Ban on toyshop sexism won't end children's gender stereotyping

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/toyshop-sexism-children-gender-stereotyping

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My daughter wasn't yet three when it started. First she refused to wear anything that wasn't pink. Then she announced that she wanted to change her name to Cinderella Barbie Sleeping Beauty. This was an achievement.

We owned no Disney princess DVDs, had never uttered the word "Barbie", and she wasn't yet at nursery so it couldn't have come the route of the nits.

Are the spores of this stuff, I wondered, in the air?

Now my son is two and a half. Dollies delight him not, no, nor fairies, though by your smiling you seem to say so. The two things in the world that interest him most are fire engines and (oddly) zebras. He has a special dance that he does on sighting a fire engine. When he wakes up in the morning and you ask him what he dreamed about, he says: "A fire engine and a zebra."

Now Marks & Spencer has joined a growing number of retailers in announcing that all its toy marketing will be gender-neutral. Does that mean my next child will grow up free of these obsessions? I'm not counting my fluffy pink chickens.

I don't want to troll all you good people by trying to make the case that marketing toys by gender is a positive social good to be applauded. But I think there is a case – a pretty strong case – for not getting ventilated about it. And – not to make the perfect the enemy of the good – for seeing the battle against it as a sideshow, and potentially one that could distract us from the main event.

The adult world is, you may have noticed, a bit gendered. Do gendered toys reflect or enable this? A bit of both, obviously. But to argue that the main flow of causation in the culture is from Barbie to Playboy bunnies seems to me to get things upside down. And there's a danger that, if we pride ourselves in zapping the tiny mushroom of toyshop sexism, we may miss the mile-wide, mile-deep underground mycelium of which it is an emanation.

Children are actually pretty good at differentiating fantasy and reality: arguably, rather better than adults. Adult fantasies tend to masquerade as reality. Kids at least know that they're playing.

Those simplistically normative roles are their starter kits: here are the stereotypes. Before you can start to consider them critically, you need to be able to see them whole. If something's absurd, isn't it a good thing to keep its absurdity visible: out where we can see it?

Do they swallow these roles lock, stock? I have more faith in them than that. I know, at least, that when I was 10 (air punch) I wrote to the chairman of Mattel asking why he didn't make dolls for boys: a few begged questions and unexamined assumptions in there, sure, but it was a start.

When I asked my friend the professor of gender studies about all this stuff some time ago (I know this sounds like the overture to a joke, but it isn't), I was semi-secretly hoping for a jeremiad on the wickedness of princess-mania, and tips on how she'd saved her daughters from it.Actually, she said, one of hers had that obsession too, for a bit – but that other obsessions came along to supplant them. I hope I don't misrepresent her when I report her being relatively relaxed about the idea that her children would experiment with a whole series of roles and, yes, stereotypes.

I loathe the Disney princess magazines. I hate Barbie. I despise Action Man and all he represents. But I loathe them because they're in bad taste, and because they are idiotic, rather than because I think that they have a profound effect on the way my children will understand gender roles. Sure, they patronise the fullness of human possibility with their oddly proportioned bodies and weirdly one-dimensional preoccupations. But ascribing too great a power to them is to make fools of ourselves. Knocking the "Boys" and "Girls" signs off the toyshop shelves is a nice thing to do – but it's something we do for ourselves more than for our children.

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