Why I think No Gender December is a crock of shit

no gender december2

Greens senator Larissa Waters is endorsing a project linking gender-marketed children’s toys to serious social issues in later life, such as domestic violence and poor self-esteem.  She is backing Play Unlimited’s “No Gender December” campaign, which calls on parents to boycott Christmas presents that reinforce gender stereotypes.

9news reports

“In the firing line are Barbie dolls for girls and toy trucks for boys, products Senator Waters said perpetuated negative social constructions.

“While the starkly separate aisles of pink and blue might seem harmless, especially to well-meaning rellies and friends, setting such strong gender stereotypes at early ages can have long-term impacts, including influencing self-perception and career aspirations,” she said.

The whole idea of Barbie being a bad role model for girls is quite ridiculous to me. You know how little girls see Barbie? As a doll – not a role model. They no more want to grow up to be Barbie than they want to grow up to be a pony with a rainbow coloured tail.  And if they do, it’s because they are under 10 and they believe you can be a pony when you grow up.  Not many children of 13 or 14 are even interested in Barbie let alone aspiring to be her.

The truth is that we stop playing with toys many years before we start to find our place in the world, years before the onslaught of hormones that sweep through the body deleting all signs of teenage mutant ninja turtles or  Polly Pockets.  But when do play with toys we instinctively play with toys that make up feel happy and connected.  Kids in third world countries do the same thing with no plastic toys in super mega toy stores.  The little boys fashion wheels and play with sticks that they “drive” through the sand.  They play ball games.  The little girls nurture and baby the rags that they pretend to be their babies. They create and they nurture.
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There are no catalogues or gender labeled toy aisles in the some of the third nation African countries where the little boys fashion cars and the little girls carry their “babies” on their back.

Creating a “no Gender December” is like trying to pretend that our children have no gender. It’s a ridiculous idea that gender is “bad” –  I think we are all safe in saying that there are differences in males and females. It doesn’t make one gender better or the other worse but trying to pretend gender doesn’t exist is farcical.

To make the leap from playing with gendered toys to domestic violence is a harsh and cruel arrow to fire and points to a victim blaming mentality that should have no place in our society.  To think that the toys that you play with as a kid dictates how you act and feel as an adult gives no credit to our children’s capacity for critical thought and maturation.

It feels unnecessary to force our kids to think about toys with the cynicism and political bent that 2014 seems to demand.  Why is it that we laud and fawn over the mum who allows her son to dress up as a fairy but we balk when she does it with her daughter? Why do we raise the mum who gives her daughters cars to play with but try to direct our boy’s attention elsewhere.

Let’s not politicise toys, childhood is too short.

Comments

  1. I’m so with you on this one. I actually feel quite angry that someone came up with “no gender December”. I’m a girl. I like being a girl. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like boy stuff. It just means I’m a girl. My daughters played just as much with dolls as they did with Thomas the Tank Engine trains. They like blue just as much as they like pink. Let them be and let us stop trying to control everything and tell each other what to think.

    • Exactly! There are differences between boys and girls and that’s not an issue – in fact it makes the world a better and more interesting place. To pretend that these differences don’t exist is erroneous but the whole point is to let them just be kids. Let them play and be happy

  2. Um, which African countries are you speaking about that have “no catalogues or gendered toy aisles”? You might want to be a little more specific. Africa is a huge and diverse continent, not poverty porn that can be lumped all together, thank you.

    • Thanks Shelley, I am actually from Africa so I appreciate you pointing that out. But I can tell you that even in Johannesburg in South Africa there are townships where the kids grow up never owning a toy, never stepping inside a glitzy mall and still they play with toys that they have fashioned according to their gender

  3. Carolyn @ Champagne Carte says

    Totally agree with you, Lana. God help us, surely there are bigger things to worry about than this? If we’re giving it a whole month, we’re saying it’s one of the top 12 biggest causes of concern for our society. I’m sure I can come up with 100 I think are more pressing. And if we’re going to get crabby about toys, how about the children in China who are working hard, making them for us? Or the environmental damage of all that plastic crap? Either way, my children will still end up with a whole bunch of it, we will smile and say thank you, and I feel confident that they won’t turn into monsters.

    Perhaps if we’re concerned about domestic violence we could look at laws that protect victims and punish perpetrators? And career aspirations? How about equal pay for women – that would be a nice start too.

  4. I think for me it’s the big leap from toys in childhood to domestic violence. I spent my time teaching my boys about respect, compassion and being a decent human being, and let them play with whatever they wanted, which went from trucks to feather boas. I’m pretty sure it was the moral compass I taught them that will influence their behaviour (one is now 20 and one 16) not the toys. Gender in and of itself is not the problem. And I wish people would realise that difference isn’t a bad thing. There is so much human variety I just wish we could embrace all of it rather than trying to either force a particular version eg pink for girls or nullify what is beautiful diversity. Instead of focusing on gender neutrality, I’d rather we focused on teaching our kids to be decent human beings, having respect for others and that content of character is more important than what they do or don’t play with. In a sense it feels like we are missing the mark.

    Having said that I do have a problem with companies that put out things like science experiments for girls and science experiments for boys. Surely it should just be science experiments for kids from which readers can pick what they want to try.

  5. As I commented over at Pinky’s website, when I was a kid I had a Golly-Wog – I loved my Golly-Wog – I adored my Golly-Wog – and my Golly-Wog was, in hindsight, the most freakin’ racist toy in the history of Toydom…

    I, of course, am one of the least racist people I know – go figure…

    • I loved my Gollywog, I remember him well – he wore a blue checked suit that was actually attached to him now that I think about it. Like you I like to think my world views were based on more than my favourite toys, although if they were I would love panda bears, gollywogs and princesses equally and I probably wouldn’t survive in the real world

  6. At last I was able to read this post after disabling my virus detector. Stupid computers! It’s funny because when I wrote my post it was meant to be funny and no-one thought it was! Story of my life actually. This is wonderful. I have written serious responses in my comments and they pretty much mirror what you’ve said here. By the time girls are about eleven they wouldn’t be seen dead playing with dolls or wearing pink frills. I think we should be more concerned with the blatant sexual innuendo in music videos and role models like KK rather than poor, innocent Barbie. Isn’t there an entire range of career Barbies? Like, Doctor Barbie, Nuclear Scientist Barbie etc?

    • My favourite Barbie when I was little had no career BUT she had a working basin and I thought that made her pretty damn fabulous. I think I still turned out okay

      PS You are always funny xx

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  1. […] Never mind toy shops with pink and blue signage and girls wearing pink and boys playing with trucks. This is the stuff that matters. This is the stuff that normalizes misogyny and violence. […]

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