What About All Those Pink Toys for Girls?
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow will find it hard to resist the televised images of wonder and awe dancing on their television screens courtesy of the nation’s leading toy manufacturer.
One of the big box discount stores shows us children sneakily unearthing hidden Christmas booty, while another offers suggestions for easier wrapping.
Um. What happened to the element of secrecy?
If I can keep Santa alive for my youngest son this year, it’ll be a Christmas miracle. Kids are pretty savvy, after all. Watching this play out, my youngest challenges the screen, “Idiots! Don’t they know Santa brings the toys?”
Dodged a bullet there.
Unfortunately, that will be the last Nerf bullet I dodge this season courtesy of the toy manufacturers. I have two boys, which means war is being waged at all times. Barbie and I have not communed since my youth, and the only times I’ve ventured through the Pink Aisle have been for my nieces.
My boys have owned, and played with, a play kitchen. Once, my oldest expressed interest in getting a baby doll when he was very young. The husband, usually of open minded constitution, was having none of that.
Yet, we jeer at the gender specificity being played out in the form of children’s toy marketing. I never liked pink, and I resent the assumption that because I’m a girl, I am destined to live in a bubble gum world.
A walk down the designated girl aisle is like a Real Housewives training session. Either you’re faux vacuuming, preparing plastic food and cleaning little Strawberry Shortcake plates while bottle feeding a doll that really pees and simultaneously combing your little pony’s hair… or your miniature proxy is living the dream house life tooling around in a sports car with the ubiquitous Ken of questionable sexual orientation.
A few steps away in the black and many shades of gray aisle, there is an entire galaxy to explore. Battles are fought, civilizations are built and legends made. A brash air of certainty abounds. It’s all wrestle mania in a construction zone with a hot rod collection even Jay Leno would envy.
The commercials are an exercise in Pavlovian preposterousness. For the boys, the voiceover growls the allure of down and dirty domination, while the girls’ sing-songy world of unicorns, rainbows and “let’s do each other’s nails” girlish wonder, comes at us in a voice that leaves us in a cotton candy trance. It’s only mantra, “She’s beautiful…”
Like Ralphie, in “A Christmas Story” wearing a big pink bunny suit, when all he really wants is that elusive Red Rider BB gun… you find yourself shrouded in pink when you’d rather shoot your eye out any day.
My little guy asked me why everything is pink in “that” aisle. I’ve gotta admit I was stumped for an answer. I’m not knocking it, I just wish we could finally throw the gender roll conditioning out the window with the baby’s bath water. Someone else’s easy bake oven rapture is my sword fight blissdom. I’m just saying, it’s okay to embrace it all without feeling that it’s off limits.
This Christmas, nobody should stand in the pink aisle seeing red and feeling green with envy.
Linda Roy is a humorist/writer/musician who blogs at elleroy was here She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two boys, and fronts the Indie Americana band Jehova Waitresses. She’s Managing Partner and Editor-in-Chief at Lefty Pop. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, In the Powder Room, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, Aiming Low, Mamapedia, Midlife Boulevard, Bon Bon Break, and The Weeklings. She was named a 2014 BlogHer Voice Of the Year.
