GoldieBlox Breaks into Toys R Us

This ad popped up on my Facebook newsfeed today and it caused quite a diversity of reactions in the comments. There's something about it that makes me uneasy. Take a look…

When I was little, I played with Lego and racing cars and trains. I wasn't the kind of little girl that enjoyed dolls and tea sets much (actually there's a photo somewhere of me aged 2 standing on a table with a walking, talking, blinking, crying doll I'd been given for my birthday. I'm standing at the very edge of the table, looking petrified and for all the world as if I'd happily leap off the end to avoid that terrifying monstrosity).

When I had my own children, I consciously made the effort to ensure that they had a range of toys. They had balls and bats, skateboards and scooters, tea sets and dolls, cooking pots and action figures, hammers and saws and doctor's sets. They also had a wide range of toys that would spark their creative spirit - wooden blocks, paper and crayons, Lego, pillows for forts and stuffed animals. We read books and played with mud and shells and rocks. We had animals and played dress-ups. Nothing was really off limits unless it was unsafe or just too hard for their little hands to manipulate. They both loved dressing up as spiderman or angels (we had wings) and "cooking" mud for their plastic "families".

B2 still builds space ships and forts with the Lego blocks - minus any instructions (actually even if he gets a set with instructions, after he's built it, he takes it apart and builds something out of his imagination).

So I'm a little confused about two things; why there needs to be gender-specific toys and why this new toy is so exciting.

First to the gender-specific toys (and colours). Who determined that pink and purple were girly colours? Up until the early 20th century, pink had not been gender-assigned. Parents were just as likely to dress boys in pink as girls, and it was considered a "stronger" colour and therefore more suitable to boys. Purple was the colour of royalty and religion in England. Worn equally by kings, queens and bishops. It was definitely not gender-specific. And when did being a princess become an aspirational goal? Really, how exactly does one aspire to become born into a rigid heredity? That doesn't make sense to me. Or is it marriage to a Prince that girls should be aiming for? That didn't work out very well for Princess Diana or the Duchess of York. So clearly being married to a Prince isn't sufficient to guarantee happily ever after. And by the way, who said girls were the ones who had to stay home and cook and clean and take care of frighteningly real crying, feeding, weeing baby dolls (yeah ok, they still scare me)? So why do parents feel pressure to introduce their children to only gender-specific toys? It's really none of anyone else's damn business what toys your kid likes to play with. Let them play with what makes them happy. Childhood is such a very short time in our lives. Is it really necessary to imbue it with such extraordinarily weighty drama? Should it really be spent preparing children for adult roles they may or may not assume (which incidentally, is the reason the Baby Born was invented)? Shouldn't it be a time of fun, creativity, imagination and learning how to take calculated risks?

Now onto this particular gender-specific toy. I don't get the excitement. It seems like an avenue for one manufacturer to market to a specific target audience and make a pile of money - all those parents disenchanted with the new "girlie" Lego sets and fed up of having their daughters directed to anything princess or pink or frilly will be champing at the bit to spend their hard earned cash on this cleverly marketed toy. Perhaps I'm overly sceptical, but I don't see how (apart from clever marketing) this toy is markedly different from the myriad engineering toys that already exist. You don't want to buy your daughter a Lego model of the Death Star? Ok, don't. Go buy her a bunch of Lego bricks in different colours (or if you want her to be really creative, just one colour) and tell her to build whatever her heart desires. There's nothing gender-specific about a Lego brick. Or Kinex, or Duplo or any of the other engineering/building toys that exist. To be fair, the idea behind the toy is great. It's aimed at getting girls interested in engineering and building, and ultimately any play with engineering toys will improve girls' spatial skills (which do lag behind boys' when looking at large scale studies). However, the GoldiBlox are no more creative than the Lego sets. They do not encourage imagination or risk-taking any more than existing sets, and you can't yet buy GoldieBlox bricks separate to the kits. So girls who buy this set are restricted to "building along with Goldie" rather than inventing their own machines.

Maybe parents of girls have a different take on it? What are your thoughts?

Cooking up a Hot Mess with Paula Deen and Anne Rice

The recent allegations levelled at Paula Deen, self-proclaimed Queen of Southern cooking, have brought with them a slurry of debate on social media networks. The level of emotive commentary has highlighted just how far the world has yet to go in race relations (and I use the term "race" in its most socially understood form here). It seems that everybody has an opinion and nobody's scared to voice it.

Today, while meandering through my Facebook newsfeed, I spotted a new blogpost from a site I regularly read. The bulk of that post was on a young author who had scored herself a publishing deal at the tender age of 15. A wonderfully positive post about a clever young writer who is being recognised for her talent. Lurking at the bottom of the post, however, was a link to author Anne Rice's Facebook post, posing a question about the social vilification of Paula Deen.

Did I ignore the link? Did I allow my fingers to hover momentarily over the link then brush them quickly away to another page? No. I clicked the link. I read the initially apparently innocent question. Then I read the many many polarised responses to the question, to Paula Deen herself and to a plethora of other social issues, some of which appeared unrelated to the issue. People don't hold back on social media. Sometimes people loose all sense that they are a member of humanity and should perhaps exercise a little humanity in their responses to others. And having worked myself into a lather, shaking my head at the state of affairs, and losing heart in people's capacity to conduct a debate or even an argument without a rapid slide into vulgarity, accusations and name-calling, I decided to post my own response to both the question Ms Rice posed and to some of the responses it elicited.

It's an issue I feel quite strongly about, so … well, I got a little carried away. So here, in its 980 word entirety, is what I posted. Don't say I didn't warn you...

Completely agree with Sarah ^^ (this is a long post and I apologise in advance). Ms Deen is not in danger of losing her life. She's really not in any danger of losing even her livelihood (her empire spans more than just the one Food Network show, and they haven't cancelled either of her sons' shows). This isn't a "lynch mob" as you so colourfully put it (nothing like emotive language to whip up a mob). She's not being pursued with a noose or burning torches and pitchforks. Nobody here appears to be wearing white pointy hats. I think the scrutiny she's being subjected to is perfectly human, and frankly justifiable given her frequent claims to Southern manners. It's unfortunate for her that social media happens to be the church meeting or town gathering of our times and allows for the airing of many more opinions than would previously have been possible. It's also unfortunate that people use the relative anonymity of social media to express their views in a less than tactful or considerate way, but if we cut through the bluster and filibuster, it seems to me that there are three positions here. Firstly, there are those who are outraged by the revelations from the allegations (and let's remember that at this point they are still allegations - her tearful video admissions aside), there are those who are mindful that she has not yet been convicted of any wrong-doing other than in the court of public appeal (tearful video admissions aside again) and so should not be condemned on the basis of allegations, and finally there are those that seem to have missed the point of the debate. Paula Deen may well be a charming archetype of a Southern white lady, but that doesn't mean she has any right to racist views. Claiming a defence of "everyone's at least a little bit racist" serves only to detract from the significance of her utterances (and it appears she's a recidivist on this count) - she is a Southern white lady and all the history of subjugation that that entails. I agree that it is shocking to hear African Americans call each other the N-word in jest or affection. It appears like double standards. It doesn't sit well with me, but does confirm how entrenched the generations of discrimination and disenfranchisement are. There is a minor case to be made about the taking back of power by using the word, but I think that's a furphy - some words are just too vile. Calling for people to "move on from what happened in the past" is a position of luxury adopted often by those who have never been oppressed or had generations of their family oppressed by anyone, or by those who are apologists for such colonialism. We're not talking about a bit of name calling and a sticking out of tongues like you did at age 5. This is generations of being subjugated, having your futures determined for you by others purely because of the colour of your skin, this is being told who you can marry, where you can live, where you can shop, when you can go out on the streets, where or whether you can educate your children and for how long and in what courses, for generations. It is the assumption that one group of people is innately superior to another by virtue of a little less melanin. And it's the fact that there is still not equity (not talking about equality here - I'm not sure real equality is ever achievable) between African Americans, Native Americans and others (white, brown, brindle, whatever you choose to call the colour of your skin - and the same applies in other countries too, so don't feel you are being persecuted because you're from the US, it's not much different in Britain or in Australia). I'm not talking about an individual, case-by-case analysis. I'm talking about the entirety of African America or Native America compared to how everyone else fares in health, education and employment (severely under-represented) and the criminal justice system (severely over-represented). It's not that easy to "just get over it". This is generations of mental health issues, generations of general health issues (have you seen the diabetes and heart health statistics for African Americans and Native Americans compared to the rest of the population? Have you seen the morbidity rates?), generations of fighting overt and covert discrimination in education, workplaces and life in general. For many African Americans, waking up and deciding not to let the past determine how you react to the world can be stymied the very second they walk into a store and the clerk behind the counter ignores them in favour of the white lady who walked in after them. They may brush it off as one ignorant clerk being a jerk, leave the store and walk down the street, only to have a mother pull her child protectively out of the way. They go home, walk in the door, and notice a car speeding past, that slows in front of their house, just enough for the young teenager in the front to lean half-way out the window and scream, red-faced and ugly, the N-word before racing off again. Anne Rice, do you not think it's a valid response that people are still polarised by her words? Are you surprised? Do you truly believe she's in danger of having her front door bashed down in the middle of the night, of being dragged half naked and half asleep into the yard, and of being strung up from the nearest tree by people who don't even have the courage of their convictions to show their face? I understand that you were trying to draw an analogy with the comparative anonymity of social media, but your inflammatory language was perhaps a little ill-thought-out.