypes that contribute to domestic violence was announced.

Predictably, the inquiry was instantly deemed “a war on Barbie”. It was also an opportunity to label the Greens, who initiated the inquiry, as kooky for linking Tonka trucks with Australia’s family violence crisis.

Both the federal government and the opposition were eager to uncouple themselves from any suggestion that they might begin policing toy boxes. A spokesperson for Labor leader Bill Shorten remarked that any notion of “a clear link between toys and domestic violence is absurd”.

Last year, the Greens supported the No Gender December campaign, which encourages families to be open-minded when choosing toys to place under the Christmas tree. The campaign highlights how toys are marketed in ways that segregate play along gender lines.  Most toy shops erect an invisible Berlin Wall that largely keeps girls in the pink, sparkly zone and boys in the sector of camouflage-toned action.

Sam Humphreys: It's a Matter of Trust project

The suggestion that children’s toys, books, or films might have any connection with the beliefs children internalise about gender and the kinds of adults they become rankles many people. We commonly take exception at the idea that anything that formed part of our beloved childhood could be anything other than innocent and delightful.

It is time that adults “grow up” and stop ridiculing the idea that the cultural products we make for children are influential and can have both positive and negative impacts.

Parents tend to accept that young children might be swayed by advertising for junk food, depictions of smoking, alcohol or drug use as desirable, or TV or movies that are infused with swearing. Children are consistently absorbing cultural cues about how to behave and act. As a result, parents might restrict their children’s exposure to things they see as harmful, or at least help children negotiate what is socially acceptable and healthy for their own wellbeing.

When it comes to the negative influences of gender stereotyping in moulding how girls and boys feel that they can act as kids and as adults, we inexplicably change tack. These are only innocent or trivial toys or cartoons. And children won’t be thinking about adult concepts like the gender pay gap or domestic violence in any case.

The Reducing Violence Against Women and Their Children report, released this month,  demonstrates that young people have already formed views about gender relations and violence. It shows that when presented with hypothetical scenarios, boys as young as ten years old think that female victims of domestic violence are at fault; girls tend to blame themselves. Why would children already blame women for domestic violence if they were not absorbing ideas from the cultural around them?

Individual toys do not transmit troubling beliefs about violence directly, but the gendering of toys is a reflector of, and a contributor to, the gender inequality that produces domestic violence.

Critics of the inquiry propose that Barbie and other traditional toys marketed for boys or girls have been available for decades, as if to suggest that popular practices cannot possibly be wrong. They also ignore the coexistence of gender inequality with these and other superficially innocuous traditions throughout this period.

There is no social engineering in the suggestion that we should examine how the marketing of toys and children’s entertainment might bolster gender inequality. No one is proposing restricting the interests or freedom of children to choose. Rather, we must remove the limitations on children that are deployed through gendered marketing.

Toys that are categorised for girls are often related to domestic chores, fashion or babies, mirroring the ongoing expectation of women’s disproportionate contribution to housework and childcare. While boys’ toys involve construction, adventure, or warfare. Gender inequality is entrenched in the way that toys that are marketed for girls are unacceptable for boys or else they will be mocked because what is feminine is unimportant, frivolous and incompatible with being a “real” boy or man.

The gendered marketing of toys is not the direct reason why one in six Australian women has experienced domestic violence. Yet we cannot expect that “raising awareness” and simply telling men to respect women and monitor each other will make any meaningful difference to the long history of violence against women. It is time we looked seriously at where gendered inequality originates and is cemented to understand how we might shift the power imbalance at the core of violence against women.  

Barbie for Boys? The Gendered Tyranny of the Toy Store

“I didn’t encourage my daughter to play with Barbie dolls and dress up in flouncy fairy costumes, but she just gravitated toward them.”

When confronted with the idea that gendered marketing and stereotypes have a substantial impact on children’s play, many parents make claims such as this that suggest that girls have an innate predisposition to acquire pink, glittery toys.

Not only do many parents deny that gender stereotypes shape what kinds of toys children feel allowed to play with, but so too does our Prime Minister. On hearing of the No Gender December campaign, which encourages people to consider what kinds of toys they are buying in the lead-up to Christmas, Tony Abbott dismissed it as “political correctness”. We must, he argued, “let boys be boys, let girls be girls”.

No Gender December, and similar campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys, nevertheless suggest that the gender stereotyping of toys restricts children’s creativity and development. They also argue that the separation of toys for girls and boys contributes to gender inequality by marking off certain pursuits, careers, and tasks as unsuitable for one gender or the other.

Letting children “be” boys or girls implies that there is a natural set of likes and dislikes for each gender that are unaffected by the culture in which we live. Behind this view is the sense that toy preferences are rooted in biology, such that only girls are drawn toward baby dolls because they are driven to nurture, while boys will be attracted toward active toys such as guns.

There are several problems with this viewpoint. First, to take one type of toy as an example, very young boys seem equally attracted to dolls. Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender refers to a study that measures young children’s reactions to dolls, finding that boys only begin to reject dolls around the age at which they can be taught that dolls are intended only for girls.

If we were able to create an environment in which limiting cultural views about gender were not presented to children through the media, advertising, or enforced by their peers or parents, then in all likelihood many boys would continue to show an interest in dolls beyond infancy, as some still do regardless of these factors. That would truly be letting “boys be boys”.

Indeed, such an attempt to counter the effects of gender segregation in toy stores is already in progress in Sweden.

In 2012, Top Toy, the franchise holder for Toys R Us in Sweden, produced a catalogue with a girl shown deftly working a Nerf gun, a small boy cradling a baby doll, and both a boy and girl playing with a doll’s house. International media reports about the catalogue reacted along predictable lines, suggesting that gendered separation of toys mirrored children’s natural preferences and that the concept of gender neutrality was bizarre and artificial.

Nevertheless, Toys R Us Sweden has only continued to move towards gender neutrality in its stores, with the physical layout being transformed such that typically masculine and feminine toys are intermingled throughout the aisles.

Second, these supposedly “natural” preferences for particular kinds of toys or colours shift according to what our culture believes appropriate for children and what the toy industry finds profitable.
We know, for example, that the “pinkification” of girls’ toys is a relatively recent phenomenon, in part motivated by a desire to improve sales by rendering the most innocuous of toys unusable by siblings of different sexes.

Similarly, where Lego was once imagined as a relatively unisex toy that encouraged creativity and developed fine motor skills, in recent years a separate line intended for girls, which involves less freedom to construct, has become a bestseller.

We place great strength in the idea that the kinds of toys that children play with helps to determine the kind of adults they will become, especially in terms of how appropriately masculine or feminine they will be. Even children know enough to act as “gender police” if a boy or girl attempts to play with a toy outside the accepted items for his or her gender.

The No Gender December campaign notes that:

It’s 2014 – women mow lawns and men push prams but while we’ve moved on, many toy companies haven’t.

Yet some of the main markers of gender inequality refuse to budge in countries including Australia. The majority of housework and childcare is still performed by women, even as more women are in paid employment than ever before. High-paying industries and senior positions within most fields remain dominated by male employees, while feminised occupations, involving caring or working with children, remain low paying.

The segregation of toy aisles is a reflection of a society in which gender inequality is normalised and children are taught to understand that the disparity between male and female social roles is inescapably natural.

While making it easier for girls who want to romp adventurously to do so and for boys who want to show an interest in clothing to play with Barbie won’t single-handedly correct gender inequality, it will help to minimise the internalising of gendered limitations during childhood. It also won’t stop girls being girls or boys being boys.



This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why Toys Matter: The Doll and Oven Debate

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.

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".

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.

'Lottie', Arklu, 2012

'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.

Fulla, the "Muslim Barbie"

Somehow cereal lead me to Fulla. I was reading about how extruded cereals are purportedly very unhealthy (an unpublished study conducted with rats apparently showed that the creatures that ate the cereal box lived longer than those that ate the rice krispies inside), and then through the link of unhealthy foods came across a discussion of Oreo cookies. There was an ill-fated attempt to promote the cookie with an African-American "Oreo" Barbie, and finally somehow a brief update on the world of Barbie lead to my discovery of Fulla.

Fulla's occasional description as "Muslim Barbie" seems wholly inappropriate, as I can't imagine there to be an equivalent to Barbie in the Islamic world. If you mean a method of socialising girls into cultural norms, then perhaps Fulla does fulfil the same function as Barbie. Barbie's life is entwined with her boyfriend Ken's (though I never owned a Ken because it seemed a waste to get a "boring" tuxedo-clad Ken when there were more elaborately dressed Barbies to own). Her primary function is as a fashion model to be dressed and undressed in approximations of contemporary women's clothing and swimwear. On the surface of it, Barbie exists to rehearse scenes of Western dating and sexual display. While I don't have a strong knowledge of this area, clearly these aims are not central to socialisation of girls in Islamic nations.

As such, animated promotional videos of Fulla, who is described on her American site in English as "the little girl who wears modest outfits", show her inhabiting a female-centred, domestic world. In the two that were often embedded in newspaper stories in English about Fulla she is ensconced within the home. In one of these, Fulla remains in her gigantic house. She conducts her morning prayers, makes her bed, takes a phone call from her friend, fixes herself breakfast (on Fulla dinnerware, and eating what appears to be Fulla cereal- so product tie-ins transcend cultural and religious difference to some extent), welcomes her friend for a visit, whom she surprises with a cake, and then settles in to bed while looking through the happy memories in a Fulla photo album. In the other, Fulla dances around her home -which seems to occupy its own large tract of land that keeps it distant from other dwellings- magically changes outfits twice, until she is dressed in what I believe is referred to as an Abaya, which then enables her to move outdoors and pick a flower, while continuing her unstoppable dance of happiness.

Fulla's face bears quite the resemblance to Barbie's, despite the difference in eye and hair colour, and the abundance of pink and the font used to write her name also seem similar. These two videos created the perception in my mind that Fulla was entirely confined within the home, a convenient answer to problematic interactions with men in the public sphere. One more clip shows Fulla painting a picture and imagining dancing out in a field with two other girls dressed in Abayas.

Some further searching on YouTube showed that there was much more to Fulla and the range of options presented for Muslim girls than this, however, even if certain religious or cultural requirements had to be met. Like Barbie's much touted "careers" as a doctor and an astronaut, Fulla works as a dentist. You can see the dentist Fulla playset here. She rides a horse across the desert past a number of building and structures, including the Sphinx, albeit side-saddle. I'm not sure why she cries as she lays the flowers at the end of the clip, so there is something significant in there that I am not knowledgeable enough to understand. She sings, along with her sidekick dolls, in a tamer recreation of the 1980s "Barbie and the Rockers" band, though these scenes are interspersed with her reading the Koran (I think) and nurturing children. Overall the videos work against many Western norms, but other elements of Barbie culture are reinforced, such as the focus on jewellery and clothing, and references to touchstones of American culture (if not just appropriations of Barbie herself, but also Fulla clutching a Care Bear).

In another, Fulla is finally shown outside (not in a dream), riding a scooter and playing badminton with a friend. Though Fulla is often depicted with two children, I think it is clear that they are not her own children and that she is unmarried. It's consequently a little strange that we never see her parents in any of these clips, though I think Barbie's dream home is permeated by a similar uncertainty about just how she's acquired such a mansion in her own right. I did read an explanation that it would be inappropriate for Fulla to have a "boyfriend" like Ken, and as such, no male companion for Fulla would ever be manufactured. In these videos in isolation, from a cultural outsider's perspective, the absence of other people, especially men seems striking. When Fulla rides across the desert, into an amazing looking historic town, or scooters around something that looks like Munchkinland, there is not a soul to be found. At home, her female friend visits, or she cares for children. In the world at large, there are no other people, however, with the vast metropolis shown in the scooter video not offering up a single soul to invade Fulla's outdoor freedom. Is this because of restrictions on girls' free movement outside the home, or customs about their interaction with men?

There is, no doubt, much more at work to the world of Fulla than I have the ability to talk about, but I find her fascinating. I've also discovered an equivalent to Bratz dolls (Arabian Friends) and a few other attempts to combat the appeal of Barbie in Muslim countries. I might post on them separately. Some have questioned whether she is merely another ideal for girls to conform to, even if she is not parading around in swimwear and high heels. Whatever she is doing, she is certainly more successful at capturing buyers in the Middle East than previous attempts to create a modestly dressed doll rival to Barbie. Paradoxically, I think she's done it by following Western models of marketing and branding pioneered by the likes of Barbie.

Mark Ryden's 'Saint Barbie' and 'Big Doll'

I'm a fan of Mark Ryden's surreal artwork. I have a framed limited edition lithograph of one of his works, The Magic Circus, at home. I don't know why a tiny reproduction, little bigger than a photograph, cost as much as it did, but I do know that the full-size limited edition lithographs sell for over $1,000 and are always snapped up immediately upon release.

As a casual fan, I was surprised to see that there was a pertinent artwork for this blog that had escaped my attention. 'Saint Barbie' from 1994 puts the icon of manufactured femininity in the position of a deity, and the nostalgic innocent girl (with her puffy-sleeved dress and Alice headband) as pleading worshipper. I haven't reached a conclusion about the spotted butterfly with a man's head yet (initially I took it for Barack Obama!), but it is situated above the Barbie-goddess and the girl, at the top of the visual hierarchy. The other gaze in the image is coming from the flower in the foreground, which is a recurring motif in a later Ryden work, Big Doll.

Once you see the Barbie-esque doll at full-size, she becomes grotesque, with her receding hairline, oversized head and impossibly wide eyes. The real girl, who is miniaturised, almost becomes the doll by virtue of her size, but her realistic depiction, her plain, dark eyes, her short limbs and basic dress, make it difficult to recognise her as the giant Barbie's plaything.

I suppose the presence of the eyes in both paintings could be read as the way in which the development of girls plays out under the public gaze. The sense of always being looked at, and assessed, is an inescapable part of leaving girlhood behind.