Boys and Girls

We have gone to great lengths to help our boys have access to as many creative play options as possible. I have found that this is a sizable effort in a society that wants to quickly divide kids into gender-specific consumer groups before they can even manage solid food. Before you start citing all those studies that show that little girls like to build warm enclosures while little boys like to build tall towers and then knock them down, I'll say upfront that the fact that there are biological differences between boys and girls is not the issue that rankles me. What gets me is how easily we claim those differences as unbendable, how we celebrate them, and then spend lots of money to make them stick.

For an example, take a visit to Pottery Barn Kids. Wanna decorate your child's room? Just click on "Boys' rooms" or "Girls' rooms." If you're a boy, you get sports and trains and trucks and airplanes and dinosaurs. If you're a girl, you get pink. Or you can go visit any Halloween costume website. The first thing you'll get to select is whether you want girls' costumes or boys' costumes. At one site I've visited, if you click on "classic boys' costumes," you'll get a choice of ninja avenger, aviator, astronaut, bandit, Buzz Lightyear, chef, confederate officer, cowboy, crusader, police officer, prisoner, mechanic, and doctor. A click on the "classic girls' costumes" will get you a choice of ballerina, Barbie, pink playboy bunny, cheerleader, flapper, mermaid, and bride. Isn't the fun of dressing up for Halloween that you get to be whatever you want to be? Does a girl today really have to cross the gender divide to pretend to be a doctor?

I recently read a really interesting essay about girl culture by Peggy Orenstein. What I like about this article is that Orenstein looks at the whole industry of toy production, how decisions are made about what gets to be a "girl toy." Have any of you been to Toys R Us lately? The place is so clearly separated by gender. Girls get roughly 30% of the store (it's the pink side!), while boys get the rest (not pink!). The girl section has Barbie and her slutty neighbors, the Bratz, mermaids, fairies, dollhouses, and kitchen stuff. Boys appear to get the rest (the vehicles, the sports stuff, the models, the bikes, the Legos), and this is all located across a wide aisle from the pink section. Are you looking for Dora the Explorer? She's in the girl section! Are you also looking for her cousin, Diego? He's in the boy section! And that's too bad, because he gets to do way cooler stuff than Dora does (Animal rescue expeditions! Trips to the arctic! Undersea adventure!).

Before you get the wrong impression, let me say that I loved Barbie when I was a kid. I had a whole assortment of them and their 1970s friends (Darcy Covergirl, complete with disco ball and stage; Marie Osmond in glittery green gown; Darth Vader, who acted as "the husband."). Do you remember, too, that there was a beauty salon and an apartment building? Well, check out what Barbie's up to these days! She's got a party bus! It has a hot tub! She has friends who are "scented" like suntan lotion. Then there's this one (don't you love the whip?!). And now, after her years as a drunken sorority girl and then as a dominatrix, Barbie gets married. And newsflash: she's white! Look at Barbie the Caucasian Bride.

Blue and Green aren't too interested in Barbies, but we've tried to keep the gender doors open when it comes to their toys. They have tons of trucks, but they also love their toy kitchen and their cleaning equipment.

(Blue, cooking with a bowl on his head, wearing a Home Depot apron)

The thing that's tricky with "boy toys" is navigating all the violence. Once you surpass the "I love you, you love me" toddler phase, suddenly boys are supposed to want to enter combat. Ninjas, Transformers, Star Wars, it's all about shooting. There were two rules in Blue and Green's boy-heavy preschool class last year: "no potty talk" and "no shooting noises." (Well, they also developed a third rule in response to the little kid who kept stripping off all his clothes. The rule was "no naked."). With Blue and Green, we just never brought up the idea of guns, and so they never wanted them. But despite our best efforts, Blue recently said to me, "Mama, can I have a water shotter that's shaped like a drill?" Oh well. Even without the language, the concept is still there. I know, I know, several of you are now saying, "See, it's all inborn!" Well, OK, maybe it is. Maybe Toys R US and Pottery Barn are just reflecting back to us our own primal desires. But I actually think we're smarter than that, that we can come up with new ways of talking about gender differences and similarities that don't box little kids into narrow roles before they learn to think for themselves.

The hardest thing to accept is that this issue is going to be increasingly out of my hands. Other kids will become much more of an influence on our boys' interests. Yesterday, we had this fabulous little kid -- I'll call him Jacob -- over to our place to make a volcano with us. He walked into the house and said, "I'm going to have a pirate birthday party, and all the pirates are going to blow up and DIE!" Alrighty. Anyway, we did this volcano, assembled the plaster strips, painted it, added the baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring, and it exploded and oozed just as we hoped it would. This little friend abruptly took some dinosaurs and shoved them into the volcano's crater, screaming, "The dinosaurs are blowing up! They're dead! Their blood is running down the mountain!" Blue and Green looked skeptical, but they joined in the carnage anyway, throwing their own dinosaurs into the mess.

Later, the three of them gathered in the living room to play with Blue and Green's Playmobil airports and airplanes (Some of Playmobil's boy toys; the girl toys come in pink boxes). These toys are pretty cool, if you can get over the fact that it takes ten hours for an adult to assemble them. Blue said to Jacob, "The woman (pronounced wooman) pilot gets to fly today." My heart skipped a beat, because the female figure in this set isn't a pilot. She's clearly a flight attendant, as she came in a bag with the cups and the orange juice cartons. Plus, the real pilot, a man, is wearing a pilot's hat. But Blue doesn't know this, and he has been perfectly happy to run an equal opportunity airline. A moment passed. I was so sure that Jacob would say something. Another moment passed. "OK, she can be the pilot," Jacob said. Then he added, "But my guy gets to be the hijacker."