The message we send our kids about gender in 2011...

[Amaris]

What do you do, though, when a boy wants to play pretty princess instead of universal soldier? I'm not saying boys can't be more violent, and girls won't choose to play house, I'm saying that they should be able to choose what they wish without ignorant notions of gender "normality" getting in the way.

No I agree. One of my daughter's lifelong male friends liked to dress like a princess until he was three or four. Of course now he plays Transformers and runs around like a maniac like everyone other boy in the schoolyard!

Well then... okay.

Well to be blunt, those are all indicators of a sexual predator (interest in kids toys, collection and display of kids toys, interacting with kids using the toys) which why I guess it worries some people.

Now let's be clear I'm not saying in any way, shape or form that you are a sex predator or anything of that nature but simply that sadly for you, your hobbies overlap with common indicators (and there are a lot which is why it's such a complex issue) that people look for and that is why you are getting this reaction off people.

No, I understand where you're coming from. I'm fortunate that my brother knows me well enough that I would never harm my niece, not in a million years. I think it's a sad commentary on the way things are that I can't simply enjoy being around my niece without that accusation cast in my direction (not referring to you). I'm sure I have members of my family who think it. I'm actually quite protective of my niece, and she runs to me anytime she is afraid, and I would give my life to protect her.

As for other children, it's sad a person can't simply be around them without raising suspicions. I love kids. They're silly, unrestrained, imaginative, and present the best in life. Those who would prey upon them are lower than scum, and it also gets my blood boiling because it makes people like me look guilty even though I wouldn't harm a child for any reason. It's just human nature, I guess.

Ah, well. I still like my ponies, my niece loves to play in my room, read my books, and have me carry her around, and as long as it makes her happy, I don't care what other people think.

 

[Kestra]

Gender stereotyping begins at an early age, even before a baby is born in many cases. It's not just about toys or even colors. It's saying things like "she's so pretty" and "aren't you handsome" where we teach children about all the associations that come with gender. Even when we are denying stereotypes, we are talking about gender and it becomes an important part of our identity.

 

[Vulcan Princess]

I played with both stereotypically male toys and stereotypically female toys as a kid. I loved my Barbies and my Matchbox cars. (And my sister and I would race the cars down the tile floor and purposely crash them into each other over and over.) Even now, I have interests that are considered stereotypically feminine, in that I enjoy ballet and music and art. But, I almost joined the military, and I'm instead going into the most male dominated area of law for the simple reason that it's the one I find to be the most interesting.

I'm puzzled by people who say that their sex or gender is an important part of their identity. I believe them, but I just don't get it. I'm female, but it's no more important to me than having red hair or being short. It just is. It only becomes a big deal when others make it a big deal. I tend to define myself more by the things I've chosen - my religion, my politics, my career.

The gender stereotyping starts young, though. In kindergarten, the teacher asked us all what our favorite color was. We were sitting in a circle, and about four boys in a row said blue, and three girls in a row said pink. The teacher interjected that this made a lot of sense because blue is a boy color and pink is a girl color. My favorite color was blue (with yellow and orange as my other favorites). When it was my turn, I hesitated and then lied and said pink was my favorite. I wish I had told the truth. I wonder what the reaction would have been.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Not everything should be gender neutral. How many boys out there want to play with Barbies? How many girls want to play with GI Joes and Transformers? Not many, I'd wager.

I'd take that wager where the girls are concerned. As far as the boys and Barbies, maybe not so much (although GI Joe was originally pretty much a boy's version of a Barbie doll - they pretty much invented the term "action figure" so they wouldn't have to call it a doll). That said, when I was a pre-schooler I liked to play with baby dolls. And cooking toys...actually, any toy that you could make something with - a baking set or a Mattel ThingMaker were all the same.

 

[Amaris]

I played with both stereotypically male toys and stereotypically female toys as a kid. I loved my Barbies and my Matchbox cars. (And my sister and I would race the cars down the tile floor and purposely crash them into each other over and over.)

I remember one particular time when I was playing with Barbies in a kindergarten classroom (I was actually in kindergarten, yes), and one of the girls dropped Ken in the wastebasket and I called out "Great! Now I have to treat Ken for head trauma!" (I was rather melodramatic then). I remember very little from that age, but that always stood out in my memory.

Even now, I have interests that are considered stereotypically feminine, in that I enjoy ballet and music and art.

I, too, love ballet, music, and art. Ballet is just a breathtaking dance form that never ceases to amaze me. The freedom and beauty in the movement of the dancer always captures my imagination. It makes me believe that human beings can float on air, unrestrained by the surly bonds of earth. Also, I like it when they can do that tip-toe thing and not fall over.

But, I almost joined the military, and I'm instead going into the most male dominated area of law for the simple reason that it's the one I find to be the most interesting.

That is awesome, Vulcan Princess! Best of luck on succeeding in your career path!

I'm puzzled by people who say that their sex or gender is an important part of their identity. I believe them, but I just don't get it. I'm female, but it's no more important to me than having red hair or being short. It just is. It only becomes a big deal when others make it a big deal. I tend to define myself more by the things I've chosen - my religion, my politics, my career.

The same. I decided early on that I was going to like what I was going to like. I mean, when I die, if all they can say at my funeral is "he liked My Little Ponies", then I think I did rather well.

The gender stereotyping starts young, though. In kindergarten, the teacher asked us all what our favorite color was. We were sitting in a circle, and about four boys in a row said blue, and three girls in a row said pink. The teacher interjected that this made a lot of sense because blue is a boy color and pink is a girl color. My favorite color was blue (with yellow and orange as my other favorites). When it was my turn, I hesitated and then lied and said pink was my favorite. I wish I had told the truth. I wonder what the reaction would have been.

See, that's what I'm talking about. Making children choose to follow such an artificial construct that serves no positive purpose does nothing for them. You should have felt free to happily proclaim blue as your favorite color. You know, I like pink. It's one of my favorite colors, and I like it because it's a vibrant color. I also love blue (sky blue being the preferred shade). If I were to wear a pink shirt out in public, I'd get looks. I'm certain of it, but a blue shirt wouldn't even draw attention. It is so ingrained in people's heads that girls have to like this and boys have to like that, and when it's all boiled down to gravy, there is no legitimate reason for that to be so.

 

[sidious618]

My sister had barbies as a kid...






















.... and she would have them kill each other!

 

[nevermore]

My sister had barbies as a kid...








.... and she would have them kill each other!

I was given two barbies for xmas once by a relative who clearly did not know me at all.

If done properly, their arms and legs melt into tentacles, and when they're still soft, you can fling them up against a glass door or window, and they'll stick there looking all creepy.

With the one exception of that particular family member (who, again, had I think never met me), no one in my life really ever made gender distinctions in what they bought for me or what they allowed me to want them to buy for me. Even my baby blanket was pink and blue plaid, and my first "big girl" room was pained all midnight blue, including the ceiling, at my insistence.

Anyway, maybe part of my exemption from this insidiously limiting shit was that I don't actually remember having any interest in toys at all; for instance, I still don't really know what one is supposed to do with dolls or action figures. Are you supposed to make them, like, talk to each other or stage fake battles or something? Cause I just don't get the appeal of that - why wouldn't you just have an actual conversation or play jailbreak or acorn wars with your friends?

My godbrother had a shit-ton of legos and matchbox cars, which were fun for an hour or so, but beyond that, my "toys" consisted of about a million stuffed animals that were basically for display. I did shit outside, played board games, read, watched TV, did homework, played with my dog, etc. I did have a transformer. It was fun until I transformed it. Then it went on a shelf.

 

[milo bloom]

We're trying to raise our 4 year old without too many of these restrictions, but we're finding he naturally gravitates towards cars and trains and Lego bricks and such. One of our friends though has two kids he plays with, a girl about six and a boy a few months older than ours, and he loves wearing his sister's dresses and fairy wings and such, but then she'll sit down with him and play cars and trains.

There are some things that boys and girls will naturally gravitate to, but there are also some things it doesn't make any sense to segregate. My boy loves playing with kitchen stuff, but most play kitchens are done up in pink and purple and only marketed towards girls. He does have a dollhouse that he loves playing with, and we made sure that it's neutrally colored (it's basically unpainted wood). He has several little dolls for it, but they're all dressed "normally" (ie, no Barbie style froufrou stuff). It's got furniture and everything, he moves the dolls around in it, along with little gnome and Smurf figures we've given him.

There's just too many perfectly innocent places where boys and girls interests can intersect that the toy makers insist on putting in strict little pigeonholes.

And by the way, I'm 37 and I've been watching My Little Pony FIM with my 4 year old son.

 

[Finn]

I was given two barbies for xmas once by a relative who clearly did not know me at all.

If done properly, their arms and legs melt into tentacles, and when they're still soft, you can fling them up against a glass door or window, and they'll stick there looking all creepy.

An old friend of mine from high school used to tell us about how an aunt once got her a barbie doll one Christmas when she was a young girl.

She immediately yanked off the head and threw it at her aunt.

 

[Maestro]

My daughter has Barbies. My daughter has two dollhouses. My daughter has Doctor Who figures. Who are even in scale with her dollhouses (and yes, they stop by to visit).

My daughter is also a Patriot Belt in the Little Dragons sequence of Karate America. She sat on the couch and watched the Packers win the Super Bowl. She loves wearing her Aaron Rodgers jersey. She loves watching Clay Matthews destroy quarterbacks.

My daughter prefers pink and she prefers dresses. She has not one, but two American Girl dolls.

My daughter can explain to you the Off-Sides rules in not one, not two, but three sports. She loves it when we get front row seats to a U of Wisconsin or Dubuque Fighting Saints hockey game so she can bang on the glass. She loves to scream "Hit somebody! Anybody! Everybody!" in the middle of a hockey game.

My daughter has every Tinker Bell movie ever made. She plays with mermaids in the bathtub.

She and her girl cousins play house together. They watch "girly" cartoons together. She and her male cousin play Thomas the Train together, and they play with toy tractors. She knows which is John Deere and which is International.

My daughter loves to try to read The Princess Diaries books. My daughter also loves to run the train around the tree at Christmas.

I'm, uh, not seeing the problem here.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Well...I did at least see proof today that some things are looking up. It used to be that it was boys who played doctors and girls who played nurses--but at the Barnes & Noble today they were selling kits that very clearly were intended for both boys and girls. The picture on the cover at first made me think the girl would be a nurse--but she wasn't; she actually had the stethoscope and everything that little kids associate with a doctor, and was featured as the most prominent on the cover. So some things are getting better...

But then again, I think maybe society has reconstructed medicine as a "nurturing" activity and therefore suitable for girls. And I did notice that it was the boy, on that cover, who had the surgical scrubs. And of course surgery is in some ways the more technical and less "nurturing" part of medicine. (Not to say that some surgeons don't feel deeply for their patients, but they don't get as frequent of a chance to exercise their bedside manners where the patients are aware of it--and the stereotype tends to be of surgeons as very detached and technical.)

At least I never encountered any kind of restrictions with that kind of play. My parents even got me a little white coat to wear and one of my dad's Air Force name tags that he was done with, so that I could play "flight surgeon." They wouldn't have had a problem with me going into the military--and who knows, maybe I would have, had physical conditions not ended up prohibiting it.

It's also sad in that Toys R Us research to see "building" somehow being classified as a "boy" thing. That was at least another thing I was not discouraged from having. My K'nex became one of my favorite toys because I could build whatever I wanted. I might not have thought I could ask for spaceships and planes and such, but at least I managed to build some. Those K'nex even led directly to my first story plots that stretched over several days. That kind of play directly led to my starting to write, when I decided I had to go write down one of the plotlines I'd been working with.

Milo--about your kitchen example...is it me, or is that kind of ironic in light of how cooking is actually portrayed in some venues as this uber-masculine thing to do, like in Iron Chef and Hell's Kitchen? Or is it that there's a difference between doing it as a profession--considered "acceptable," and cooking for your family, which is considered in some weird way to be less dignified and a strictly female thing to do?

 

[JiNX-01]

I didn't conform to the standard of what a girl was way back when I was a kid. SciFi was aimed at boys, yet none of my three brothers had any interest. I was the was the one who watched Star Trek, Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits and the X-Files. I was the one in the family who bought sci-fi novels and took up an interest the sciences, particularly astronomy.

When gift-giving occasions came around my parents would buy me dolls and tea sets and the like. I wasn't a good mommy to my dolls. I'd give them baths (and dolls in those long long ago days weren't designed to be submerged in water).

I preferred climbing trees, playing in the dirt and going on hikes in the woods.

When my dad took me to the store to buy a new bike for me, I picked out a green boy's bike because the girls' bikes were pink and had stupid baskets decorated with flowers on the handle bars. And there was NO WAY I was going to be seen on a bike like that.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I remember one particular time when I was playing with Barbies in a kindergarten classroom (I was actually in kindergarten, yes), and one of the girls dropped Ken in the wastebasket and I called out "Great! Now I have to treat Ken for head trauma!" (I was rather melodramatic then). I remember very little from that age, but that always stood out in my memory.

OH MAN, that literally made me laugh until I cried!!!



I bet your teacher wishes now that she'd caught that on tape!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I remember blowing up GI Joe figures (at the time, they were over a foot tall) with firecrackers in the middle of the street.

 

[Myasishchev]

When I was a lad, I strongly preferred She-Ra to He-Man.

One kid called me gay. Looking back, and considering Prince Adam's oiled pectorals flexing beneath the bondage harness, emblazoned with the cross of a monastic order, I'm not sure he understood what the term meant.

 

[ShamelessMcBundy]

All i gotta say is that my niece (6) and my nephew (4) play together. My nephew will play with my niece's dolls and her toy houses and my niece will play with my nephew's cars. And seeing that is good, and happy, and warm, and wonderful. They get along, they have fun. It's fantastic. My niece has her own cars that she likes to play with. My nephew has his dolls that he likes to play with. Seeing those 2 play together is the most fantastic thing i can imagine.

 

[DBR]

My toys were my best friends. We did all sorts of fun stuff together. I had a ton of rubber dinosaurs and animals, and I would dig trenches and make hills in my mom's garden, then get the hose and make rivers and lakes and make one hell of a mess. It was my own prehistoric dinosaur sanctuary - like The Great Valley from A Land Before Time.

Toys for Boys, toys for Girls . . . who cares? A great imagination can make anything fun.

 

[RJDiogenes]

When I was a lad, I strongly preferred She-Ra to He-Man.

One kid called me gay. Looking back, and considering Prince Adam's oiled pectorals flexing beneath the bondage harness, emblazoned with the cross of a monastic order, I'm not sure he understood what the term meant.

Back in the 60s, I used to buy Supergirl comics all the time. My Uncles would tell me it was a girl's book. Hello? It featured a cute blonde in a miniskirt.

 

[PianoWizzy]

I'm in my teens and I can confirm that the separation of gender in social convention still reigns, although thankfully not as tightly as it used to. There's still a sharp division between the males and females in public schools, though. [Very glad that in my school there's no division at all.]

I'm also glad that while my parents have been very rooted in Asian culture [well they are] at least my dad picked up at a young age that I was much, much more interested in getting a miniature toolkit [with massive functionality] and a fishing trip over dolls and dresses. [My mom complained about this deviation for years, of course. Got over it eventually and came to know exactly which gadgets I wanted.]

During my time in public school, and I mean before 4th grade or so, I do remember usually cringing in disgust at dolls, playing the computer games, riding a scooter around at dangerous speeds [boy that brings back the oldest memories of time ], and hoarding Legos and K'Nex pieces. I don't remember the reaction -- likely because I didn't really care.

 

[Sean Aaron]

My daughter enjoys Barbie and Hot Wheels cars and dinosaurs and Sylvanian Families, but right now she's most mad for Moshi Monsters and Harry Potter Lego on the Wii.

TV (which includes computers) is the devil.