'Online toys let boys be boys and girls be drudges '

[ErrolTheDragon]

Yet another article in the Sunday Times today, which includes quote from born-on-MN 'Let toys be Toys'. It's good that responsible retailers such as John Lewis have got the message to stop stereotyping kids toys but eBay etc are depressing.

This is surely an issue on which everyone who cares about kids fulfilling their potential should support, even those who can't or won't engage with other feminist concerns.

I'll put the link in the next post.

Despite the headline, it’s also not great for boys if they are all getting given walkie talkies and tool kits when some? many? would prefer art kits or toy kitchens or hair sets. It’s all part of the gender stereotyping and narrowing which can diminish all children, and make them feel they aren’t a proper little boy or girl if they don’t conform.

Thanks ScipioAfricanus for following up.

I did my searches on a macbook using Safari, but since I was in the USA at the time googling the search terms "gifts for girls Amazon" took me to Amazon.com. And that's where I was sent when I accessed the site directly from my browser without going through Google first.

But Amazon.co.uk, where you searched, is an entirely different & separate site from Amazon.com. If I'm in the UK, I can buy from Amazon.uk.co, but to do so I had to set up a separate account for the UK site specifically. I can look at Amazon.co.uk from the States, but I can't order anything from it.

I doubt Amazon gives a flying eff about us - or the Times, for that matter. A big secret of Amazon's direct-to-consumer retail operations is that they've always lost money & are still unprofitable even today when here in the US they've come close to putting brick 'n' mortar retail out of business entirely. Amazon's biggest business is Amazon Web Services or AWS. AWS is the largest non-governmental operator/provider of cloud computing services in the world, catering to huge multinational corporations, governmental organizations like the CIA &, Pentagon, along with various national governments globally. AWS is what supports all the rest of the Jeff Bezos empire, including Amazon retail. With retail, Bezos has always taken the long view: disrupt the market, dominate retail, & once dominance has been achieved, aim for profitability. So though Bezos as a person (as opposed to a business owner & employer) is in some ways quite woke (as illustrated by his ownership of the Washington Post), I don't think he & his company could give a hoot if some customers or critics castigated Amazon for presenting consumer items in a sexist way. With so few shopping alternatives left, even people who hate Amazon will still shop there regardless.

I think what probably happened in this case is that the Times gave misleading info due to imprecise reporting & sloppy editing. Or so it seems to a nitpicky literalist like me. Instead of saying they searched on Google for "gifts for girls Amazon" they should've said they searched "gifts for girls Amazon.co.uk". Sure, they might've only typed in the single word "Amazon" but they should've made it clear that when someone in the UK enters "Amazon" in the Google search bar, what comes up is not a generic, universal Amazon, but a much smaller site, Amazon.uk.co. The Times, after all, is an internationally-read newspaper. But maybe that's what the Times was trying to convey when it put that second set of quotation marks around the word Amazon in the sentence I found confusing.

When I Googled "gifts for girls Amazon.co.uk" I got what you did. First this:
Amazon.co.uk: Gifts for Girls: Toys & Games
www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Gifts-for-Girls/b?node=2174085031&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8
Results 1 - 24 of 74 - Online shopping for Gifts for Girls from a great selection at Toys & Games Store.^

Then when I clicked on that link, I also got what you did. Not a list of 74 mostly sexist "girl" toys containing from the get-go a lot of home appliances & household drudgery tools, but an endless number of toys & games of all sorts for all types & ages, none of them categorized in a sexist way.

So there's still something fishy about this story, though I can't pinpoint exactly what it is.

Two more things: when I went to Amazon.com & to Amazon.co.uk I did so both signed-in to my accounts & blind. But the results in each instance were basically the same, so my history didn't seem to affect it much. But then I did most of my toy-buying years ago before Amazon took over US retail. As I recall, I spent a small fortune on Brio, Lego, puzzles & kids books...

I also tried to replicate the Times' results by doing various searches on ebay as well, including one for "sexist gifts for girls". I too found the results much more sexist, with lots of pink items, princess stuff & Disney junk. But ebay is a much harder site to draw generalizations from, since the way items are listed & described is largely controlled (I think) by the individual sellers using the site.

I’m not sure that’s all entirely fair - the Times is a UK paper and when they say Amazon, most readers would assume Amazon UK - that’s our Amazon. It’s not a teeny tiny little offshoot. We wouldn’t shop from Amazon in the US (Amazon.com) or elsewhere unless we couldn’t get it locally. Sometimes I check reviews on the US site.

If Amazon changed their landing page, I would assume that was done not from caring about gender stereotypes but because they wanted to avert criticism. Perhaps you’re right and they wouldn’t bother. eBay certainly didn’t - their results were consistent with the article, so I don’t see any reason to mistrust it, as there are plausible reasons for the change in Amazon’s results, though I agree that the Amazon results you now get don’t match the article.

Fair enough, ScipioAfricanus. I hope you're right. I've long read & admired the Times, which you are correct is clearly a UK-based paper, so the error in judgment & reading comprehension here was/is probably mine. I should've realized they meant Amazon.co.uk, not Amazon.com, duh. I think my suspicions were in overdrive in part because, as all the BS about gender, sex &TWAW in the press today shows, journalistic standards have dramatically slipped at once-impeachable sources (or so they seemed way back when) like the NY Times, Washington Post & TIME in the US & Der Spiegel in Europe with its newly-revealed scandal of totally made-up stories.

BTW, I did not mean to suggest that Amazon.co.uk is "a teeny tiny little offshoot" of Amazon.com. The two are simply different, & the only reason the US site is bigger is because the US population is 5-6 times larger than the UK's, & Amazon has had a much bigger impact putting conventional shopping out of business here than in the UK so far. I'm an Anglophile who adores most things British, so the last thing I'd want to do is belittle the country I visit often & I've long wished were my own. If I offended you, I'm genuinely sorry, especially as I have enjoyed our exchange here.

I'm off now to wrap the iron, clothes steamer, toilet brush & cooking utensils I got my 20-something son for Christmas. Just the other day he asked me for pictures of him as a young child pushing his baby doll in her stroller - I think he wanted to show his much younger half-siblings how back in his day boys & girls played with all sorts of toys. Happy holidays!

No, I admit I did get a little uppity at the use of our Amazon being not a de facto one for the UK, but that’s probably more my own tetchiness about our country becoming more and more idiotic and shut off from itself. Most of the people I know are freaking out about what 2019 will bring - not the usual Christmas rest and good cheer.

I’ve enjoyed thinking about this and discussing it and although I personally think the article is probably innocently different from our searches, I agree with you that journalism has to be questioned and totally should be. The last few years I’ve really stopped feeling able to trust the press and that’s terrifying in democracies like ours.

I hope you have a lovely Christmas - and your son sounds great. Gives me hope that I can raise my son like that even with all the nonsense we have to fight against!

Thanks for this exchange, ScipioAfricanus. You've been a peach. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you & your loved ones. I bet your son will turn out great, & I hope you enjoy raising him, even when he gets to be a sulky teen prone to giving you constant "side-eye" as we Yanks would say. Parenthood sure is humbling & comical, innit? (That "innit?" is me pretending to be British. I also like to use such expressions as "shirty" & "go spare", which make all my US friends & family laugh at me).

I'm looking forward to our next encounter. Over & out.

I agree with you that journalism has to be questioned and totally should be.

Absolutely. Part of the reason for the current state of affairs (re gender, brexit, climate change etc) is people being over-trusting of one or just a few similar sources and not reading critically.

I actually don't mind things being labelled as for girls or boys. It's common sense that either sex can play with any toy and most do, but it's easier to find a certain toy if you know it will be with all the boys stuff or all the girls stuff. Same with clothes, I actually get really annoyed how some places online don't have separate girls and boys departments anymore, it makes it less convenient for me.

Why would anyone run a search for "gifts for girls?"
Sometimes it’s the only way to filter searches. Many online shops separate their toys by boys and girls so certain types of toys won’t appear on a toy search done for girls. I was searching for superhero costumes for my daughter and if you just type in superhero costumes you end up with a lot of male superheroes with fake muscles on them and I wanted to specifically find female superheroes. So you specify costumes for girls and they are usually excessively girly with silly tutus or pink versions of supergirl, batgirl, etc. And the problem is the costumes themselves are usually very sexualised as the films are aimed at adolescent boys so there’s not usually any middle ground. Another one is looking for science kits, they will have boys ones and then girls ones that are for making makeup or body lotions for spa days. The retailers themselves list things according to stereotype so if you’re buying things you have to search in both the boy and the girl sections to get a full picture of what’s on offer. Often it won’t even occur to people to look in the ‘other’ section for something. I have older family members who are obsessed with buying my daughters girly things even though they themselves aren’t fussed.

I don’t see why the categories ,for boys‘ and ‚for girls‘ would be necessary. You could make sections like dolls, vehicles, play kitchens & co.... and easily find stuff this way. As for clothes, similar is possible with categories like skirts, trousers and colors / motives.
And why is the choice so often between dark blue and pink, anyway? God, how I miss the 70‘s!