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If you want concrete proof that your childhood wasn’t nearly as magical as you remember it, just walk into a toy shop and take a brief look around. As a fully-grown, mature adult, you are now, at last, gifted with the experience and perception to realise that you’re surrounded by nothing more than mountainous heaps of colourful plastic crap.
But cast your mind back to how you felt about this shiny trash as a kid. Those toys rocked your world, didn’t they? You would have killed your little brother with a pencil if you thought it would bring you any closer to owning that spark-spewing space-gun, or the deluxe Barbie dollhouse with the Jacuzzi attachment – even if your folks had real guns and a six-seater Jacuzzi right there for the taking. But that wasn’t the point. You wanted those toys. You had to have the whole set of whatever the Hell it was you were collecting. And what you did with them if you ever finally got them is hardly worth remembering.
Like anything in the gifting industry, toys are a cynical ploy to steal from the middle class and give to the rich through manipulation and guilt. And like pornographers, toy manufacturers seem to spend more time and money on the packaging than on the actual product, because they know they have you by the short-and-curlies anyway. Christmas is coming and you have no choice. You have to have them. Toys are the junk that turns parents into pushers and their kids into whores. Ever seen a kid begging for something in a shop? Then you've seen a manipulative toy addict in action.
It's all good fun if, like me, you're blessed with a childless lifestyle and a pro-choice girlfriend. But standing in the middle of the toy shop I felt like I was straddling two worlds. On my left were the boy toys: hyper-realistic cars and gun-like contraptions conscientiously designed to look as little like real guns as possible without sacrificing the ability to actually shoot things. Boy toys are big and flashy and in come in millions of colours, but girl toys are small, uniformly pink and unutterably depressing. This may be just the boy in me talking, but the first thing that strikes me about the toys for girls is how disturbingly useless they are. Sure, maybe you can't actually kill someone with a plastic ray gun from another planet, but some of those things shoot fake little bullets, and that could take out an innocent child's eye, if you tried really hard.
But what do girls have? Anatomically incorrect blonde princesses, who would probably hate them in reality, designed purely to make them feel inadequate for the rest of their lives. Baby dolls that defecate and cry, most likely as a warning for the punishment in store for them for the crime of being born with a vagina. Then there are the ovens that don’t work, and mini mansions and ponies they’ll never own. If you think sexism is dead, every toy shop in the world is here to prove you wrong. A more advanced species might well consider this level of gender-based social conditioning to be a form of child abuse. The fact is that men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus. We all come from the same planet, and we should really start treating kids as if they do too.
Now I’m not saying people shouldn't give their kids guns and dolls – I’m just saying we should mix it up a little. Why not give a huge gun to your little girl? Who knows? She might also have to shoot someone some day. And why not give your boy a dolly? There’s a 90% probability he’ll grow up to want to play with women anyway, and if not, there’s still a good chance he’ll want to dress them up and do their hair. It's a win-win situation.
- Chris McEvoy
Note: I don't respond to anonymous comments. So stand up tall and air your view on my blog - or just send me an email.
But cast your mind back to how you felt about this shiny trash as a kid. Those toys rocked your world, didn’t they? You would have killed your little brother with a pencil if you thought it would bring you any closer to owning that spark-spewing space-gun, or the deluxe Barbie dollhouse with the Jacuzzi attachment – even if your folks had real guns and a six-seater Jacuzzi right there for the taking. But that wasn’t the point. You wanted those toys. You had to have the whole set of whatever the Hell it was you were collecting. And what you did with them if you ever finally got them is hardly worth remembering.
Like anything in the gifting industry, toys are a cynical ploy to steal from the middle class and give to the rich through manipulation and guilt. And like pornographers, toy manufacturers seem to spend more time and money on the packaging than on the actual product, because they know they have you by the short-and-curlies anyway. Christmas is coming and you have no choice. You have to have them. Toys are the junk that turns parents into pushers and their kids into whores. Ever seen a kid begging for something in a shop? Then you've seen a manipulative toy addict in action.
It's all good fun if, like me, you're blessed with a childless lifestyle and a pro-choice girlfriend. But standing in the middle of the toy shop I felt like I was straddling two worlds. On my left were the boy toys: hyper-realistic cars and gun-like contraptions conscientiously designed to look as little like real guns as possible without sacrificing the ability to actually shoot things. Boy toys are big and flashy and in come in millions of colours, but girl toys are small, uniformly pink and unutterably depressing. This may be just the boy in me talking, but the first thing that strikes me about the toys for girls is how disturbingly useless they are. Sure, maybe you can't actually kill someone with a plastic ray gun from another planet, but some of those things shoot fake little bullets, and that could take out an innocent child's eye, if you tried really hard.
But what do girls have? Anatomically incorrect blonde princesses, who would probably hate them in reality, designed purely to make them feel inadequate for the rest of their lives. Baby dolls that defecate and cry, most likely as a warning for the punishment in store for them for the crime of being born with a vagina. Then there are the ovens that don’t work, and mini mansions and ponies they’ll never own. If you think sexism is dead, every toy shop in the world is here to prove you wrong. A more advanced species might well consider this level of gender-based social conditioning to be a form of child abuse. The fact is that men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus. We all come from the same planet, and we should really start treating kids as if they do too.
Now I’m not saying people shouldn't give their kids guns and dolls – I’m just saying we should mix it up a little. Why not give a huge gun to your little girl? Who knows? She might also have to shoot someone some day. And why not give your boy a dolly? There’s a 90% probability he’ll grow up to want to play with women anyway, and if not, there’s still a good chance he’ll want to dress them up and do their hair. It's a win-win situation.
- Chris McEvoy
Note: I don't respond to anonymous comments. So stand up tall and air your view on my blog - or just send me an email.
