Daily Fail finds out Swedish toy companies X-mas ads are gender neutral!
7:40 pm - 11/27/2012
Dolls? They’re not just for girls: Swedish toy firm forced to become ‘gender neutral’ for Christmas catalogue.
- Top Toy pictures girls holding guns and boys holding baby dolls in catalogue.
- Comes after company was criticised for discrimination in previous catalogue.
- Sales director: 'Gender debate in Sweden so strong that we had to adjust.'
Sweden's largest toy chain has been forced to become ‘gender neutral’ by picturing boys holding baby dolls and girls brandishing toy guns in the pages of its Christmas catalogue.
Top Toy - which holds the franchise for Toys R Us - made the move after being reprimanded by the country’s advertising watchdog for ‘gender discrimination’ in a previous catalogue, which featured boys dressed as superheroes and girls playing princess.
A comparison between this year’s Toys R Us catalogues in Sweden and Denmark, where Top Toy is also the franchisee, showed that a boy wielding a toy machine gun in the Danish edition had been replaced by a girl in Sweden.
Elsewhere, a girl was photoshopped out of the ‘Hello Kitty page, a girl holding a baby doll was replaced by a boy, and, in sister chain BR’s catalogue, a young girl’s pink T-shirt was turned light blue.
Top Toy, Sweden’s largest toy retailer by number of stores, said it had received ‘training and guidance’ from the Swedish advertising watchdog, which is a self-regulatory agency.
"We have produced the catalogues for both BR and Toys R Us in a completely different way this year," said sales director Jan Nyberg.
"For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we have had to adjust."
He added: "With the new gender thinking, there is nothing that is right or wrong. It’s not a boy or a girl thing, it’s a toy for children."
Sauce
The Headline from Daily Fail is ridiculous and does not reflect what the toy company actually said. There was actually one news story about this in Sweden 2-3 weeks ago but no one cared. Most comments are males being afraid that we're "feminasing" young boys and that Sweden is not "thinking of the children" enough!
The little boy with the doll is supercute, though I'm not sure what he's doing. Is he taking the baby's temperature with an ear thermometer?
Edited at 2012-11-27 11:16 pm (UTC)
Let's get this straight: we're supposed to be up in arms because little girls are depicted playing with toy guns and all those fabulous kinds of toys I desperately wanted as a child, and had to wrestle from my brother?
Won't someone think of the children and force toys on them they don't want to suit The Daily Fail's latest crusade? :(
And it sucks for the kids who can't get to play with the toys they want because of some kind of gender deterministic bullshit. So it's good the catalogue is changing stuff, I wish more of them did. And without only doing it after being criticised, but at least they are doing something, I guess. :/
This girl looks all kinds of fierce. I like to see someone from the Daily Mail just try to her gun away.
ANd when I was a kid, I can distinctly remember playing dolls with my boy friends and water pistols with my girl friends, as well as vice versa. If a kid likes a toy, they'll play with it.
Here in the UK there is a chain of toy stores 'The Entertainer'. They have threem main areas, an eye searingly yellow area for preschool toys. Guess what the other two are? Bright blue for 'boys' toys and a nice(!) bright pink for the girls. It's quite quite sad really, but I'm sure the Daily Fail would love them for upholding the standards of gender stereotyping.
I honestly think the problem is getting worse, not better, from everything that i hear. kind of scary to think that. :/
The policing has gotten so much worse, because at least I grew up in a "girl power" era. I wonder if what we're seeing is the backlash against daring to tell little girls they can be awesome too.
Edited at 2012-11-28 01:09 pm (UTC)
but yeah, same as you, i simply never saw the point in dolls or the stuff in the 'pink' section at all. I was always in the gender neutral or boys section. my sister was mostly the same, but she did want dolls too was the only difference, so she got one. i think my parents were glad i wasn't interested, because they are so expensive :/ . mostly i played with trees and dirt tbf.
i look back at photos of 6 year old self and many were dressed in tights, dresses, patent black shoes, hair done up nicely... and i was wearing really cheap jeans, broken sports shoes and oversized shirts. there were others who didn't have expensive clothes either, but they were still more feminine. no one teased me about what i wore or did with my hair though, not until i was older did people have 'opinions'. nowadays i think people are far more critical of kids and the kids are aware of stuff like fashion. i find it really worrying, personally. :(
I don't think there's really toy animals anymore. Not like there were when I was a kid. They're mostly deformed cartoons like the new Littlest Pet Shop or electronic things, most likely also highly stylized (old LPS was pretty stylized but they were at least recognizable as a real animal, unlike the modern ones). They were such a huge part of my childhood it's kind of jarring to look into the toy aisle at Target and see nothing that caters to the interest. Don't little girls still love horses? Where are the horses!?
i mean, with teenagers and adults I had issues, but as a small kid?
Aaaaah story of my life. It wasn't even that bad, I just didn't learn how to dress myself/femme it up until college when I had to dress myself daily (uniforms make it hard to learn fashion!) And it was only in sixth grade PE that a few girls called me gay. I was like wtf but now I wish I could get in a time machine and thank them. They knew almost a decade before I knew.
Aaaaah story of my life. It wasn't even that bad, I just didn't learn how to dress myself/femme it up until college when I had to dress myself daily (uniforms make it hard to learn fashion!) And it was only in sixth grade PE that a few girls called me gay. I was like wtf but now I wish I could get in a time machine and thank them. They knew almost a decade before I knew.
ah, uniforms would have been both good and bad for me... wish i could say it wasn't so bad for me, but i had pretty much the worst time imaginable. just glad highschool doesn't last forever and i could get the hell away from everyone and get myself to the UK for university. not having much of a life because i was too busy studying to try and get the grades for UK university was definitely worth it! this country rocks (compared to all the others i've lived in).
I have twin cousins, 6 years old. Their parents are also actively on guard for sexism/essentialism, but in their peer group there are people who vocally questioned their choice to buy a toy kitchen for their boys. A kitchen. (Aunt gave them what-for, and suggested maybe their boys ought to learn culinary survival skills, too).
The twins themselves seemed pretty much unaware of gender segregation until they went off to preschool, and then almost immediately they started explaining to their parents about 'girls' colors' and 'boys' colors', and stopped wearing necklaces when they played dress up. It was sad.
Naive me. I remember thinking this shit was obviously stupid and would get better.
some times i really wish i could control the media, just so i could ban shit like that from being promoted.
Unfortunately I have to pick my battles at the school. Right now my daughter is getting shit from other kids about being an atheist - they badgered her when she tried to not answer them about her religion. Any other school in the district would be just as bad as this one on the crap she gets, but the rest are also dominated by classism, which is the one thing this school doesn't have.
These boys are really shooting themselves in the foot. Teen guys often say they want gamer girlfriends, but you are dissing my Halo-playing daughter. Idiots.
Ugh, yeah, I can't blame you for having to pick your battles. Religious battles are tough enough and adding much else on top of that would just make it worse. >_<
GOD, ikr? Like I'd want to talk to guys who are gamers, but most of the time when I brought up Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, or Pokemon, I was dismissed as a "real gamer" because I didn't play FPS games (I never bothered mentioning I sucked at them, but yeah). Hell, I kind of wonder if that on top of my not owning a home console since the PS2 have been what's kept me from getting a job at Gamestop every time I've applied. :/
ughhhhh i get so angry, toys are toys dammit!
The best thing I ever saw at work was this British family come in to buy matching outfits for their family...and all the brothers and the dad were buying pink costume tutus and sparkly pink hats so everyone would match.
Their education system is about being gender neutral and that's all kind of awesome. I didn't have the boy toys or girl toys issue at home. I had ninja turtles and princess dresses, doll houses and creepy crawlers kit. No one died so...
I had a dad take issue with me because I let his toddler boy play with a baby doll *rolls eyes*
as a kid, i always thought that k'nex and legos were The Best, and Hot Wheels tracks were like rollercoasters. and i remember having this awsome (garishly colored) neon pink and purple super-soaker that made shooting noises. but one thing i never noticed was brought up in an article i read awhile back somewhere; the topic was similar, but mainly about kitchen playsets being mostly geared towards girls. my own personal solution? think of Food Network Channel. at 22 years old, i would TOTALLY deal out cash for a 'Iron Chef Kitchen Stadium playset (includes talking timer!)'.
(What continues to amuse me is that when said male cousins were really little, my Mum managed to convince their right-wing Dad to let her buy them a toy tea set for Christmas because 'it develops their maths skills!' What she didn't mention was that the tea set would be quite as cutesy as it was...)