I am a girl and my favorite toys as a small child were cars. Generalization is fine when speaking, well, generally, but I'm glad I was able to grow up at a time when someone didn't take the cars from me and stuff a doll in my hand.

Boys are girls are different, yes, but those differences exist on a behavorial spectrum. For every parent who wants their daughter to play with guns, we have two or three who will slam down any boy who wants an Easy-Bake oven on the grounds that their son won't be a sissy.

I have a 5 year old daughter. She has access to legos, and dolls as well as an assortment of nerf guns. She loves to build, to shoot, and beyond all loves her dolls. I am expecting a boy shortly and I am sure he will have a favorite stuffed animal but I am sure his preference will be for trains or the guns. Boys and girls are different and not just by virtue of their genitalia why bother pretending otherwise?

I remember as a young child my neighbors (2 girls) put on "capes" (really just some old blankets) and pretended to be princesses. I put on the old blanket as a "cape" so that I could fly like superman. Lucky for me there were no tall buildings in our neighborhood; just the old dog house to jump off.

" and (oddly) zebras." Not that oddly, I'd suspect one of two things, either has watched Madagascar or like 10% of the male population he may be partially color blind.
To a color blind kid, most other animals look boring.

I was brought up with 3 boys, one older, 2 younger, and while I was quite the tomboy, I did have dolls and many fond memories of mothering them along with my and my brothers' stuffed animals. We had a coupla boatloads of toys and I also remember my brothers taking their GI Joes and making them "date" my Barbie dolls. I also remember them pulling my Barbies apart once, on a long boring car trip to Maine!

That said, I have 2 girls, and while they had a plethora of stuffed toys and dolls, they both at one time or another asked for a firetruck, a Barbie doll PT Cruiser, and a couple other cars (as well as a couple of dragons). Which they received. If a kid asks for something and you can provide it, why not? What does it matter what gender they are, if they want a certain toy? Shouldn't matter.

Also, let's allow the kids to grow and change. My older daughter wouldn't put down her dollies as a wee one and now won't stop taking things apart to see how they work. Meanwhile, younger daughter who wouldn't play with anything but her trucks is now the girliest girl who ever girled.

My four-year-old daughter is WAY into all of the princess crap, but she likes trains and legos, too. Her legos have a lot of pink and purple, though. She typically wants to build either a princess castle or a horse stable. Santa is bringing her one of those wooden Thomas the Train sets this year, because that's the first thing she runs to play with when we go to the neighborhood toy store. I might get her one of those pink nerf bow-and-arrow sets, too.

She mostly wants to wear pink and purple and sparkles and pouffy things, and regularly tries to convince me that she should wear either her princess dresses or her fancy (expensive) church and party dresses when we're just out and about.

I think all of the "Disney Princess" stuff is ugly and cheap looking, though. It also seems like Barbie clothes are crappier than they were 20 years ago. (Also, is it just me, or is Ken a little effete now?)

Kind of an interesting article, and the comments were great fun, at least half of them being Serious Indignant Observations from Serious Indignant People.

Here's what I was having a little trouble with, though. Some of those commenters seemed to complain that the toys were somehow deliberately divided into boy toys and girl toys. Maybe it's some kind of UK thing. Out here, it seems like the toys are arranged categorically: stuffed animals, dollies, trucks, blocks, etc.

Of my three daughters, I only remember only the youngest being particularly enamored of dolls, and only for a while. Now she's more interested in practising her violin. Her eldest sister was entranced by pictures of women in wedding dresses when she was younger, while the one in the middle usually wanted nothing more than a Border's gift card for her birthday.

"What does it matter what gender they are, if they want a certain toy? Shouldn't matter."

Plenty of room in the world for individual variation. Just keep in mind that the existence of outliers does not invalidate the principle of averages.

@AHW: Also, is it just me, or is Ken a little effete now?

Ken never was all that manly-looking, but I suspect he's designed to be unthreateningly cute, like a singer in a boy band. Would the children who play with Barbie want a tough, G.I. Joe type of boyfriend for her to date?

Sure, boys and girls are different, but that won't keep Those Who Know Best from suppressing any ideas boys might have about leadership or individuality. Public schools are already well on the way to graduating legions of incompetent people.

Dr. Leonard Sax has a few good books on the subject: "Why Gender Matters," "Boys Adrift," and "Girls on the Edge." He gives pretty great lectures (based on science and research) on the differences between boys and girls as it relates to their learning and development. Our local preschool has adopted some of his ideas and the kids are responding positively, it's been neat to see.

I recall reading some article years ago by a woman whose parents had used her childhood as an experiment in gender neutrality. (I forgot who it was.) What they did was dress her up and cut her hair like a boy and only gave her "boy" toys to play with. From what I could tell from the article, they were not being gender neutral. They were trying to turn her into a boy. To what end, I don't know.

Yes and no. Most girls are gonna gravitate towards princesses, most boys to cars. But some of each aren't, and I think it's not a bad thing to take some of the shame away. In fact, most kids I knew growing up played mostly with toys of their own gender, but had one or two beloved opposite-gender toys.

RPM, the bigger problem was there were NEVER enough Kens to go around, so he was busy. I'm buying a Ken for every Barbie if my kid is into Barbie, so as to avoid the problem. Stuffed animals had to stand in for male characters when I reinacted Narnia or whatever. As to GI Joe, his body was hot but his face was not handsome, he often had an ugly grimace. But with a nicer face and Prince clothes, yeah, sure... I'd love to see a buff knight doll.

A little girl goes to see Santa Claus at the local shopping mall. When she arrives and sits down on Santa's lap Santa asks "What do you want for Christmas little girl?".

"I want a Barbie and a GI Joe" says the little girl.

"But Barbie comes with Ken" Santa says,

"No, Barbie fakes it with Ken. She only 'cums' with GI Joe!"

=============================================

There will always be exceptions to the rules. The 95% though will be generally in the center. Just like the little boys that are competitive and little girls want to have a tea party. But it is not engraved in stone.

Yes, there will always be exceptions to the rules, and I'm not surprised that there are more than a few here. But Jim P. is right on the 95 percent.

And now, back to the pain and suffering that is a second deadline day in a single week. Must people really celebrate Christmas and move their newspaper deadlines to do it?

I am a girl and my favorite toys as a small child were cars. Generalization is fine when speaking, well, generally, but I'm glad I was able to grow up at a time when someone didn't take the cars from me and stuff a doll in my hand.

Boys are girls are different, yes, but those differences exist on a behavorial spectrum. For every parent who wants their daughter to play with guns, we have two or three who will slam down any boy who wants an Easy-Bake oven on the grounds that their son won't be a sissy.

Posted by: Astra at December 20, 2013 6:32 AM
____________________________________

Regarding when you grew up (are you post-1965, aka Gen X?), hear, hear. I am Gen X and glad of it. I once made a list of various benefits of being young enough to have avoided the mores of the 1950s and earlier and also being old enough to have avoided the childhood/teenage mores of the last 20 years or so. I don't have the list at the moment, but I'd say two things I'm very glad to be old enough to have avoided are 1) the near-complete lack of a right to social privacy and modesty and the cyberbullying that comes with that lack, and 2) the Disneyfying of everything, as described in the 2012 nonfiction bestseller, "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture." (Interestingly, in 1997, SNL gave a sign of what was to come in the parody commercial: "Chess for Girls." You can see it here: https://www.google.com/#q=%22chess+for+girls%22 )

And regarding the parents who support the old stereotypes, I think what a lot of parents and pundits are forgetting is that what really matters is life SKILLS, not to mention a decent work ethic that does not include always paying someone else to do x, y, or z. This can't be created by allowing kids to wallow only in the games and hobbies that they enjoy most, even when the game happens to be non-stereotypical.

From Planned Parenthood executive Sheri S. Tepper:

"If you have a son, he should know how to cook, mend, wash and iron his clothes, shop for groceries and plan decent meals. If you have a daughter, she should know how to maintain a car, change a tire, make household repairs, and manage a budget."

(She went on to say that we all have the same needs and no able-bodied person should have to lean on someone else to fulfill those needs. Not verbatim: "If you insist on giving your daughter a doll and your son a truck, you don't get the idea.")

There will always be exceptions to the rules. The 95% though will be generally in the center.

But Jim P. is right on the 95 percent.

I don't think you and Jim were trying to be quantitative here but 95% sounds much more steeply distributed than any evidence I've seen about certain character traits as a function of gender. 95% probability is already 2 sigma from the mean in a Gaussian distribution. Hell, in the medical fields, that's enough for a publishable deviation.

(Not typically in astronomy, where 3 sigma is usually the publishable minimum, though I did sadly see someone rush out a 2 sigma result about winds on the surface of an extrasolar planet in a bid to be the "first" to detect extra-solar weather.)

I don't think you and Jim were trying to be quantitative here but 95% sounds much more steeply distributed than any evidence I've seen about certain character traits as a function of gender. -- Astra at December 20, 2013 11:20 AM

Let me rephrase it as the typical bell curve is going to include a few strange behaviors by both girls and boys. But those behaviors are going to be close enough to the norm that it probably going to be acceptable without much comment.

As in the first boy after two sisters and a divorced mother playing with the E-Z Bake oven is normal. The only child of two married parents may get a comment about the E-Z Bake oven. But is he seeing his SAHM baking cakes regularly while dad is doing 60+ hours at work?

Same with the daughter of single dad and two older brothers doing yard work. But if a two parent family, single child and a SAHD is it out of the norm?

There was an annoying christian ad on a few years back about seeing parents fighting. What do the kids grow up to do?

As you admit -- you are an astronomy technologist is an out there for a woman. A co-worker has a FWB that is a nuclear chemist, enjoys sci-fi (knows ST better than him), is very attractive, and they met online gaming the Star Wars universe. Us guys at work didn't believe his fortune until we saw pictures of them together.

Quantifying the bell curve as a percentage is a bad, but easy way to do it. I think Amy and I are both guilty of it. But do you want John Q. Public to get the point, or do want them to have to go to college and/or do research to get the general idea we're trying to convey.

And Radwaste is also guilty of this on occasion as well.

Girls play with dolls and practice being MAWWIED right from the git-go. It's no wonder young men grow up utterly clueless about dating.

100 years ago Saki nailed this. It's still worht reading
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.shtml

What a load of rubbish. I'm a woman. As a child, I loved a mixture of toys including Star Wars figures (which belonged to my brother), farm animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs and sometimes even toy trucks and trains. (Thomas the Tank Engine was my favourite TV program when I was really little.) That doesn't mean that I didn't like to play with girly toys because I loved playing with My Little Pony, Keepers and a dolls house, minus the dolls (the SW figures took their place...).

But I always despised dolls, never really liked playing with Sindy dolls or Barbie and the toys I hated most were anything to do with prams, pushchairs and dolls which imitated babies and toddlers.

I have seen articles where girls get bullied for liking Star Wars at school and it is unacceptable. The really sad thing though is that girls probably have more freedom than boys when it comes to choosing which toys to play with because of gender stereotyping.

"But do you want John Q. Public to get the point, or do want them to have to go to college and/or do research to get the general idea we're trying to convey.

And Radwaste is also guilty of this on occasion as well."

Not sure what you mean by this. What I want, generally, is for an American with a vote to understand what the hell they're doing before they claim to be an authority and direct public funding.

Are you actually saying that someone should accept an idea without looking anything up?

I'm genuinely sorry for those who think their opinion trumps physical laws, or a natural principle like cause/effect -- or, even a law, which they could have looked up with a minimum of effort. You know this about gun laws.

Are you actually saying that someone should accept an idea without looking anything up? -- Radwaste at December 22, 2013 1:37 PM

My apologies. It was an unjustified rag from prior comments you have made about getting the in-depth details of radioactive exposure compared to general concept that radioactive exposure is considered bad.

YOU'RE ALL WRONG, ALL OF YOU.

THOSE THAT WANT GENDER NEUTRAL SECTIONS, THOSE THAT WANT BOY SECTIONS AND GIRL SECTIONS.

YOU'RE WRONG AND YOU'RE WAY BEHIND THE CURVE.

The new fight is for Fat Barbie:

http://www.uproxx.com/webculture/2013/12/heres-2-year-old-fat-barbie-photoshop-people-freaking-facebook/

Until parents are buying their children, boys and girls plus sized dolls then we as society are still involved in the fat shaming, oppressive, erasing hegemony of slim.

Come on people, let's get with the program.

(apologies for linking to uproxx)