As I started into the store, however, I noticed this display. I passed it, came back, left it again, and then finally had to take a picture. (This is the end-cap directly before the boardgame area, just for geography's sake.)
An entire display of boardgames made pink and "girl-friendly." In case you can't see what games they are, we've got Mystery Date, Monopoly (with a makeup-case style organizer), Life, an Etch-a-Sketch, the Ouija board, and Twister.Now, I am a child of the 80s, and came into my adolescence in the 90s. I remember the old-school layout of Toys 'R' Us before they did unilateral remodels of their stores, when the building was essentially divided into areas like a turf war between two gangs: Boy Toys, Girl Toys, and Baby Toys. In my local Toys 'R' Us in Lombard, Illinois, the Boy Toys and Girl Toys were separated by the Video Game Aisle, a huge double-aisle that made sure you would never get confused as to which "side" you were on. Board games were the very first aisle, bikes the very last, and baby stuff was in the far back of the store. And woe betide the girl who ended up in the Boy toys.
But Toys 'R' Us updated this layout somewhere during my college years, and split the store into "sections" rather than gender. Sure, there is still a distinct suggestion of gender--no one is combining the Barbies with the wrestling action figures--but it's the feeling of "pods" rather than "aisles", and no great chasm between. You can move from the arts and crafts to the baby dolls to the sports toys, instead of the arts and crafts to the books to the baby stuff because no one wants them mixed up with the Girl Toys.
When I took my social communications class in college, we talked a lot about Toys 'R' Us, and my professor expressed pleasure that the Girl Toy/Boy Toy aisle war was over. The issue is that the Girl Toy/Boy Toy war itself isn't.
I've never thought of boardgames as gendered things, or at least didn't until last night. I used to play boardgames with all manner of friends and we never had issue with the fact that they came in nice, gender-neutral boxes. We enjoyed the games for the merit of the games, regardless of our genitalia. But apparently, that is no longer good enough for the modern girl; or more terrifyingly, maybe it never was.
The more we do this to our daughters, though, I think the more we're doing them a disservice. As games go, Mystery Date and Life are both pretty girl-oriented to begin with. My brother used to hate playing Life because it was all about getting married and having babies. There was no way to take the Rockstar career and remain single and childless, unless you were really lucky and never landed on a "It's a [baby's sex]!" square. My sister and I used to make a game of seeing which of us could have so many children that we'd need a second car. Because dammit, life was about getting married and having a brood. Or at least, the game of Life was.
But Monopoly in a makeup case? Twister with pastel spots? Why? Why do we force our girl children to feel trapped in this world of pretty pink things, stick-on jewels, and script lettering? I wish I could have opened up one of the pink Monopoly cases, but instead I had to go online to find out that the entire game is changed. The property cards, the board, the money, it's all pink. And don't worry about Park Place and Boardwalk, because they've been traded in for fictional stores and eateries.
Maybe I'm too easily bothered by this sort of thing, but to my mind, there is a difference between empowering girls to feel like they can be as capable (or more capable) than their male counterparts, and talking down to them. You want to daughter to feel like she can conquer the world? Give her the original Monopoly and let her be a real estate queen. Don't give her game pieces shaped like purses and teach her that the only thing she can accomplish is owning a shopping mall.
As I was in the action figure aisle, a woman and her daughter came up to look at some of the soldier figures. The girl couldn't have been more than six years old. The mom was asking her opinion on a gift for a little boy in their lives, and kept saying things like, "Which one do you think he'll like?"
The daughter finally huffed, "That one. Now can we go to the girl part? This is the boy part, these are boy toys, and I don't like them."
This is how we're raising our children, to understand this line between Boy and Girl that can't be crossed without a loss of identity. I spent my childhood playing with Matchbox cars as much as I did Barbies, building Lego castles as often as I rocked baby dolls to sleep, and I think I benefited from it. I never felt that I was either All Girl or All Boy and never shall the two meet. I would've been personally offended if my mother had bought me the make-up case Monopoly.
But times have changed, I guess, and we're teaching our girls that they're better at text-messaging and shopping, beating it into their heads when they're young. It makes me wonder where they'll be, twenty years from now.
2 comments:
I was a little girl in the 70s and I, too, played with a great multitude of toys. Fisher Price, Barbie, Lego, Star Wars, Star Trek, dolls, cowboy and Indians. For a long time, it was just me and my brother playing together (in the years before he discovered computers) and it had to be interesting to both of us. Nothing was repackaged for me in pink. No plastic purses with fake credit cards or plastic shoe cases were forced on me.
But with the birth of my niece, I have discovered the horrors of what is considered appropriate for girls. Kitchen sets with phones built in that say catchy phrases like "Hi, girlfriend!" Grocery store set ups that show girls how to be cashiers. For Christmas when she was two, Zoe received something that I immediately dubbed The Imelda Marcos Starter Kit: a plastic backpack filled with frilly pink dress up shoes.
I go out of my way to purchase things Zoe likes but that are not too pink. The very first gift I ever bought for her was a wind-up UFO. Her parents are not pink, frilly, girl people. Neither are either sets of her grandparents. But yet the child ADORES pink and princesses and frilly. I can only surmise she gets this from her peers and that makes me worry more for them than it does for Zoe.
I was a girl in the nineties, hitting adolescence in early 2002. I remember the boy/girl aisle war well; I also remember the way that I made houses, kingdoms, and occasionally robots from Legos, k'nex, and other nominally male toys. I had a children's tool set by the time I was six; I also had every Barbie accessory that I could con my divorced parents into. (Ah, guilt.) I'd say I turned out well enough, all things considered. I'd honestly say that I have a great amount of affection for most of the toys from my childhood, even the ones that were annoyingly pink. (That trend was starting toward the end of the nineties, just I started "outgrowing" toys.)
I also had adults in my life who worked in toys stores throughout both decades, and I learned to be horrified by some of the marketing strategies. In some ways, I really, really doubt that the Bratz would have taken off as well as they did without the incessant marketing that the manufacturers did. I remember being horrified at about 13 when I first saw them in the store. "They want us to emulate these things? They're freakish looking. And slutty."
These days, the only time I go into Toys 'R Us (which managed to edge out KBToys in our area when I was 14) is if I'm hunting for obscure Trivial Pursuit board games and Fred Meyer and Walmart have already failed me. The last time I was there, my best friend and I walked in, stopped, and tried not to walk back out because we were already lost. Ours was in the middle of a construction project and we were attempting to figure out where board games were. I did get slightly worried at the overload of pink, but the ones you took a picture of? So much more terrifying.
But my days in toy aisles buying for other people have been going on for several years now. I have many young nieces (the youngest is a month old, the oldest nine? ten? this year) and I also have preadolescent male cousins. Trying to buy toys for any of them (in rare instances; luckily I can usually get out of it) has always given me fits. My male cousins love the old dollhouses my father keeps from my childhood; they're extremely entertained by playing house. On the other hand, they wouldn't ever ask for such things in their own house. (Despite my aunts's decision years ago that if they liked them, well, we'll go against gender binaries.) My nieces have all been co opted by evil pinkness. And Hannah Montana.
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