Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (18 page)

‘Come to my princess party!’ said the invitation from a girl in my daughter’s nursery, next to a vivid illustration of a Sleeping Beauty-style princess in crown and gown. My daughter was delighted, and on the day in question she got me to help her pull on her glittering paste tiara and her miniature nylon balldress sourced from the Disney Shop. When we got to the party we were greeted by the expected sight, a dozen little girls modelling outfits dreamed up from the 1930s onwards for fairy-tale heroines. A scattering of boys in their everyday clothes, navy and grey, hung around the edges. The tea table was decorated with glitter and pink plates and cups, with a few plain blue ones thrown in too so that the boys would have somewhere to sit.

My daughter didn’t join in for a while. ‘She’s feeling a bit shy,’ I explained to one or two other mothers, as she sat on my lap for a while, watching. ‘I wish I had a girl,’ said one. ‘So quiet. Thomas is such a handful.’ Later I heard the same mother in the kitchen, with Thomas clinging to her leg and refusing to speak. ‘He’s like his dad,’ she was saying. ‘Grunts rather than talks when he’s fed up. Honestly, boys …’ At one point the party disintegrated into a fracas. One boy was slow to pass the parcel on. A girl, furious with him, stood up, her tiara askew, and punched him in the face. He screamed and ran from the room and refused to rejoin the game, so the hostess sat him at the tea table while she laid out the cakes. The parents in the kitchen passed judgement on why he wasn’t in the circle. ‘Boys aren’t great at playing
games at this age,’ said one. ‘They just can’t sit still! It’s so much harder for them, I think.’ ‘Boys are just so much younger than girls in many ways,’ said another. At the end the children were handed their party bags, colour coded in pink and blue, with plastic bracelets and hairclips inside for the girls and bouncy balls and plastic spiders for the boys.

Pink girls, blue boys. Princesses, fighters. Shy girls, grunting boys. Good girls, aggressive boys. That’s what we want to see, so that’s what we see. Even if our children so often diverge from expectations, and the princess becomes the puncher or the fighter wants to chat, this hardly seems to dent the strength of the stereotypes. And the assumptions made by parents are often being backed up by stronger gender divisions in the marketing carried out by toy companies. So our children are now growing up to see that the toy cookers on sale at Marks and Spencer are labelled ‘Mummy and Me’, while the toy tools and drills are labelled ‘Daddy and Me’.
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On the website of Boots the chemist you can find all the fascinating products from the Science Museum, including a kit for sending secret messages, in the ‘boys’ toys’ section.
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On another toy shop website, Hiya Kids in Putney, south London, in 2008, the ‘boys’ toys’ page contained various intriguing objects, including a walkie talkie, a metal detector and skittles, while the female section sold only toy kitchens, tea sets, dressing-up clothes, dolls and dolls’ houses.
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One company, Indigo Worldwide, even goes so far as to market one set of magnetic words for little girls learning to read and another for little boys. The girls’ words include ‘heart, love, cooking, friends, angel’, while the boys’ words include ‘money, monster, scary, running’.
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When my daughter was four, I remember taking my first trip to Hamleys toy store in London. There, the floors are absolutely divided; as you rise up the escalator you go into a pink and silver world of Barbies, tutus and fairies. Their catalogue explains: ‘Little princesses deserve nothing but the very best: at
Hamleys we’ve got the finest selection of girls’ toys anywhere! We’ve all the dolls you could dream of and acres of accessories too. There are pony play sets, make-up and beauty boxes and much more to enjoy … In fact, everything a girl could wish for!’
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The website’s bestselling toys for girls were a baby doll, mouse babies, a changing bag and body glitter.
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These play into exactly the kind of femininity described by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949: ‘The little girl cuddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams of being cuddled and dressed up herself; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvellous doll.’
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One of the strongest branding exercises for this generation of little girls has been that of the Disney Princesses. What could be more traditional than this theme, which resurrects those heroines, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Belle, which were first created by Disney up to seventy years ago and which were relaunched as one pastel, smiling sisterhood in 1999? Yet it has taken off like wildfire; sales of Disney Princess products increased from $136 million in 2001 to $1.3 billion in 2003, and to $4 billion in 2007.
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Given its appeal to such an old-fashioned femininity, the surge of this brand’s popularity has taken many by surprise. I had never seen a single one of these Disney Princess films until I had a child myself; although my parents didn’t try to edit Disney out of my life, it was simply the case that children in the 1960s and 1970s, without videos and DVDs, saw fewer feature films. How intensely and vividly, however, this brand has gripped our children. There must be hardly a little girl alive in Britain today who doesn’t have some possession stamped with the brand. If I go into my daughter’s bedroom I will see it on a music box, miniature dolls and medium-size dolls, a wand, a cup, a necklace, crayons and stickers. When I open her dressing-up box, I see the crackly nylon Cinderella dress, and the Snow White dress that is so worn it is falling apart, and the Sleeping Beauty shoes with their little pink heels.

Of course it isn’t a problem that little girls are dreaming of being little mermaids with sweet voices, or of going to the ball in a puff of silver. I wouldn’t want to deny any girl these pleasures – so long as they aren’t all expected to do it, and so long as it isn’t all they are expected to do, and so long as boys are not seen as being contaminated if they so much as pick up a pink wand. Yet right now it is often assumed that boys and girls will play in absolutely distinct styles. For instance in 2003, Mattel launched ello, a pastel-coloured, curvy building range for girls which was to compete with Lego or Duplo, but ‘specifically made for girls’. Mattel’s resident psychologist, Dr Michael Shore, explained why girls needed their own building range: ‘While “building” is generally associated with boys’ play patterns, there are several ways that girls “build”. Girls also “build” stories and characters with their traditional doll play … The ello creation system … stimulates roleplay and storytelling in a way that is relevant to girls.’
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Similarly, there have always been books aimed at girls and books aimed at boys, but these divisions are becoming even more vivid in this generation. Now, if you go into any children’s section of any bookshop you will find shelves and shelves of books aimed solely at little girls, all with pink glittery covers and an emphasis on fairies and kittens, ballet and theatre. Their plot lines are fantastically repetitive, reinforcing over and over again the traditional femininity of their young readers. Here is one typical heroine of one typical fairy book: ‘Evie took off her pyjamas … then she put on the blue sparkly dress and matching knickers – which both fitted her perfectly now that she was fairy-sized herself. There was a mirror on one wall and when she went to look at herself she couldn’t help smiling – she looked so pretty. Now all she had to do was fix her hair.’
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Beside such books, there will be examples of a genre aimed specifically at young boys, which feature scarlet and navy covers and scowling heroes. A leaflet published recently by Leapfrog explained to parents how boys’ and girls’ reading choices would naturally
differ. ‘Let boys be boys and girls be girls’, it urged. It explained that: ‘Boys … Like reading to have a purpose, for example books that show you how to make things or tell you about things. Girls … Enjoy a bit of fantasy, magic and make believe – princesses, castles and so on.’
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I am not saying that there are no differences between boys’ and girls’ preferences, on average, or that what differences there are would entirely disappear if children were given complete freedom in a completely equal world. Whatever parents do, and whatever changes we created in the wider society, it might be that we would never see the boys choosing the dolls and the girls the footballs in precisely equal numbers. But the expectations that we are laying on our children in this generation are failing to allow for their true variability, their true individuality, their true flexibility.

Those parents who find that their children are happy to fall in with these traditional gender divisions often feel no need to question why their daughters’ bedrooms are hung in pink, and their sons’ wardrobes are unrelentingly sludge and navy; why their daughters’ T-shirts proclaim ‘Princess in training’ and their sons’ say ‘100 percent lazy’. But other parents feel very uneasy about the way that our culture is constructing such limited environments for each child, pink or blue according to their gender. Joanna Moorhead is a writer who lives in south London. She has four daughters. It was after the birth of her third, Miranda, she began to question the way that the whole family had supported such a stereotyped view of girls’ upbringing. Because Miranda is a rebel. Given pink dresses to wear, she decided she would prefer jeans; given dolls, she decided footballs suited her better. Instead of fairies and princesses, she decided her heroes were Horrid Henry and George from the Famous Five. She was a classic tomboy, but in a world, her mother thinks, that no longer celebrates tomboys.

‘Miranda has lifted the scales from my eyes,’ Joanna said to
me over a coffee one afternoon. ‘Now, I look back on my older daughters’ early years, and I can’t really believe that I bought into those stereotypes without ever questioning them.’ Joanna gave her older daughters the classic upbringing of our times, full of pink and ballet and dolls. ‘It’s strange that our culture is so insistent that girls should be so girly, even though the opportunities have developed so much for women. You know, I go to work at a newspaper where men and women work together, and I’m usually wearing trousers, and there is no issue about that. We don’t assume as adults that we will have totally different interests and ways of dressing from one another. But for young children, it’s so much more divided. I do think it is led by the market, it’s very commercially driven.’ Joanna cited the gender division you can see in television commercials, which will flash up a vivid pink spectrum of dolls to dress up and cuddle, against the active toys for boys.

Many parents believe that these expectations mark a shift towards more rigid beliefs, away from the freer childhoods which they themselves experienced. For instance, looking back on her own life, Joanna Moorhead believes that a generation ago her tomboy daughter, Miranda, would have found it easier to get through her childhood. ‘I wasn’t a tomboy myself,’ she said, ‘but I just don’t think it was a big issue. There wasn’t all this big pink frilly thing about being a girl then. I grew up with brothers, we shared toys, I had a trainset, I don’t think that being girlish was something all girls had to fit in with in the same way. Boys and girls had the same toys.’

We can see why it might be tricky for a girl like Miranda to find a way through contemporary culture, but it can be equally tricky for boys who do not fit the mould. Fenella is a 42-year-old mother who currently lives in Belgium; I contacted her through the problem pages of a newspaper, to which she had written for advice. She has one son and one daughter. She was brought up by a mother who was influenced by feminism’s second wave
and who took it for granted that children could follow their own preferences without pressure to conform. ‘Apparently I never played with dolls,’ Fenella told me. ‘And my brother was quite feminine in some ways – I mean, he did ballet when he was young, he wore make-up in his teens. He is now an artist, and he always was a bit of a rebel in that way. I think people now often assume that means gay, but he isn’t – he has a female partner now and has always had girlfriends. My mother was very keen to reject stereotypes; she had been brought up in a conventional way herself but she responded to the feminism around her. She wanted us to cross conventional boundaries – she encouraged my brother to do housework and treated us very much the same.’ Before she had children herself, Fenella assumed that this freedom would only have increased for this generation. ‘I honestly didn’t think that anyone would have a problem any more with a girlish boy or a boyish girl. I thought my children would be living in an even freer time than I did in my childhood.’ But she has found the opposite, and for her son, a six-year-old who prefers dolls to cars and ballet to football, the problems are now very real. This is a generation in which many boys are encouraged into a stereotyped masculinity at an early age; for those who resist, life can be uncomfortable.

‘He can’t be accepted for who he is,’ Fenella says sadly. ‘My husband, who isn’t exactly macho himself, says he will be teased at school if he behaves like this, and he reacts with absolute fury when he sees him being girlish, as he sees it. My son desperately wanted an Ariel Barbie so in the end I bought him one and told my husband it was a present from a friend. My son absolutely loved it, but one afternoon my husband cut all its hair off, in an effort to try to make it a more suitable doll for a boy.’ For Fenella, she sees anger at her son’s choices coming partly from her husband, and also from the peer group. ‘My son will spend the morning dressing up one of his teddy bears like a ballerina and when a boy comes to play he’ll show him so
enthusiastically and the boy will say, pink is for girls, and my son is so downcast.’ For a while her son had a group of female friends at school, but then they closed ranks and wouldn’t play with him because he is a boy.