Pink toys lead to pestering and unnecessary unpleasantness in toy shops - discuss

[hunkermunker]

They're colourist, imo - ignoring orange, yellow, red, green, teal, indigo, brown, etc, etc

The pic of the pink in ToysRUs is foul!

Oh Fennel, I do wish you would engage on this issue. How is feminism supposed to progress...or am I wrong in thinking it an progessive movement?

Oh come off it MT, do you think 90 per cent of the little girls in the country individually decided they really, really, really like pink all on their very own taking no account of what they see around them at all? Completely oblivious to marketing budgets, promotions and advertising?

I'm all in favour of celebrating things that girls are into, but there's a bit difference between genuine appreciation and being pushed and kneaded by Mattel, Hasbro et al.

The massive branding of everything also leads to a narrowing of imagination, I think.

for example the princess dressing-up dress; it seems all but impossible to get a generic princess dress on the high street - every single one is Disney branded.

admittedly some of them are blue etc but the agenda is clear - reinforce the idea that a REAL princess looks like one of the disney characters; collect several and get the matching dolls, with mini-versions, and so on.

no encouragement of the idea that girls or boys can have their own idea of what a princess wears or looks like or does.

same for boys - the 'boys' dressing up is exclusively super heroes or pirates. That's it, other than Halloween or Christmas themes.

the whole pink thing is part of that - in a society that is so enormously consumer focussed, it is a colossal reinforcement of the idea that a 'proper' girl has pink when everything in sight looks that way.

Mind you, I remember being seriously pissed off as a child because ALL dolls were blonde with blue eyes. At least these days I'd stand a chance of finding one that looked a little bit like me without going on a major expedition.

Most toys in most shops are awful, I find. I hanker after the days, long before I was a parent, when most of the toys in the Early Learning Centre were wooden. And I went off Playmobil when I noticed that the fairy castle page of the catalogue has a pink border, while the police motorbikes and what have you are on a page with a blue border.

There is a massive choice of toys available though that are not pink; my daughter does have the girl type stuff- Hannah Montana, High School Musical and the Hairspray dolls, but mostly she plays with animal themed toys - Sylvanian families, animal puppets, animal books etc, and it is really the different animal species she is keen on, not any particular brand.

Also the ladybird classic tales books are good if you want traditional illustrations of the fairy tale characters that are not disneyfied, they are a much more appealing alternative.

Well my dd [5] likes pink & certainly wasn't pushed into it by Matell or Hasbro.

She liked it way before she discovered dressing up, My Little Pony etc. She has pink walls in her room which was painted when she was only playing with Bob The Builder & Thomas The tank Engine.

Until 9 months ago, she barely had a 'girlie toy'. Then her new friend had My Little Ponies & she got into them. She was given a Bratx by her other friend for her b'day but I think she threw it away!

She had $25 for Christmas, and she knew she could buy what she liked. Dh took her to TrU & she by passed all the pink stuff & brought a remote control dinosaur...[noisy bloody thing!] which is has played with more then her 'pink stuff'.

Just because she likes pink it doesn't dominate her life, sha can take it or leave it & seeminly doesn't buy into 'pester power' from the manufactorers!

ELC's bloody awful for it - although I do every now and then email them to complain (like after discovering their toy barbecue set was available in baby pink and baby blue but not something reasonable like green) and they do have a few different colours in there now. One year, pretty much every toy was available in pink or blue and that was it.

only thing is hunker, you then have people in the shops saying to the staff- "I'd buy it if it was in pink." Which then gets fed back to the team at head office. If a certain number of requests for pink for particular items crop up, then they are well within reason to assume that that is what the customer wants therefore the stuff is ordered in pink because it makes profits.

Am I the only one who when hearing the phrase "pink toys" immediately thinks of a rampant rabbit?

Oh, I know. It's fecking tragic. A pink barbecue set fgs?

Having said that, I might get this for DS2's birthday - he's obsessed with having a pink cake for his birthday atm!

"Oh come off it MT, do you think 90 per cent of the little girls in the country individually decided they really, really, really like pink all on their very own taking no account of what they see around them at all? Completely oblivious to marketing budgets, promotions and advertising?"

Occam's razor Edam. Yes. About 90% of girls do prefer pink to any other colour. That's not to say they aren't encouraged to buy it, but no one has them in an arm lock forcing them to do it.

What I don't get though is what is wrong with pink? Except 90% of boys tuning their noses up at it?

And, just another thought, both boys and girls watch the same TV ads, yet still most girls gravitate towards girls toys and boys to Ben 10. That is total freedom of choice in action.

My son is in the 10% minority of boys who like pink though he seems to growing out of that now. I didn't dress him in pink from birth.

No, I think the TV ads make it very clear that pink is for girls and superheroes for boys.

I'm very glad that ds prefers Ben 10 to power-rangers and Marvel Comics superheroes, btw - far more bearable. But atm he really, really likes playing with my old doll's house. I doubt very much he'll play with it when he has little boys round, though - he is getting a serious message from his peers and TV ads that dolls houses are for girls and girl stuff is yuck.

But really, not being arsey here, do you really think our kids are so easily led? That they have no preferences of their own that also might happen to be gender specific?

I still don;t see what's wrong with pink. Can someone please explain that?

Sorry, x-posts. But agaon, it's chicken and egg, isn;t it?

I don't see anything wrong with pink per se but I do object to small children being told if you are a girl you play with pink girly toys and if you are a boy you play with blue toys.

And expecting an individual small child to stand up against the weight of society's expectations is a big ask. It's hard enough for adults to buck the trend.

I don't think it is chicken and egg. When I was very little, in the 70s, pink really wasn't a huge thing. Toys were far less obviously gender-differentiated. Have discussed this with my mother who agrees.

Mind you, there was one horrible little girl who chucked my sister out of the play house in reception 'because your Mummy works'!

Oh 70s a differnt ball game. Things were totally segragated then. Oddly, far less choice.

See my comment about blonde, blue-eyed dolls! Oddly enough my slightly racist grandmother bought us a black baby doll. But told us it was called 'Blackie'.

And yes, lots of people were quite determined to tell girls they should play at ironing and boys with Meccano but manufacturers didn't - the toys on sale weren't pink or blue. ELC especially has really changed.

SOrry MT but the segregation and commercial pressure is there. It's almost impossible to buy anything for a child older than about 6 months that isn't gendered. Even things like colouring books and crayons are either 'Fairy Princesses and ickle butterflies and pink,' or 'trucks and trains and pirates and blue'. All of this reinforces the idea that the most important thing about you is whether you are a boy or a girl, and that gender defines everything. This is just so bad for people - it leads to misery and bullying for the child who doesn't want to slot into a narrow, rigid, gender role and it leads to misery in adulthood when you end up believing wankers like John Gray about hte 'difference' between men and women, which all boils down to 'Men are more important that women, I don't want to talk about my feelings, so shut up, suck my dick and cook my dinner'.
And it's not just toys, either - when it comes to clothes, everything above 3 months is, again, gendered: the only reason you can get newborn clothes in yellow, green, white, etc is because of people wanting to buy without knowing the sex yet. FFS toddlers need simple, practical clothes like leggings and t-shirts in a range of colours, they don't all have to have stereotypical pictures on and in the case of girls' clothes, extra frills and glitter and shit that makes them actually very impractical.

I think pink is a very appealing colour full stop. I know my DS is not alone in being a pink loving 3yo boy. I regularly buy him pink things such as drinking cups, toothbrushes etc. Even his cycle helmet is pink.

BUT I am as guilty of gender stereotyping as the next person really. I took him into our wonderful independent toy shop, hoping to find a large play castle for his Xmas present. He utterly fell in love with a lovely large wooden expensive pink doll's house. He already owns a (cheapo NCT sale plastic) pink doll's house, but this really was fantastic and had far more play value for an older child. Did I buy it for him? No, because I fear he's only got a year or so left before he picks up the "pink is for girls" message and if I don't end up having other children to play with the house, it will have been a bad investment.

People gender stereotype children, casually, all the time. It starts as early as the 20 week scan if you find out the sex (one of the reasons I don't). I find it immensely depressing and not entirely escapable.

Incidentally, even in our wonderful independent toy shop full of hugely expensive wooden toys, there is a corner of the shop with a distinctly pink glow, where the "girls' stuff" resides.

solidgold, perfectly put.