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building and performing gender
Dec. 9th, 2003 05:53 pmI went to the local Lego store yesterday. It's an amazing place - a little visually-challenging for me, but the IDEA of a store full of legos and related toys is still overwhelmingly cool. They have lots of different lego-bits, all sorted by type at the back of the store...not just different colors and shapes of bricks, but gears and dolls and everything. You can pick out exactly what you want for your project, and buy it by the cup or the cubic foot.
A couple of young men stopped to stare, while I was filling my cup. One said wistfully, "Why didn't they have a store like this when we were little kids, instead of waiting until we were 20?" When I was a little kid, I wasn't allowed to talk to strangers. Now I could say, "Just think of everything you can do with it, now, that you couldn't have done when you were a little kid."
The main reason I went shopping was to find a present for the child of a friend. I picked out a kit for building a lego castle and populating it with little lego knights and horses. It was a good fit for the kid's interests, but I was hoping to find something less expensive, and I didn't know if this particular 5-year-old would be daunted by Lego's concept of "ages 8+". So I asked the clerk, "Do you have anything else on a similar theme?"
Her first question was, "Is this for a boy or a girl?" She didn't ask about the age of the child, or the size of toy I wanted. Nowadays, gender defines toys. Even the sort that used to be free of that sort of classification. There aren't any unisex castle-building toys. I had picked up the boys' version, which looks kind of like lego-castle-building toys used to look when I was a child. It's vaguely European-looking, with brown horses and gray knights in red and blue outfits. The alternative castle is a girls' version, which looks like it came out of the Arabian Nights, with orange towers and purple onion-domes, palm trees and magic princesses. All the pieces come with names and backstories. I bought the traditional castle-building set, the one with all the gray bricks. I'm sure the kid will grow into it.
As an engineer, I like the idea of encouraging girls to play with building toys. Too many women shy away from mechanical things because they were pushed away from them in childhood. It's still hard for me to perceive this girly castle toy as a positive, encouraging thing for girls...maybe it's just because I'm not young enough, or because I was raised in a less sexist time, or because I was never the sort of girl it's meant to target. It seems patronizing, even at the elementary-school level. Even before I got close enough to see that the boys' castle involved a lot more actual building, and assumed more free play with figures (while the girls' version was more pre-assembled, and appeared to come with its own backstory [not that it matters much, as some kids will go off-script as soon as the box is open...I'm still mildly irritated by toys that come with scripts.]), I had a powerful negative reaction to Lego introducing such a strong sexist distinction.
I'm a child of the 1970s, and so are the parents of the child who will be playing with this castle kit. There are some kinds of sexism (especially relating to work and job choice) that were common then, that have almost faded from public view, and that's a good thing. But there also seemed to be a kind of egalitarian idealism, an idea that sexism was worth fighting...and that's faded as well. So many people my age seem to be opposed to sexism, but they just throw up their hands in frustration when it comes time to dress their babies in pink or blue and indoctrinate them.
A couple of young men stopped to stare, while I was filling my cup. One said wistfully, "Why didn't they have a store like this when we were little kids, instead of waiting until we were 20?" When I was a little kid, I wasn't allowed to talk to strangers. Now I could say, "Just think of everything you can do with it, now, that you couldn't have done when you were a little kid."
The main reason I went shopping was to find a present for the child of a friend. I picked out a kit for building a lego castle and populating it with little lego knights and horses. It was a good fit for the kid's interests, but I was hoping to find something less expensive, and I didn't know if this particular 5-year-old would be daunted by Lego's concept of "ages 8+". So I asked the clerk, "Do you have anything else on a similar theme?"
Her first question was, "Is this for a boy or a girl?" She didn't ask about the age of the child, or the size of toy I wanted. Nowadays, gender defines toys. Even the sort that used to be free of that sort of classification. There aren't any unisex castle-building toys. I had picked up the boys' version, which looks kind of like lego-castle-building toys used to look when I was a child. It's vaguely European-looking, with brown horses and gray knights in red and blue outfits. The alternative castle is a girls' version, which looks like it came out of the Arabian Nights, with orange towers and purple onion-domes, palm trees and magic princesses. All the pieces come with names and backstories. I bought the traditional castle-building set, the one with all the gray bricks. I'm sure the kid will grow into it.
As an engineer, I like the idea of encouraging girls to play with building toys. Too many women shy away from mechanical things because they were pushed away from them in childhood. It's still hard for me to perceive this girly castle toy as a positive, encouraging thing for girls...maybe it's just because I'm not young enough, or because I was raised in a less sexist time, or because I was never the sort of girl it's meant to target. It seems patronizing, even at the elementary-school level. Even before I got close enough to see that the boys' castle involved a lot more actual building, and assumed more free play with figures (while the girls' version was more pre-assembled, and appeared to come with its own backstory [not that it matters much, as some kids will go off-script as soon as the box is open...I'm still mildly irritated by toys that come with scripts.]), I had a powerful negative reaction to Lego introducing such a strong sexist distinction.
I'm a child of the 1970s, and so are the parents of the child who will be playing with this castle kit. There are some kinds of sexism (especially relating to work and job choice) that were common then, that have almost faded from public view, and that's a good thing. But there also seemed to be a kind of egalitarian idealism, an idea that sexism was worth fighting...and that's faded as well. So many people my age seem to be opposed to sexism, but they just throw up their hands in frustration when it comes time to dress their babies in pink or blue and indoctrinate them.
