Toys for boys, toys for girls

On January 23, a lovely exhibition dedicated to toys ended in Paris.
The exhibition “Des hommes et des jouets” for more than four months has transformed the Grand Palais into a beautiful gallery of dolls, toy soldiers and teddy-bears: I walked for over an hour in those colorful rooms, surrounded by children of all ages who smashed their hands and their wide open eyes on display cabinets exposing all kinds of toys.
First exhibition halls were dedicated to animals, from the wooden horses on wheels to plastic dinosaurs, from teddy bears to croaking frogs.
Musicians, acrobats and robots to follow.

And then the tragedy: on the entrance of the third room appeared the word “GIRLS“.

A huge space occupied by a table football branded “Barbie” (almost a provocation) immersed in a blaze of white, pink and fuchsia. All around dolls, baby dolls, nurses, prams, kitchens, housewives, small houses, nuns, bakeries, pan and pots and stove.
When I arrived in the “BOYS” room the shelves were covered with Meccano, Lego, cars, guns, planes, trains, soldiers, spacecraft, workers, artisans, cowboys and Indians: the walls were blue and light blue.

In the room dedicated to media characters and comic strips (from ET to Mickey Mouse), I heard several mothers to explain to their children who was the pupped dressed in blue and red and covered with cobwebs. In front of the Cat Woman statue I also heard one child asking: “Mom, is this Pretty Woman?”.
Loredana Lipperini - Italian writer and blogger who always deals with gender issues – in her book “Still on baby-girls’ side” has widely told about stereotypes exasperation in toys marketing and of many other products that also affect more adults markets.
Gender still appears to provide a secure grip on consumers, and where toys companies can make a product differentiation (for boys and for girls) they do.
Of course, as Loredana Lipperini stressed in Chapter 3 “Alice in the Mirror”, toys and games dedicated to girls always have to deal not only with household, mothering and care or with a life lived at home, but also paying great attention to their physical appearance: the continuous anticipation of the entry point (ie the time of access to consuming) makes this physical attitude become seductive and extremely standardized in increasingly younger ages, with all the emotional and social risks that this means.

Not to mention the idea of femininity that exudes from these market games: the ideal woman is still beautiful (and the type of beauty is only one), neat, silent.
I don’t think it’s possible to determine with certainty whether the female preference for certain types of game is purely cultural, or if there is something genetic: Louann Brizendine, in her book “The brains of women“, tells about a little girl who was given – for a certain period of time – just toys considered masculine, until one day they found her cradling in her arms a plastic truckload wrapped in a blanket, like a newborn.
Observations that could be done are countless, but the exasperation of pink and blue, the broom to females and the steering wheel to males, the obsession for separate rooms and the removal of narration in favor of membership, further to be not good for anyone – except for advertisers – is really pissing us off.

Because from here we arrive immediately HERE.