Pink v Blue?

Is the real debate associated with gender and children the world of gaming?

The age old debate of whether boys should have ‘aggressive’ toys and girls have ‘pink’ and domestic toys has reared its head again. Quite frankly, it is pretty straightforward, let children have a choice, and let them play with what they like. If parents are gullible enough to fall for the aggressive marketing campaigns from companies, that isn’t the kids’ fault.
If you are teaching gender, take a look on You tube, there are some excellent feminist debates about Lego and their new range of Lego Friends – their sales were flagging with their traditional and highly critically acclaimed approach of gender neutrality, so they created a pink version and called it ‘Friends’ to appeal more to girls. If you have a mixed gender children the premise being you end up buying twice as much. Luckily, only my daughter has dabbled in it, she has a couple of the VERY expensive packs, but soon got bored. It is useful for lots of development, particularly fine motor skills, but not at that price. The boys would rather kick a ball – a much cheaper option. The company is now making huge profits – i.e. we all buy into it!

I had two boys and then a girl, from my perspective it was a major relief that I could stop reading through dinosaur encyclopaedias, looking at teeth and tail lengths and maps, we even had dinosaur snap. We went through the Thomas the Tank engine phase too, and a ‘Whale Book’ where on a visit to the Natural History Museum, my son was thrilled to see the narwhal and manatee from his whale book. Neither boy could walk past a stick or a stone without either picking it up or kicking it. Then I had a little girl, and as she had two brothers she more than held her own, had access to pink things, but has floated through it all without much of a thought. She did dye her hair at five, and I had the shame of having to ‘fess up’ at her school that she had found a blonde hair dye and used it, with the help of an older friend, because she wanted to ‘look like mammy…’ something I never encountered with the boys.

There was also the time my daughter age four showed me the new earrings she had acquired for her soft toy doggy. She had taken (stolen) two of the pins from the Heart Foundation box to put through the ears of her toy dog, because she thought it looked pretty….Yet another occasion where I had to do a walk of shame and confess and put a donation in the box. From my experience, there is something innate in connection to this; the boys wouldn’t have ever given it a second thought.

Clothes wise, there is a huge variety for girls, you don’t have to stick to pink. My daughter was fond of layering – i.e. wearing everything she owned at once. One day at nursery the Head asked if she had been Goked, another friend likened her to an American ‘Bag Lady’, but she was happy. My sons are sporty, but have a curiosity about femininity. One in particular, takes every opportunity to dress as a princess.

The elephant in the room as far as I am concerned is gaming. There is all of this public angst about gender, but as my boys get older and want Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, because ‘everyone has it’ even though they are not even close to the 18 certificate it claims to target. It reminds me of the era of the Victorian ‘Naughty Nineties’, where there was a veneer of respectability, but the debauchery below was barely hidden.

Linguistically, we live in a politically correct world, which is only right, and language does have to be challenged and we should not allow people to use derogatory racist, sexist, homophobic words. This is all progress, but then almost the whole of the population of young people seem to be playing games for fun where a spectacularly un PC use of language is the norm. They kill, maim, murder and take joy in committing crimes; and then share this experience live on line with ‘friends’. As far as I am concerned, this is where there are mixed messages. Most of these boys have the emotional intelligence to know it is a ‘game’, but some don’t!

Culturally, I do think children should share their experiences, my boys tend to use their X Box for Fifa, to talk to friends and make plans, and my main assurance is that as soon as there is a chink of light and sun, they are all out playing football together and swinging in the trees, so I try not to be too hung up about it. But, until misogyny through gaming it truly challenged for such an impressionable age group, the pink versus blue for under 5s is an irrelevancy.

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