Another Gender Rant

I'll preface this by saying that Asa really doesn't need any more toys.  He has all sorts of developmentally-appropriate and/or fun toys.  Our living room is a testament to that.  He's also got a basket full of stuffed animals, which he is learning now to appreciate... which, at his age, pretty much means that he chews them.  About what could be expected.

However, M. and I have been wanting to get him the one thing that appears, to us, to be lacking in his collection... a complement, if you will, to his blocks and trucks and shapes.  You see, Asa doesn't have a doll.  Lots of stuffed animals, but no doll.  Fair enough, said we, his birthday is coming up, we can get him a doll.  Right?

You'd think we'd have stopped being this naïve a while back.  But no.

M., doing errands today, stopped into Creatoyvity, a rather upscale toy shop that tends towards Political Correctness and organic/wooden toys.  She came home emptyhanded, and looked at me rather thoughtfully.  "They were all little girl dolls," she noted.  "Frilly, pink, girly dolls.  Not a single one that looked like a boy, let alone one that had boy parts."  Hmm.

I went online to do a little more research.  Surely, I said to myself, a big chain like Toys'R'Us should have something, right?

Well, right and wrong:

Huh, it's all pink and girly.  Oops, what's that?  Over on the left-hand sidebar?

Right.  A "sort" function.  In among all the girly princess dolls... six.  None of which was remotely realistic, two of which were Raggedy Ann and Andy, all of which looked much more like stuffed animals.  Because, really, heaven forbid a little boy have a baby doll.

FAO Schwartz wasn't any better:

etoys.com had something, at least: a couple of very expensive, hard-plastic dolls that weren't even available:

And one potty-training aid:

Right there, in the product description put out by the manufacturer: "Tinkles, an anatomically correct drink & wet friend to lead the way and teach the basics of potty training to your own baby!"  This isn't a lovey, or something to care for and hug, it's a pee model.  Which, apparently, means that boys can only have dolls if they have some sort of educational purpose.

Fisher Price had a whole series of "Little Mommy" dolls:

But no Little Daddy dolls.  Apparently, Daddies don't love their babies, don't cuddle and rock them, don't change diapers... and we're once again living in the 1950s.  What's up with that?  A 2009 Bureau of Labor and Statistics survey noted that "On an average day, among adults living in households with children under 6, women spent 1.1 hours providing physical care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children; by contrast, men spent 0.5 hours providing physical care."  That's over twice as much time spent by women.  Last year.  Do I blame this on the lack of little boy dolls?  Of course not.  That's just a symptom of a larger cultural bias that is not - no matter what recent so-called "post-feminist" college grads may think - going away anytime soon.  (And no, just for the record, this isn't the man-hating lesbian rant that some may want it to be... I can't quite see women purely as victims - I know too many like this one.)

What I question is why, if we truly want equality in the home as well as the workplace - if we want fathers to be as hands-on as mothers and to be full participants in both housework and childcare - why aren't we modeling this to our sons?  Why are so many of the kitchen playsets pink and frilly?  Why are doll clothes and doll accessories so often pink?  Why is it that, nearly 40 years after the song first came out, we still frown when William says he wants a doll?





Now, certainly, Asa is far too young to notice the implicit gender typing in his toys.  He's even too young to notice whether his dolly is a boy or girl.  He's too young to cuddle a dolly, to see it as some sort of representation of a human, to treat it as his baby.  But really, I have a hard time believing that in the next couple of years, during which time I rather expect that he will begin to notice and understand such things, there will suddenly be a glut of boy-dolls on the marketplace.

So what to do?  Just keep looking...