pink toys-- eww, say boys

Our discussion today of children’s reactions to gendered toys interested me. We had discussed the color pink, the messages it sends little girls when we buy pink toys and clothing and bicycles for them, and toys in general. We discussed a little girl playing with Legos, which are often considered a boy’s toy, and we discussed a little boy playing with dolls and other feminine-gender associated toys. We discussed our own personal experiences with toys, and pink, and whether we had gendered reactions to the toys and clothes we played with and wore.

My own personal experience, as I mentioned in class, was that I was raised with toys traditionally gendered for girls, for boys and neutral gendered toys like stuffed animals. The way I played with the toys, however, betrays my own culture of care and interpersonal relationships: cars did not go “vroom”, they went “hello Barbie, how are you today?” I anthropomorphized not only my stuffed animals but my trucks, my miniature airplanes and even lego creations. Was this a “girly” reaction? Maybe it was, although it should be noted that I never once played with baby dolls pretending to be the mother.

So how do children in general react to and play with toys? I found two interesting and scholarly articles that dealt with the subject to a certain extent. First, I found an article detailing reactions of children to a commercial for a gender-neutral novel toy. The girls and boys who saw the commercial showing the same gender playing with the toy wanted to play with it more. The girls and boys who saw the opposite gender playing with it didn’t find it so appealing. A third category of children simply liked playing with the toy once they saw it on tv. This category was of children who were not yet gender conscious: children who answered poorly to questions about gender (e.g. “is that a man or a woman?” or “when you grow up, will you be a mommy or a daddy?”). Another article, similar to the first but without a commercial, details boys’ and girls’ reactions to toys they are told are “for girls” or “for boys”. Not only did they want to play with the toys they are told are for them, but when they found a toy they themselves liked well, they reasoned that others of the same gender would like it too and others of the opposite sex would not.

The end results of the articles? Children have notions of gender at very early ages: from preschool or at the latest, kindergarten or first grade. They also have strong feelings of difference from the opposite gender, even to the point of assuming that if they like a toy, that a member of the opposite sex would not like that same toy. They are heavily influenced by what they see other children doing, and identify with those of the same sex much more than the opposite. Thus, what we tell children and what they see in real life and television both needs to be very gender neutral if we want to show them that the world is their oyster and they need not be identical to every other child of the same sex.

After all that, I want to spend a second on pink. Pink has been a gendered color since when? I don’t know. But today it is associated with women, for better and for worse. For worse: it is a stereotype of the girly girl who is weak and intellectually stagnated. For better: it is Reese Witherspoon’s color as she aces the LSATs in “Legally Blonde” and goes on to work for a senator after law school. Can we take back the color not just in the fight for breast cancer but as a symbol of universal solidarity between women? Or is pink relegated always to Barbie’s color and unattainable ridiculous standards of beauty? I’m hoping for the former. But it seems like a question of balance to me, that just as I was raised with Barbie in her pink Corvette and He-Man too, I hope that we can raise our children exposed to every facet of society, not just the pink parts, and not just the non-pink parts as well.