Professor and blogger Rebacca Hains appeared on “Fox and Friends” today and made excellent points about the ramifications of gender segregated toys and what we’re teaching kids through sexist marketing. The show started with Sabrina Schaeffer of Independent Women’s Forum, justifying gender segregation in toy stores:
It doesn’t mean that girls can’t go on to do anything that little boys can go on to do. It’s just that they like to play differently, and that’s okay.
This is a common argument for gender segregation of little kids. Nothing wrong with marketing make-up and dress up and shopping toys to girls. It’s just play, silly. No big deal.
The show ends with this point from Hains:
some girls want the chemistry set. And they shouldn’t feel like it’s just for boys. If we don’t say, “Hey, these are jobs for men and these are jobs for women,” why would we say, “These are toys for boys and toys for girls,” when toys are really kids’ work?
Don’t we want more female chemists? How is that going to happen?
Check out what my friend’s 6 month old daughter just received from her grandmother. (Can you read “teaches” and “laugh and learn?” below) 6 month old child, from her grandmother.
Watch the video and read the transcript here.
I knew from the time I was a small child, I wanted to be a scientist and my mother didn’t believe in gender roles so she let me play with whatever I wanted and supported me in obtaining my goal. For a long time I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I loved dinosaurs. I was also a huge nerd then too, so I wanted lots of Star Trek and Star Wars stuff. However, unlike my mother, the rest of my family was very much into gender roles, and my being “boyish” didn’t fit into the ‘Married with 2.5 kids’ future they’d already envisioned me even at the age of 3yrs old. Year after year I received toys like you pictured, dolls with pink dresses and princess costumes and I had to hide my disappointment every holiday in order to ‘be polite like a good girl’ even though I was really upset because what I really wanted was a light saber, some plastic dinosaurs and a Worf action figure. People like Sabrina Schaeffer are the reason I hated my family members so much for telling me I was a freak for not following what every girl wanted, which was dollies and dress up and obviously something was wrong with me, which ended in them calling me a dyke all through my childhood. When you like girly things, it’s considered normal and no one says anything, but if you express an interest in ‘boy’ stuff when your a girl, people call you a freak and it really does a disservice to boys too that want to play with unicorns and barbies. Let kids play with whatever they want and settle down.
Thanks so much for the shout-out. And that toy is abysmal!