I'm not saying that I don't believe there is a problem. Colour coding toys according to gender, implying that there are things only girls or boys should play with is a terrible thing to do and it has made me question whether I fell for it. My daughter liked to play with Barbies, she had a shed with a cooker and play food and she made us pretend dinners with her imaginary friends, she liked stories and acting out Disney fairy tales. I tried to interest her in numbers and nature and experiments but she preferred books and singing. Then my son was born and he loved numbers, when I tried to read to him he was more interested in working out how many pages we'd read and how many more there were to go. He measured things and wanted to make the volcanoes with baking powder and vinegar that I had been unable to interest my daughter in it. He showed me diggers and fire engines that I'd never noticed before. Did I unconsciously instill these gender stereotypes into them? I have no idea. I think they made their own choices although my son was probably more rounded because he had his sister's 'girl' toys to play with. He liked to play with the Barbies and the cooking stuff in the shed but maybe my daughter missed out. She did have a car, which she washed when the Long Suffering Husband washed his.
I would be horrified to think that somehow I was conned into pushing my daughter into an 'arts' career and my son into a 'science' one because of the toys I gave them. I remember a discussion with one of my daughter's friend's mums when she was about 3 about how she wouldn't allow her daughter to have a Barbie. At the time, I thought that it was just a doll with impossibly small feet and big head but as I'm not still in touch with them I can't tell you if this little girl grew up to be a Civil Engineer instead of having a career in the 'Arts' (although as both her mother and father were artists I'd be surprised).
So, I agree with the campaign to let toys be toys and I don't think they should be colour coded but I wish everyone would give pink a break. It's not pink's fault that we STILL live in a sexist world.
Instead of saying that pink is bad, we should be embracing the colour, we should allow boys to wear it in fact, we should actively encourage it. When my son was a baby he had a set of bright baby-grows, that I had chosen because as soon as my daughter had been able to express a preference she quite clearly preferred bright colours and I thought it was a shame that we dress babies in such wishy-washy colours, when they would much prefer to look bright and snazzy. One of the baby grows was bright fuchsia pink and it was my favourite. It really suited him. However, one day I was really told off by an old lady for dressing my boy in pink. "You'll turn him," she told me, "Scar him for life. He'll not know if he's Arthur or Martha." I think she was wrong as he has no questions about what gender he is.
It hasn't always been this way. All babies used to be dressed in white and when colours were first introduced at the turn of the century the convention was that boys should wear pink and girls looked better in blue. It was only in the 1940's that pink for girls was established. It fell out of favour in the 60s and 70s, but came back in when parents were able to determine the sex of their child with a scan. But it hasn't happened universally. All that has happened is that parents are frightened to dress their boys in pink; girls wear blue all the time.
Again, I am wondering what is so scary about women. Why are men so terrified to be associated with feminine things? Women can quite happily confess to wanting to learn to build a brick wall, wear DM boots and trousers or watching boxing on the TV but men would rather die than admit to enjoying a spot of cross stitch, cake decorating or flower arranging. They baulk at the very idea of wearing make up or a skirt.
It has become clear, recently, (you only have to look at Twitter) that a lot of men hate women and the very idea of becoming like a woman is abhorrent. The men in Nigeria have just proved what they fear most - a girl with a book. We are so fortunate in this country that much of the battle has been won and that our daughters are safe from abduction, rape and being sold into slavery while at school but to win true equality the men need to know that they are missing out by avoiding pink. When they realise that and embrace all the colours in the spectrum they may be able to stop hating women.
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