Toy Bender

Mamas Don’t Let Your Girls Grow up Without Boy Toys

Super Ginger is confused and frightened by his sister’s bounty of non-war mongering Ken dolls.

I’m grateful to wrest control of this blog away from my fiancé long enough to speak about an important consideration when buying toys for children. Parents, please buy your daughters some male gendered toys. I grew up in the 80s, an era that saw the rise in gender neutral ideals like pink could be a boys color or that girls could play with trucks. My parents were no exception to this new wave of parenting ideas, as I had Matchbox cars and a few He-Man figures in addition to my Rainbow Brite and Care Bears. I happened to prefer buying my toys in the pink aisles, but they still did their part. Good job, Mom and Dad!

However, they did make a huge error. I had no male gendered toys from my favorite female toy lines. I had two Barbies, a Skipper, and a Midge doll, but no Ken, Kevin or Todd. Now, I was fully aware that my Barbies could be anything they wanted to be like an astronaut, a doctor, a teacher, or an unmarried girl “in trouble� and still look damn good doing it. Unfortunately, what my Barbies really wanted was to be in a meaningful relationship. I would get my Barbie dressed and send her off to work and then I’d get Midge and Skipper ready for school. Then they would come home and change and be ready to meet their imaginary boyfriends for dates. I shouldn’t be accused of lacking imagination, since the majority of Barbie’s day consisted of an imaginary office and an imaginary significant other. Still, I think it would have saved me some time and mental strain if Barbie had some tangible plastic lips to smooch after a night out.

Clearly, this is a BOY Pony.

My “My Little Ponies� also had to serve double gender duty. This problem wasn’t nearly as critical as my Barbie situation. Ponies mainly frolic and play, giving no thought to living in a mainly female society… but I’m a girl. We have a nasty tendency to couple things up. I am the proud owner of one of the My Little Pony Happy Family sets, which contains a mother, father, and baby. This gave one of my Ponies a mate, but the rest of them all seemed to be about the same age and they had no one to call their own. This necessitated a few ponies to step up to the plate and become drag kings for the good of Ponyland.

I happened to be a resourceful child, and could work around my difficulties, but it wasn’t an incredibly satisfying play experience. It had the same feeling of playing a board game by yourself (which I also had occasion to do. This might be a good time to mention that I’m an only child.) I envied my friends who had Barbies who could get married and begin to live the dream of balancing a family and a career. My bottom line is this: Parents, it doesn’t matter if your daughter has a GI Joe, or if your son has a My Little Pony (which my gay best friend and his twin gay brother did. That’s another story all together, but I’m just saying.) Just make sure that Jimmy has a Princess Leia or a Hawkgirl and Susie has a Ken doll to go with that Bride Barbie. Otherwise, Barbie’s just going to look like Miss Havisham, and then you’re going to be making your child read Dickens to understand your literary allusions, and that, in my opinion, constitutes child abuse.

-Diane Schneider