When my mom talks about my childhood obsession with the color pink, she often tells a story about when I went over to a neighbor’s house to play. When I saw the pile of trucks and superheroes in her room I asked, “Where are all the girl toys?” The neighbor turned to my mom and said, “We don’t raise our children to differentiate.” My mom responded that she didn’t either, but I did. It bothered my mom, and it bothers me, that this woman passed judgement on me and my mom's parenting based on the fact that a 6-year-old girl thought trucks were for girls and dolls were for boys. Societal gender roles didn’t make me like the things that I like, but society did tell me what categories to put those things in. The problem is not the desire to be gender-neutral, which is a noble desire, but the disdain shown for typically feminine things. If toys are gender-neutral, why can’t boys play with dolls and wear pink? When we try to make things gender-neutral, we often get rid of everything pink and we try to teach girls that pink is bad. We encourage everyone to play with trucks and balls and superheroes, but no one to play with pink toys and dolls and princesses. In doing this, we are teaching girls and boys that typically feminine things have less value.
Throughout my life people have told me that my love of pink, dolls, ballet and princesses was a crime against feminism — that it was pushing women back. Is a little girl wearing a pink dress really the problem? Wearing pink dresses and pretending to be a princess made me feel empowered. Princesses were brave and strong and kind, and that was the kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be. One of the biggest criticisms of Disney princesses is that they teach young girls to be weak and passive and to wait around for a prince to save them. While Disney princesses have their faults, they taught me a lot of important lessons about what it means to be a strong and independent woman. As a recent Disney commercial explains, being a princess is about more than wearing a tiara. Rather than degrading the idea of a princess, why not celebrate it for what it represents? To me, a princess is any girl or woman. Being a princess means you are brave and strong and smart and kind. Rather than teach our daughter to hate princesses, why don’t we teach them to be empowered princesses?
One of the most important lessons of my childhood is that being feminine does not take away from a woman’s strength but only adds to it. I played with dolls a lot as a kid, and my dolls wore pink ball gowns and tiaras, but they didn’t just sit around and wait for a man. My dolls wore their ball gowns to work, on camping trips and to the pool. Having dolls who wore clothes straight out of the pink aisle at the department store didn’t corrupt me because I was taught that those dolls could BE and DO whatever they wanted. My dolls were doctors and dentists and teachers and scientists and Olympians and movie stars and opera singers and talk show hosts and business women. Gender-neutral has become a term that negates and looks down upon the feminine. We teach our children that these feminine toys are bad and less valuable than the traditionally masculine ones. All of a sudden “boy toys” are what is acceptable for everyone and “girl toys” are not OK because they create gender stereotypes. This kind of early childhood branding only sets kids up for more gender inequality.
We are teaching them to look down on femininity, on women; we are teaching our children that girl things are not good enough for boys, that gender-neutral means that women need to hide their femininity. We should be teaching our children that it is AWESOME to be feminine and to build or want to be a superhero, not that girls have to make themselves more masculine to be acceptable and respectable. If we spread a message of hating pink, we are only degrading women more. The whole point of gender-neutral toys is that it doesn’t matter. Boys can like pink and girls can like blue, but the reverse is also okay. As a little girl named Riley once said, “Girls can like dolls OR superheroes and boys can like dolls OR superheroes,” or maybe even both.
Should toys be gendered? No. Any child should be able to play with dolls or superheroes, but let’s not make this a war on pink. The problem is not with pink toys, the problem is with those toys being assigned to girls. Gender-neutral toys are only a problem when gender-neutral really means masculine.
