Toy stories

Until she was about three years old, Dances With Mermaids knocked around in overalls, tiny workboots, T-shirts and denim pants. Tomboy stuff. Then she got her first look at a Barbie doll, and that’s when the whole story changed.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I was reading this post at Outside the (Toy) Box in which a mother talks about the ways stereotypes about gender get reinforced with kids at an early age, and how confusing and infuriating it is to be a parent watching the stereotyping accomplished, with the most benign of intentions, by friends and relatives bearing gifts:

For his first birthday my son got a total of nine vehicles. One toy airplane, two toy fire trucks, a toy globe with a train that goes around and around inside, a tractor, and a few other sundry transit items.

That’s what boys like.

Except he didn’t have a wish list. Nope — I didn’t take him, diaper and all, to do a registry or something. This isn’t what he wanted, this is what others wanted for him.Big difference.

I remember the year my daughter got 8 babies for Christmas. I loved one in particular, much like the killer radio flyer ride-on fire truck. It isn’t any one item that makes my skin crawl. It’s the bounty — it’s the power of emphasis and omission. Like the kids can’t hear what the toys are saying.

She received a kitchen at 2. He’ll get a train table.

To compensate for my daughter’s doll museum, I bought her the tool bench. I bought her the doctor’s kit, I bought the little tykes basketball hoop. I don’t have a problem with baby dolls or with vehicles, but I do have a problem with proscriptive identities.

And I especially have a problem with the shitty biological determinist lay talk about gender. Like the well-blogged stupid Tonka commercials, “Boys — they’re just built different.” Sure they are — I change diapers. But what my daughter and son have in common is so incredibly vast in comparison to how they differ.

And what of the differences that they’ll have later on? They are likely to be grand and real. But isn’t it time we recognized that we’ll bear a good deal of responsibility for the authoring of those differences (that’s the universal “we,” not the you and I kind of “we,” you and I, well, we’re already brilliant)?

If one more person calls him Little Man or Tough Guy . . .

I’ll smile politely, probably. I was socialized too, you know.

All true, all too true. Plenty of times I’ve walked past parents who were dealing with their little son’s tears by saying “Boys don’t cry.” But as my children get older and become more and more a part of society, I am surprised to realize that I’m becoming less of a gatekeeper and more of a referee between them and the outside world. There are things they choose for themselves. Do they choose them because of societal pressure or personal inclination? Is there any way to tell? And even if I can, how stiff-necked am I going to get about it?

Which brings me back to little denim-clad Dances With Mermaids, walking with me in the Pathmark supermarket. There was a display of Barbie dolls at the end of one aisle — displayed on a lower shelf, at eye-level for a little girl. Dances With Mermaids stopped cold. She was transfixed. “Oh looooook,” she said, speaking in a narcotized voice. “It’s beautiful.” Up to that point, her dolls had been of the floppy, Raggedy Ann sort or, more often, stuffed animals. But from the moment Dances With Mermaids saw her first Barbie, her brain and my bank account became partly-owned assets of Mattel Corp. Societal pressure? Did she love Barbie instead of other dolls because of her DNA, or because Barbie looked something like the real-life women she saw every day?

I don’t know. I quickly accustomed myself to the Barbie invasion, helped along by the observation that Dances With Mermaids and her friends imposed their own imaginations on the dolls, even as the dolls imposed brand names on their imaginations. The direct-to-DVD movies are, for the most part, a class act. But I can’t help but notice that while the DVDs, which are apt to be seen by parents as well as kids, go for empowerment talk and messages about personal integrity, the Web site — which is likely to be experienced in private, without parental interference — is all about shopping for new clothes, getting new salon hairstyles and meeting new boys. It is also remarkably easy to click “accidentally” on order forms and marketing pages.

I would prefer to live in a world where toys are used to tell stories instead of sell stories, but nobody asked me for my preferences. I recognize the frustration of dealing with the gender-stereotyping influences raining down on our kids, but I’ve come to decide that holding off the equally relentless buy-buy-buy messages may be a more important and more winnable battle.