I’m totally with you on that thought. We’re just playing the same gender-based game inside-out if we refer to the love of pink as “sad”.

As a child I played with wooden blocks, barbies and stuffed animals. In first grade I pretended my pen was a screwdriver and snuck under my desk to play “car-mechanic”. I was the only girl who knew how to fashion a paper gun.

I still gravitate to male dominated fields: mathematics, computer science, billiards.

I liked to dress up as a kid, too. But I always had trouble relating to other girls. Only as I got older (3rd, 4th, 5th grade) did I [increasingly] steer-away girl-marketed items.
I really think I avoided girly things out of an elitist mentality akin to the “sadly pink” attitude. Who knows what I would have chosen in a non-gendered world?

The problem is that my rejection of pink was [possibly] a rejection of the frailty of “being a girl” – an aim based on sexist principal.

If the girl=weak=frivolous message weren’t subliminally residing behind pink – I might have liked the color more.

If I’m on to something here then the answer is far more complicated than our feminist intuitions guide us.

Do we teach our daughters not to like pink? Is it necessary for us to flip the sexist paradigm in order to compete with the prevalence of genderism in the rest of the world.

What our your thoughts?

I understand your point of view, but I don’t know if that’s a great reaction.
Not all a child’s traits are socially conditioned, even when social conditioning is present; after all in a perfectly gender-neutral society there would still be girls who loved pink and wanted to be princesses and so on. And even if you consider her preferences are socially conditioned (which, given the level you’re talking about, we can assume they are), they’re still her preferences and they aren’t invalid. All you can do is expose her to less girly things and see if she likes them too.

Hey, my favorite color was pink when I was a child. At least until I found out it was THE girly color, after which I decided my favorite color was blue… but it was never quite the same. It was only after I’d grown up I decided that hell, just because society ghettoized pink doesn’t mean I shouldn’t allow myself to like what I like.

A lot of parents really do want to buy toys that are “labeled correctly.” They rely on advertising for cues to help them do their child-gendering job the “right way,” as idiotic as that sounds.

That does sound idiotic. But mostly, it scares me to death. My children will have to grow up around those people.

Am I completely offbase in my gut feeling that boy/girl segregation in toys has gotten worse?

Oh, it’s definitely gotten worse. I tried to illustrate some reasons why in the story, but maybe it wasn’t super-clear. It’s mostly the fault of targeted marketing, which tries to refine marketing messages and boost sales by slicing the population into segments and trying to talk to the specific desires and interests of one segment at a time. You can see gender-segregated target marketing everywhere, of course. In the case of kids toys it’s not just packaging and scents shapes of things, like it is with razors or deodorants — it influences the toy itself, the concept of play. It doesn’t help that developmental psychology really has moved more in the direction of emphasizing gender differences too.

Nevertheless, the thing about boy-play vs. girl-play is that it really isn’t all that different when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it. It’s adult-simulated or -imagined play that involves a lot of conflict and interpersonal drama. So what I find amazing is that Lego markets its wares one of two ways, 1) gendered packaging, presumably so the parents will buy them (we know the kids will play with them regardless, so why all the pink?), and 2) mega-trendy corporate movie/action packaging a la Star Wars and Indiana Jones (which annoy the piss out of me and I refuse to buy them).

Clearly I’m not a marketing guru or I’d have figured this out by now. Why take such an open-ended toy and close it off? So we buy more of it’s units?

Pretty much, yes. The movie licenses always sell like hotcakes, and it would be like cutting off an arm for Lego to abandon that strategy entirely. It’s just like Halloween costumes — kids get caught up in whatever the cool thing of the moment is, and Lego benefits from that. It’s not all bad, since it lends itself to a sort of absurd, deconstructable, silly re-imagining of whatever franchise is being Lego-fied. This is clearest when you look at the accompanying video games, like the Lego Star Wars series, which is also insanely popular with adult Star Wars geeks who want to be able to realize that universe in tiny bricks, make their own modifications, etc.

The gender stuff is less cut-and-dry, but basically it’s what people have been saying — construction toys are stereotyped as boy toys. And this is not all the fault of marketing. Back when gender-neutral packaging showing boys and girls playing together was much more prevalent, Lego was still failing to capture the “girl market” because of pressures in the rest of society for girls to move away, at a certain age, from building blocks to dolls. Boys, meanwhile, are “supposed” to be building models and the like. This is basically why Lego tried (and didn’t really do very well) to get into the doll business too. Now, it’s not like girls can’t enjoy all the stuff that they package for boys, and many girls do — it’s just that nobody bothers to market to those girls, since it’s assumed that they will buy what they want anyway and there aren’t as many of them as the more “ordinary” boys and girls that fall along predictable marketing lines. So if your kid doesn’t meet the profile, you can kind of be a little proud that they’re too uncommon and marketing-independent to be a target.

Unfortunately, as the marketing artwork and commercials and everything try to hit each target harder and harder — more and more pink for the girls!! more and more aggro nonsense for the boys!! it starts to really alienate the overlap audience on either side. This is why I always objected to “over-targeting” and feel like it has diminishing returns or even starts to hurt sales after a while, but I don’t know if any marketing experts would really agree with me. (Whatever.)

It’s really not kids’ faults, though — children are naturally more “androgynous” than adults and adults have tons of insecurity and anxiety about making sure that kids get “gendered correctly,” even though I feel like half the time this borders on a sick form of culturally-condoned child abuse for the kids that don’t automatically gravitate towards the proper pole. A lot of parents really do want to buy toys that are “labeled correctly.” They rely on advertising for cues to help them do their child-gendering job the “right way,” as idiotic as that sounds. And then if you think about uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc…