ahocked by the blatant sexist content of a toddler colouring in book from Argos.. What can I do?

[Aliasnumberone]

I'm fairly new around here as some of you may know and have only really started to open my eyes to the sexist subliminal messages surrounding us that we are less worthy as women. I have twin toddlers, a girl and a boy and was colouring with them today when it struck me that the book we were colouring in wasn't worth wiping my arse on. How did I not notice this shit before! Each page has a different image, some of animals, jungle scenes and underwater scenes and the like and then there's the people... Men at work, male math teacher looking all intelligent at a blackboard, man on safari out adventuring, man fixing a car, man directing a film, man building a house.... Where as the women... Well there's the feckin fairies, the mermaid with her feckin bikini top, a plethora of ballet dancers and a girl riding a unicorn, the more 'serious' roles include a nurse (not a doctor) and a woman holding a baby and a woman shopping. Wtf?
So what can I do? Who wants to help me write a sensible letter of complaint?

[BeigeLeaf]

Sounds awful. Have you heard of the Let Toys Be Toys and Let Books Be Books campaign?

Their website has well set out arguments about this and if you are on twitter you could tweet them or I send photos to their Facebook page?

[BeigeLeaf]

www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk

[BeigeLeaf]

www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk/letbooksbebooks/

[Kalispera]

DS once had a Fireman Sam book with one character in each page.

Page 1: Sam is very brave when there's an emergency.
Page 2: Elvis blah blah heroic bollocks.
Page 3: Penny looks pretty with her lipstick on.

That went in the bin. I was fucking enraged.

[FlyHighLittleBee]

We looked at the argus catalogue when discussing gender roles in my developmental psychology seminar. Shocking!

[PausingFlatly]

Oh BeigeLeaf, that's wonderful to see Let Toys Be Toys has achieved so much with publishers.

I haven't looked in on it since the early days, and it's so good to see it going great guns (although of course depressing that it needs to ).

[PuertoVallarta]

Kalis, I am enraged just reading that.

Oh, but how I am cheered when I got to the part where you threw it in the bin! That is some damn good parenting right there. Bravo and thank you!

[StrawberryQuik]

That sucks.

As a vaguely amusing anecdote to cheer you up though...when i was a teenager one of DMs friends was studying social work, for one of her projects she interviewed me while talking about text books. Obviously I bought her my newest shiniest text book.
Unfortunately for her it was all 'Ramon is baking a cake, calculate how much flour he needs' 'Fatima is laying tiles, how many tiles should she buy?' Poor lady had nothing to discuss