An Open Letter to McDonalds, Subway, and All Other Purveyors of Gendered Toys

Tags

boy toys, boycot, business, children, fast food, gender, girl toys, mcdonalds, pink, policies, sexism, subway

(For those of you joining me from Reddit, welcome! I don’t post my child’s real name on the internet for obvious reasons. Owl is clearly a pseudonym – a blog nickname chosen by my readers. In case you read any of my other posts, my daughter’s name is also not really “Fritter”.)

Dear Fast Food Industry,

Tell your employees to stop using my child’s genitals to define his toy choices.

Let me tell you a story. Actually, let me tell you a series of stories about how my son has been reduced to a set of genitals by your employees.

McDonald’s recently had a line of Nerf brand toys on display. They had a line of blue toys and some of their pink/purple Rebelle line (because apparently girls can only play with pink weapons).

My 4 year old’s favourite colour is pink, so he decides that he wants a pink one. He loves things that throw and shoot so he’s very excited.

I get to the cash and order his happy meal and ask for a pink weapon.

“He wants a girl one?” says the cashier.

“He wants a PINK one,” I said firmly.

He got a pink throwing star type thing and he was happy.

The next time we went to that McDonald’s he decided he wanted the cannon toy, which he had seen at a friend’s house.

The cannon toy is also part of the Rebelle line.

So I order his Happy Meal, and the cashier (a different one from before), “for a boy, right?”

“Actually, do you have that pink cannon that shoots a ball? He has his heart set on that one.”

“He wants a girl one?” asks the cashier incredulously.

“He wants the PINK CANNON THAT SHOOTS,” I said. “Do you have it in?”

“Uh, I’ll check,” she says, and marks his happy meal as “girl” on the cash register.

They had it in stock and he was overjoyed. He was playing with it in the Play Place (sans ball, because I didn’t want him to shoot another kid) and an older boy kept asking him “why do you have a girl toy?”

Owl ignored this questioning completely, perhaps not even realising that it was aimed at him. He’s not a girl. He’s a boy. He’s a big, loud, messy, active boy who loves to shoot things but also happens to love pink.

“Uh, why does he have a girl toy?” the older boy finally asked me.

“Why is it a girl toy?” I asked with a note of exasperation. “It doesn’t say “girl” on it.”

The boy looked stumped.

“Because it’s pink?” I asked him. He nodded slowly.

“Does that seem fair, to tell boys that they can’t play with anything pink? Girls can play with blue,” I pointed out. The boy wandered off and I tried not to be afraid.

Owl is going into kindergarten soon. He will be told that pink is for girls, that he can’t enjoy it or wear it or play with it. I wish I could tell him that this is silly childish nonsense, but in the end, where are kids getting it from?

FROM ADULTS.

From the amazed ADULTS who insist, in a BUSINESS ATMOSPHERE, on calling pink toys “girl toys”.

From the BUSINESSES who actually have separate toy lines for boys and girls, as if genitalia should be relevant when it comes to choosing playthings.

I’m sorry, but even sex toy shops don’t divide toys based on the genitals of the purchaser. Dildos are for everybody.

When we go to McDonald’s drive through, I have no idea what to say when they ask if my happy meal should be “boy” or “girl”.

How do I know which my son would prefer? If they said “Skylander or Barbie?” I would say “Skylander”. If they said “Blue or pink?” I would say  “pink”.

My son has often wanted a toy from the supposed “girl” selection, and while that’s easy enough (though annoying) to deal with when we are inside, at the drive through we are denied even the opportunity of knowing what the choices are.

So it’s a crap shoot.

“Boy or girl?” we were asked recently at the McDonald’s drive through.

“It doesn’t matter,” said my husband. “Whichever.”

“…Sorry, was that boy or girl?” asked the voice on the other end.

“Whichever!” said PH loudly. “Just pick one.”

“I still don’t… is it for a boy or a girl?”

“BOY!” I said loudly over PH’s shoulder, just to end the exchange. I felt like saying “HE HAS A PENIS, DOES THAT REALLY TELL YOU ANYTHING ABOUT HIS TOY CHOICES?”

They might as well say “penis or vagina?” when I order a Happy Meal at the drive through.

ASK ME WHAT MY CHILD WANTS, NOT WHAT IS IN HIS PANTS.

He has a penis, but sometimes he likes My Little Pony. He has a penis and sometimes wants the Skylanders toy. The two are not especially related.

But don’t worry, McDonald’s, you aren’t the only company I am pissed at.

Subway, I’m looking at you.

Owl LOVES Subway. He likes McDonald’s for the toys and the Play Place, but he loves Subway for the FOOD. He always gets a kid’s tuna sandwich and piles six different vegetables on top.

The kids meals at Subway are a good deal.

You don’t get a toy but you do get a drink and apple slices along with the sandwich and they put it in a reusable shoulder bag featuring characters from whatever animated movie is playing in theatres right now.

Inside Out is playing in theatres right now.

Owl liked the green one, featuring the Mindy Kaling “Disgust” character.

Who is female.

“Oh, but that one is for girls,” said the lady behind the counter, hesitating and looking at my husband in dismay.

He glared at her. “THAT’S FINE,” he said with gritted teeth.

Seriously? You’re going to tell a little boy that he can’t have a particular bag because it is “for girls”? Why? Because it has a female character on it?

REALLY??

Listen, Fast Food. You need to stop. If you insist on carrying different toy lines for different markets, then you need to train your employees. This has been going on for a long time.

It isn’t enough to say you don’t train your employees to say girl or boy, because that’s how your frigging machines register the difference. Of course your employees will ask “girl or boy” because that’s the button they need to press.

Besides, they are part of our global culture which general recognizes that pink is for girls and boys can’t touch it. 

So it’s not enough to say that you don’t TRAIN them to be sexist. You need to make efforts to train them NOT to be sexist.

Don’t mark certain toy lines as “boy” and “girl” in your cash registers.

Change your POLICIES.

Train your employees in what to say.

Teach them to say “what colour of bag do you want?”

Teach them to say “Do you want a blue weapon or a pink one?”

Teach them to ask at the drive through “standard Nerf toy or Rebelle line?”

And when a boy asks for a pink toy, tell them to say “sure!” and deliver it with a smile because feminism starts here. Freedom from gender restriction starts here.

Otherwise you are a purveyor of sexism, and I’m not buying that.

LET TOYS BE TOYS.

Right now, the only way we have of protesting is with our wallets. But I hope you won’t do it because you want my money. I hope you’ll do it because it is RIGHT.

Sincerely,

A Pissed Off Consumer

Oh Sears, You Bastion of Traditional Sexism, You.

Tags

catalog, catalogue, Christmas, gender, gendered toys, pink, sears, sexism, toys

Catalogues have been known for over a century as a great way to entertain children. Owl will sit quietly for long stretches as he flips through Sears’ Toy Shop Christmas Catalogue.

He may love it, but Perfect Husband looked over Owl’s shoulder one day and was horrified.

The Sears Christmas Catalogue is supposed to catalogue toys, but it also catalogues gender stereotypes, to the point where you wonder whether this is supposed to be tongue in cheek.

Surely nothing in this day and age could be un-ironically THIS sexist?

A quick flip through the catalogue shows boys playing with cars and dinosaurs and boxing bags and discovering amazing science, while girls wearing pink hold dolls and use knitting machines and quietly paint, while totally ignoring entire shelves full of awesome cars and tools they could be playing with.

When they do touch something that could potentially be interpreted as masculine, such as a bow and arrow or a car, they are interacting with a pink version of it, because obviously things need to be pink for girls to play with them.

But it goes deeper than that.

Even the way that they are STAGED with the toys reeks of 1950’s style sexism. Like, to the point where you have to wonder if they’re being serious.

TuTu Cool For School

Tags

boy, child development, clothing, feminine, feminism, gender, preschooler, three year old, tutu

Every parent I’ve spoken to agrees – the selection for girl clothes is way better than the selection for boy clothes. The girl section is always twice the size of the boy section, and full of adorable pea coats, polka dot dresses, and bluejeans with butterfly embroideries. Meanwhile, the boy section is full of grubby looking t-shirts covered in corporate characters like Batman and Ninja turtles.

I guess Owl agrees, because one day we were trying shorts on him in the store and he looked longingly over to a rack of pink tutus and said wistfully, “Someday… when I’m a girl… I’m going to wear that.”

PH and I exchanged looks. We looked at the price tag of the tutu. Seven dollars.

“We can get that if you want,” I said.

“No, but those are for girls.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. “But you can PRETEND you are a girl. I mean, you wear a fireman suit sometimes, but are you a really a fireman?”

“No! I’m a little boy!”

“Well, you can pretend to be a girl just like you pretend to be a fireman.”

“Okay! Let’s try it on!”

He has never been so excited about a piece of clothing. He carried it proudly to the cashier, and insisted on donning it the moment the transaction went through.

We were pretty amused, and took some pictures, and tried to cherish this moment while it lasted. We got seven dollars worth of cuteness just that night at Montana’s alone, where he did pirouettes for the admiring waitress.

That was months ago.

He STILL loves his tutu.

We won’t let him wear it to school, ostensibly because tutus are dress-up clothes, and it is no more appropriate to wear tutus to school than to show up in his shark costume. The real reason, though, is that there is a boy at his school who is a little punk and would tear him a new one. This charming child introduced words into his vocabulary like “dead” and “kill” and “gun”. The same kid also taught Owl that pink is for girls, among other things. Once I took him to school with his nails painted and he came home and said “Little Punk says that nail polish is FOR GIRLS.”

God knows what would happen if Owl showed up in a tutu.

We’re not just trying to protect Owl’s feelings – we don’t like things like that parroted at him and we’re not going to set up opportunities for him to receive a lecture in gender norms from some four year old peer.

Other than that, he can wear it pretty much anywhere. He wears it to the store and playing around our complex and out to the park. He wore it to a boy’s birthday party, using the logic that birthdays are a dress-up occasion. We couldn’t argue it and so he went. No one teased him. One larger boy did see and point, but Owl didn’t notice. The other three year olds didn’t even blink.

 

He was just another boy… in a tutu.

He even sleeps in it most nights. Last night he didn’t sleep with it, but he must have put it on first thing in the morning because he was wearing it when he crawled into bed with me this morning, saying “I’m pretty now, Mom! I’m VERY PRETTY.”

We don’t know if this is a phase or not. We used to think so, when he was a baby. It was his love of pretty dresses that turned me into a feminist. We thought he’d outgrow it once he understood about gender. Now we aren’t so sure. He spotted a doll in PH’s study and wanted red lips like her, so I came home to find him wearing lipstick.

For the most part, he seems all boy. He likes to pretend he’s a super hero who fights bad guys. He likes to shoot things, and destroy things, and he has the restless energy of a male child. But he really likes to do these things while wearing a pink tutu.

Maybe these are the sort of passing inclinations that all children have, and PH and I have seen more of it because we don’t discourage it. Maybe other boys admire tutus and their parents just nod and keep walking, which is what we almost did.

Or maybe he’s a cross dresser. Or maybe he’s a trans girl (although I don’t think so, his mind is still pretty masculine). Or maybe he’s gay. Or maybe he’s just Owl, an active boy in a tutu, like Puck in the performance of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream that PH and I attended recently.

Will this be Owl in twenty years?

We don’t care.

Maybe he will grow out of this and then be humiliated by all of these photos of him in a tutu. If so, we’re going to have a word with him, and try to explain that admiring the feminine is not a shameful thing. If a girl can admire the masculine and play with tools, what’s wrong with a boy admiring the feminine and playing ballerina?

That’s the part that I don’t want him to outgrow. I want him to always know that it is okay to be whoever he wants to be.

As long as the Little Punks of the world don’t wreck it too much for him.

 

The Girl Diet

Tags

baby, boys, diet, gender, gender selection, gender swaying, girls, low calorie, pregnancy, sex ratio

PH and I need to have a girl next time because we can’t work out a boy name. We’ve vetoed each other’s favourites (with the exception of Owl’s name, a favourite of mine that PH didn’t mind) and cautiously accepted as “maybes” some other suggestions.

Girl names are easier.

We worked out several possible girl names as well as Owl’s name before we even got engaged. We know the name of our future girl.

So this time, we’re going to try to have a girl.

When I found out that Owl was a boy, I had a lot of mixed emotions. On the one hand, I have always wanted a boy. Whenever I dreamed of babies, they were boys. I LOVE little boys. I’m not so hot on little girls. They’re manipulative and often shallow and obsessed with their Barbies’ hair.

So I was glad I was getting my boy.

But PH wanted a girl. PH isn’t big on men in general. He likes and admires all things female.

So I was concerned that he was disappointed.

He has never expressed any disappointment – he loved Owl from the moment he laid eyes on him – but he has teased me about the fact that I got my boy.

“Hey, it’s your sperm that determines the gender,” I would say defensively.

“I gave you millions of girl sperms! You picked THIS one!”

It was all a big joke, but I got hired on Elance to write a series of articles about selecting your baby’s gender earlier this year and I learned a few things:

1. While the gender is in fact determined by the man’s sperm, the woman’s body has final say on which gender it produces.

2. Boys are slightly more common than girls, 51% of babies being boys.

3. The world is full of myths about timing your intercourse to have a certain gender, assuming certain positions etc and all of this is completely unsubstantiated by modern science.

4. Women (and other female mammals) who are stressed, eating low fat or low calorie diets, or living in crowded situations, tend to de-select males, and start producing more females. The effect can be as much as 60-80% females born over males. Women who eat high calorie diets experience the opposite – 60% more males than females.

The idea is that if resources are low, females are a better bet. We only need ONE male to repopulate the world, but we need a lot more women. Also, since male babies require more calories to make, a female is easier to put together if there isn’t a lot of food to go around.

It’s called the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, and there seems to be a lot of research to back it up. 

Male blastocysts also appear to be less hardy – they don’t absorb sugar as well from the uterine environment and are less likely to survive to implant in the uterine wall if the mother’s blood sugars aren’t stable.

The difference is such that just skipping breakfast can affect your chances of having a boy.

So…. guess what I’m doing?

I’m back on My Fitness Pal, logging my calories, and I’m skipping breakfast.

I’m not cutting back on calories dramatically. After all, if a woman is starving she’s not likely to conceive at all, and honestly a second boy would not be the end of the world. PH would love him and still consider our family complete.

But I would like a girl, too. First, I’ve done the boy thing and now I’d like to try the girl thing. Second, while I’m not big on little girls, I would like to have a grown daughter some day.

Plus I just like experimenting with science, especially science that motivates me to lose weight.

So I’m on a restricted, but not unreasonable, low calorie diet and skipping breakfast.

Que sera, sera.

At least I can tell PH that I tried!

…And yes, I will stop the low calorie diet the moment that second line forms on the pregnancy test.

In Which I Get Visited By The Feminism Fairy, AKA My Son

Tags

boys, culture, feminism, gender, gender identity, girls, homosexuality, masculinism, media, society, why can't men where dresses

I am not, by the generally-accepted understanding of the term, a feminist.

I would love to be a stay at home wife and mother. I like it when my husband brings me flowers and opens doors for me. I don’t get angry and aerated by the fact that most executives are men, or spend much time ranting about the glass ceiling (not that I like the glass ceiling. It pisses me off, too. I just prefer to rant about grammar).

In short, I don’t get upset when women are not treated the same as men.

But the more time I spend with Perfect Husband, the more I spend thinking about men and feeling bad for them, because they aren’t treated the same as women.

Does that make me a masculinist? I guess not. 

I don’t think PH actually likes men, much. All his friends are women. The ones who aren’t biologically women are transgender women, or married to his female friends. Or both.

PH thinks that women get a bum rap because feminine things are still not really being put forward as desirable or likeable.

The inherent sexism in our society is everywhere, and I hear a lot about it. Commercials like this one tick PH off to no end:

A basic summary of this commercial:

Man wants Klondike Bar. Man is willing to go through a difficult ordeal to get Klondike Bar. Man is told that he must listen to his wife for FIVE WHOLE SECONDS. He then makes an effort to focus on his WIFE (you know, his so ul mate, whom he committed to for life) for a matter of mere moments while she tries to talk to him about decorating the house (you know, because that’s all women talk about it and if men have to think about paint swatches, they’ll die). When the five second buzzer rings a party appears, thrown by several women who are much hotter than his wife. He starts dancing with them while the wife looks completely baffled.

TERRIBLE.

PH is furious because he thinks those new Mint Klondike Bars look really tasty, but NOW HE CAN’T BUY THEM because all he can think about is how offensive the commercial is.

He can’t buy the new Dr Pepper, either, because apparently it’s “not for women” (seriously. That’s their tag line. WTF? Way to knock out half of your potential market there, geniuses).

The fact is that feminism has been so focused on getting the same rights as men, that we have made absolutely no headway in convincing men that being feminine is actually desirable. After all, men must wonder, if being a woman is so great, why do we want to leave the kids at home and come to work in pants, anyway?

Womanhood – so awful, even women don’t want it. 

That’s a tagline worthy of Dr Pepper.

Women have spent years fighting for the right to be treated as equals to men, and that’s good. Thanks to them I can vote, I share equal ownership of my house and finances with my husband, and I can learn anything and be anything I want to be.

But no one has been fighting to give the men the same options.

Take names.

Girls keep stealing the boy names, and then mothers of boys can’t effing use them.

Girls can be (and frequently are) named things like Carson, Taylor, or Ryan. Hell, I could probably name my daughter Gary or Fred and people would tell me “oh, I love that for a girl!” But when you are looking for a name for your son, do you consider Stacy, Leslie, or Shirley? (note: Anne of Green Gables named her son Shirley – have we gone backwards socially?)

It’s not fair.

As it is, even names like Alex, Cameron, Jamie, or Sam are considered borderline. Once the girls appropriate it, the boys can’t use it any more. Why?

A little girl can go dressed up as Batman for Hallowe’en, but why aren’t there more little boys dressed as Catwoman? I can go to work in pants and sensible shoes, but what if my husband showed up for work in heels?

That’s PH’s big beef.

Not that he wants to go to work in heels (after all, he takes an hour and a half of transit each way. That’s a lot of walking) but it strikes him as wrong that men CAN’T (by the same token, if someone said I couldn’t wear dresses I’d get ticked off, even though I hate the damn things).

Men are just as constricted by gender as women are, really.

Canada offers ‘parental leave’ to either parent, usually at a rate of 55% their regular pay. Some companies, like the one PH works for, will “top up” women’s maternity leave, providing the extra 45% so the woman gets full pay. It’s a benefit they offer, but they only offer it to the women. If PH had chosen to go on parental leave, not only would he have been under some serious scrutiny by his bosses, but he would not have been eligible for the top-up.

Of course that, in turn, limits women’s choices, because it meant that it basically wasn’t a financial option for us for PH to stay home. That was fine with me, but what if I had wanted to go right back to work?

Even with that in consideration, the fact is that I can wear men or women’s clothing, I can work or stay home, I can vote, and I can get elected to public office. I can call myself Ryan, I can do any and all things that men can do, AND I can bear children and breastfeed.

Men can’t.

Men can’t wear dresses unless it’s Hallowe’en or unless they want to be the butt of a lot of jokes (PH once heard two coworkers joking about “she-males” and nearly ripped them new cloacas). Men can’t have feminine names. Men can’t stay home with their children without being penalized financially and socially more than women. Heck, the idea of a male childcare worker is so strange to us that it was the focus of an entire Friends episode.

Jason Alexander, in a recent apology for his joking that cricket is “gay”, asks us why accusing something (like sports) of being effeminate is still considered so offensive.

There’s no good answer, except the truth:

We still think that it’s bad to be effeminate. It’s associated with homosexuality, which is stupid – after all, most cross dressers are completely straight –  and homosexuality is still considered bad, too.

“Gay” is an insult.

“Girly” is an insult.

My old boss used to tell dogs who weren’t tugging on their tug ropes hard enough that “that’s a little-girl tug!”

Men who can’t pitch are told that they throw like girls.

Bella Swan thinks you need a Y chromosome to understand how engines work.

This is the society that we are bringing Owl into, and it concerns us.

It doesn’t concern Owl, yet, though.

He so far hasn’t really figured out that he is male. When I call him a “little boy” he looks at me like I’m an idiot, points to himself and says clearly, “BA-BY!”

He knows he has a penis, but he isn’t too concerned by the fact that I don’t. He seems to think it’s tucked up in my belly button somewhere.

….And about twice a week, when I show up at daycare to pick him up, he’s in a dress.

This is how I roll

Not just any dress. It’s a sparkly blue fairy princess dress. The boys wear the blue one, because blue is for boys, don’tcha know. The girls get a purple one.

I rarely see any other boy in the blue dress, though. It’s mostly Owl’s.

Apparently he drags Daycare Lady or her daughters to the place where the dresses are kept, insisting “dress, dress” until they put it on him. Sometimes he won’t take it off when it’s time to go home, so I just bring it back the next day.

The other day he spotted it on the shelf the morning after one of these comes-home-in-a-dress days and screeched until Perfect Husband put it back on him.

Then he walked around going “pwetty, pwetty.”

I feel pretty, OH SO PRETTY

The neighbours say “is he in a fairy dress??” and we all have a good chuckle. I make it clear that he chose to be in it, so they don’t think that I’m one of those weird parents who try and de-gender their child. Gender isn’t bad.

The funny thing is, I would have been horrified if I had a girl and she had turned up in a princess dress. I’m afraid for a daughter – I wasn’t a girly girl and I don’t want my future daughter buying in to the look-pretty-for-the-men media crap.

But that dichotomy made me re-examine my own biases. Owl isn’t acting on any kind of media pressure, so neither would a little girl at this age.

This is purely about a small child liking something pretty, and not realizing that society has deemed it unfit for him.

I know that one day he’ll realize that he IS a little boy.

I know that one day he’ll understand that dresses are for girls.

I know that the day will come when he will reject all things feminine, and scorn them as he has been taught to do by his peers and by the media.

When that day comes, I will sigh and feel sad. But in the meantime I can pretend that we live in a better world, and my neighbours can continue to get a good laugh.

It’s a hotdog!

Tags

baby, gender, ultrasound

Perfect Husband would rather I not post a picture of his son’s sex organs on the world wide web, despite my proud-mother urge to do so instantly. But it’s definitely a boy!

Once again, the ultrasound people wouldn’t let Perfect Husband in at first, so he was left to stew while I was ushered in. The lady was very nice, though, and asked if I was interested in knowing the gender if she spotted it. Of course, I said yes, please! She spent a lot of time staring at the monitor, making clicks and beeps, while she did complicated measurement stuff. To my infinite relief, she told me that I had over-done the full bladder thing and sent me to relieve myself of part of the load, then did some more clicks and beeps. I tried to see what was happening on the monitor, but from my angle it was just miscellaneous grey patches. When she was done the important stuff, she said everything looked totally normal, and she went to call my husband.

Perfect Husband came in looking disgruntled, but seemed somewhat appeased when I told him that I had not gotten any sneak-previews. She showed us the face, which still looks alien, and the little hands, folded over his nose. He must have been sleeping, because he wasn’t moving at all. She showed us the spine, the flickering heart, the tiny empty stomach, and then she moved down to his legs.

“This is the umbilical cord,” she said, “and this is the scrotum, and that is definitely a penis. So it’s a boy.”

We made pleasant sounds while we digested it. I was surprised, because I had thought it was a girl, despite years and years of dreaming about nothing but boys. But mostly I felt worried about Perfect Husband being disappointed, because he loves little girls the way I love little boys. I don’t know why I should feel personal responsibility for the baby’s gender, since that ball is firmly in his court, but I did. He seems to be quite accepting of it though.

And this is why I wanted to kn0w – actually being able to think of the thing that moves in me as “my son” has made me feel closer to him already. But it has also really brought things home…

Holy shit, I’m going to have a kid.

It’s IN me, I have a right to know.

Tags

babies, gender, pregnancy, ultrasound

Ultrasound is tomorrow (Thursday)!!!

I really really REALLY hope they can tell me if it’s a hotdog or a hamburger.

And I’m worried they’ll yell at me for trying to video it.