Events | 2009.12.18
Letters: Tales the toy industry tells us
Gender stereotyping and aggressive marketing in the toy industry goes back a long way ( The power of pink , 12 December). In the 1700s the electress of Hanover gave her three daughters a large toy kitchen furnished with all the gadgets to mirror the kitchen in their palace. Her intention was that by playing with the toy kitchen they would learn how to run a home. Frank Hornby patented Meccano in 1901 specifically to introduce boys to engineering and mechanics. This he did very successfully through Meccano, Dinky Cars, the Hornby Railway system and a young engineers club. Due to limits in technology, the colouring of these and numerous other toys was limited.
The abundance of pink is relatively new to gender enforcement of toys and is a result of developments in plastics in the last 20 years or so. It is now easy and cheap to produce pink plastic in vast quantities. Consequently, toys can be mass produced in enormous quantities, usually by large conglomerate companies.
A successful toy company will always target its merchandise at children and parents/relations – the younger to nag the older to believe that what they are buying is of value to the learning and development of their offspring. In 1815 Maria Edgeworth bemoaned the rise of the commercial toy shop. She believed that children should be left to improvise and play with anything they found. She thought that by buying and giving a toy to a child, the adult was imbuing it with the message that it had to be liked and played with whether the child wanted to or not.
As it has been impossible to change the minds of those in charge of toy production and sales, the efforts of PinkStinks are to be congratulated.
Author of The History of Toys
• If pink is so powerful, I wonder why, as a teacher, I am surrounded by lots of wonderful students who are far less likely to be sexist than previous generations? Maybe it is because our attitudes towards gender are not so much based on what we consume, and even less on what we wear, but rather how we are socialised by much wider social forces than the colour of toys and clothes. Maybe the negative responses to such campaigns as PinkStinks are partly due to many of us realising that what kids dress up in is just not that important.
Peter Bolam
St Clement, Jersey
• I\'d like to know which shops Phil Cohen ( Letters , 15 December) is buying kids\' clothes from – in the ones I visit, the boys\' clothes are all pale blue and beige, whereas the girls have the bright colours (including pink). And no, I can\'t get girls\' clothes for my grandsons because of all the frills, lacy edges and embroidered butterflies.
Jocelyn Rose
Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway
• What a relief to see the Present Sense movement growing ( Report , 12 December). When I go into the home of young children I am saddened by the mountain of plastic toys littering the place – destined to harrass parents trying to keep the place tidy, to distress the children who are continually losing bits, and the planet by sitting around for ever in landfill! My daughter has considered trying to get a movement such as Present Sense off the ground among friends in her town. A good way to spread the idea would be to put a little acronym at the foot of any party invitation, just above "RSVP" – perhaps "GGW" (green gift welcomed) or "PSW" (Present Sense welcomed).
Eileen Peck
Thundersley, Essex
• The rereleased Red Shoes is even better than Peter Bradshaw says ( Review , Film & Music, 11 December). Moira Shearer\'s coronet-tiara is no "quaint" or "camp" stylistic oddity from the 1940s. It was just as unlikely as party wear then. It is a device that colours the otherwise "real" story that frames the eponymous fairytale ballet as itself a fairytale. As Vicky Page (note too her aristo family but every girl name) she indeed wears it twice: at the audience\'s first sight of her, and then on her long, lonely, unreal ascent of the creepy, fantastical, ruined and weed-covered castle stairway to the meeting with the beast/magician/tempter Lermentov and her eventual doom. It identifies her as fairytale heroine with cinematic brilliance and subtlety.
James Alexander
Northampton
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2[...]19/toy-industry-pink-red-shoes
