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.

The Empire in the Toy Cupboard: The V & A Museum of Childhood

'Excursions on Land & Sea', panorama, c. 1880

People sometimes comment on the academic study of children's literature and childhood as if it is a frivolous pursuit with no potential to tell us anything about history or culture. It would no doubt make some people gasp to know that some scholars even study children's toys. The toys in this post are part of the current V & A Museum of Childhood's exhibitions, and I've chosen them because of what they might reveal to us about the British Empire.

People don't tend to think of toys as carrying any particular meaning, perhaps apart from gendered ones, but the toys of the past record many complicated ideas, even if unintentionally.

L'Orient or the Indian Travellers; A Geographical and
 Historical Game, c. 1847

The panorama pictured above is designed to look like a toy theatre. The child would roll a long piece of paper along so that its movement gradually reveals a story (a candle could be placed behind the paper to add extra drama to the scene). This panorama bears a crest with the words "The World's Wonders", encouraging the toy owner to see English shipping--in this frame the ship is "full steam" across the English channel-- as a modern marvel. Without being able to see the full roll and with little knowledge of Europe in this period, I am still a little mystified as to why the Pan-Slavic flag sits alongside the Union Jack.

It was seagoing ability that made global exploration and colonisation possible. The L'Orient board game shows three different sailing routes to India, with the watchful eyes of British monarchs from George I to Queen Victoria running across the top. While the rule booklet for this game has been lost, the V & A speculates that players would use a form of spinning top (teetotum) to advance around the squares, with a requirement for the player to match the situation illustrated in each square with the ruling monarch of the period.

Telescopic panorama of the
Great Exhibition, 1851

'All the World at the Great Exhibition' , c. 1860

TheAGreat Exhibition of 1851 was the first World's Fair (today known as world expositions)  intended to exhibit milestones in culture and industry. The 'Crystal Palace' exhibition, as it is also known, primarily sought to show British achievements and those of its colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and India, though there were exhibits from European nations.The telescopic panorama of the Great Exhibition allows a child to peer through nine layers of card to take in a somewhat three-dimensional view of the Exhibition. The ongoing significance of the Great Exhibition in Victorian Britain is evident in the continuing production of products celebrating and recalling the event, such as this puzzle from around the 1860s. The guide picture that shows the child how the puzzle ought to look and the puzzle itself include the caption "All the World and His Wife at the Great Exhibition." The caption is a little unclear to me. Does it mean that the male figure, presumably English, represents "all the world", and his wife has no connection with the imperial realm of trade and industry? Or are the other figures represented, including those in Asian dress, being acknowledged as part of the fabric of that world?                          
         

Junior Lecturer Series, 1900-1910

The importance of the colonies is evident in a set of 'Junior Lecturer' slides that were produced from 1900-1910 in order for British children to become acquainted with the geography and peoples of places such as Canada and South Africa. The possessive title encourages children to see that these countries belong to them as British people. As good citizens of Empire, children ought to acquire knowledge about common practices in the colonies, just as the first explorers and settlers observed, categorised and documented these "new" lands.

The History of Dolls: V & A Museum of Childhood

Jem and Stormer of Jem and the Holograms c.1986

During the past week in London, I've managed to fit in some unofficial research about childhood around my real work at the Bodleian Library and the British Library, where I have been reading girls' school stories. One thing I won't be listing on my university travel diary is a visit to Hamley's, an amazing toy store on Regent St. I braved four floors of frazzled parents, hyperactive kids, and enthusiastic staff demonstrating products in a zany fashion. Though the "zaniness" of the staff interacting with toys seemed confined to the boys' floor, with more sedate happenings on the girls' floor. Although technically they're not "boys'" and "girls'" floors since the "gender apartheid" of such labelling at this iconic store was pointed out last year. 

Nevertheless, the "not-just-for-girls" floor was a pink wonderland of Barbie, fairies and Hello Kitty. Astonishingly, there is even a beauty salon, at which girls can nag their parents into paying for them to have their nails, make-up or hair done, with glitter an optional extra. The salon is called Tantrum, and the website of the concept store doesn't give any sense that a boy would want to tangle with glitter tattoos or nail polish (after all, it's "the ultimate girls' experience): 

Shirley Temple cut-out doll, 1935

The current trends in toys make an ideal contrast to the history of toys and children's play that is recorded in the exhibits at the V & A Museum of Childhood. The Bethnal Green building once housed an odd mixture of items including collections from the Food and Animal Products displays at the Great Exhibition, as well as art works intended to bring culture to London's East End. Since 1973, however, all of the V & A's objects relating to childhood have been held here. With thousands of items dating from the seventeenth century onwards in the collection, only a fraction is able to be displayed. I gravitated toward toys from the nineteenth century and to those of my own childhood in the 1980s, hence the Jem photograph above (though I was more of a Barbie & the Rockers girl, despite it being a blatant copy). All of the periods represented have much to tell us about how childhood, manufacturing and branding have changed, and to reveal the fine strands that connect the toys of the past with those of the present.

Lillie Langtry soap ad

The Shirley Temple cut-out doll from 1935 is a good example of how celebrity crossed over media platforms long before the Olsen twins. Of course, celebrity association with brands began decades before Temple's dimples charmed the world, with the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising showing some of the products endorsed by music hall performer Lillie Langtry from the 1880s. While images of children, such as Millais' Bubbles, were used to sell products such as soap in the Victorian period, Temple is perhaps the first actual child to spawn her own merchandise.

Walking doll c. 1885

It is miraculous that many of the early toys survive at all, let alone with their accompanying packaging and tiny accessories in some instances. The care taken with them indicates the precious nature of children's toys in the 18th and 19th centuries, and differing ideas about their disposable nature today. The skill and patient labour required in the manufacture of many early toys is evident in the walking doll picture here: a mechanical device that made the doll perambulate was concealed beneath her large skirts. The Museum's amazing display of dolls' houses (which were originally the preserve of adults) shows the extent of the painstaking labour devoted to crafting these miniature replicas. 

Amy Miles dolls' house 1890

Though the V & A collection includes a royal dolls' house, the one pictured here from 1890 belonged to a girl named Amy Miles, who is believed to have helped in its construction. There are other objects on display that show how children and parents created or crafted their own amusements. I'm surprised my father didn't design his own board game like the very elaborate home-made game created by one family. A faultless girls' embroidery sampler from the nineteenth century shows the crossover of leisure time with the acquisition of practical skills for homemaking.

There were also amazing displays of optical toys, such as panoramas, shadow theatres and lantern slides, many of which promoted Britain's achievements or explained the customs of its colonies. In my next post, I'll show some of these toys that introduced ideas about the British Empire to children in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lego Friends Video

It's heartening to see that the criticism of the Lego Friends range for girls is rolling on. The following video, produced by Feminist Frequency, draws together some intriguing Lego ads from the 1980s onward that show the company's attempts to produce a range to entice girls to enter the world of Lego. It is dispiriting to realise that the collective picture of these attempts is that girls want to make jewellery, click together simple pieces that have pre-determined outcomes and fantasise about princes.

I'm looking forward to part two of this series, which promises to take us on a historical tour of advertisements for Lego featuring boys, including Zack the Lego Maniac.

Lego Makes Sure That Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Girls

I have an opinion piece in today's Age newspaper on the new Lego 'Friends' range for girls, which was produced in order to attract girls to the Lego brand.

Understandably, there is some debate on the issue in the comments already. Authors do not choose article titles in newspapers, so this would not have been my choice for a headline, but they are written to invite readers in with a bit of controversy. I guess the point of the article is that what we think girls and boys are is really a bit of a fiction.

Maybe a little girl is the best authority on the subject. And this girl's toy store complaints sum it up quite simply.

My Sexy Pony

This is a chance for another materially deprived childhood recollection. I had always wanted a My Little Pony, which was quite the trend in the 1980s for girls, right up there with Cabbage Patch Kids. While it was only the outright spoiled girl who would tote more than one of those ugly dolls (the same kind who owned the Barbie Ferrari), many a girl had enough ponies to open their own horse stud. I did receive some kind of cheap imitation at one point, whose mane and tail I still brushed and combed, but my heart just wasn't in it, as it didn't have all the signs of authenticity like a cute little symbol on its rump.

I also recall a miniature explosion of outrage by a writer in Bitch magazine a few years ago, in response to the redesigned version of the Pony. The new Pony was much more sophisticated in its look compared with the shy, dumpy original. The author went as far as to say that the new My Little Pony was extremely sexualised, especially as it seemed to be "assuming the position" in the presentation of its rear end. The following edition included a number of letters from readers who accused the author of "reading too much into it"- the common accusation levelled at most people working on deconstructing children's literature.

If My Little Pony for the new millenium was debatable as to its sexualisation, there is no room for doubt with a new horse toy for girls called Struts. With their high heels and excessive jewellery, the name does leave the toy open to an unfortunate rhyme. What is perhaps most disturbing about the Struts is that they no longer only represent a horse, but seem caught midway between animal and human. It's a horse-girl hybrid, with ultra-long legs in gigantic platform heels and the impossibly large eyes of a Bratz doll. Psychologist Dale Atkins calls the Struts' eyelashes "flirtatious".

Unlike My Little Pony, which seemed tailored to the masses of girls who had fantasies of owning and grooming horses, the Struts seem more about mimicking the process of women dressing up in heels, make-up and ultra-feminine pink and lacy clothing. I am not opposed to girls dressing up or playing with make-up, but the Struts seem part of the ongoing reinforcement of girls' need to be sexual, or to learn to be sexually attractive (not just pretty), at a young age. It no longer seems like fun for a five-year-old when even a horse toy has to be sexy.