Not So Pretty in Pink: Are Girls’ Toys Too Girly?

Time: Not So Pretty in Pink: Are Girls' Toys Too Girly?

Twin sisters Abi and Emma Moore noticed a few years ago how different their south London houses looked as Abi's started filling up with her sons' toy dinosaurs and trains and Emma's turned pink and girly with her daughters' playthings. Already frustrated by the barrage of pretty princesses and sparkly fairies marketed to girls, Emma says she reached a breaking point when she watched her daughter open a huge haul of presents at her sixth birthday party. Out of 40 gifts, Emma recalls, only three were items not designed solely for girls — two games and a set of colored pencils. Much of the rest, including several Barbies and a play-makeup set, ended up at a local charity shop, but the shock Emma felt stayed with her.

Not long afterward, she felt compelled to do something about it. In 2008, she and Abi, both 38, started an advocacy group called Pinkstinks, which they hope will spark a shift in a popular culture that they say puts girls "into a pretty little box" from birth, offering them toys that emphasize the importance of looking good and being feminine, while the boys are allowed to go exploring and get dirty. The sisters have launched campaigns to pressure retailers to move away from such stereotypes, like their recent effort to help persuade the British supermarket chain Sainsbury's to repackage a doctor costume that was labeled for boys and a nurse's outfit labeled for girls.

The list of products that pigeonhole girls in the clothes and makeup category goes on and on. Disney sells pink vanity tables for girls as young as 3, for example, and the European retailer Primark stocks a T-shirt in a 2-year-old size that's emblazoned with the motto "S is for Super, Shopaholic, Soon-to-be-Supermodel." Even old classics now offer girls' versions, such as an all-pink Monopoly game in which the houses and hotels have been replaced by boutiques and malls, and a "Designer's Edition" Scrabble that has letters on the front of the box spelling out fashion. It wasn't always this way. A couple of decades ago, children's clothing mostly came in primary colors and princesses were confined to the occasional film or Halloween costume. But as marketing to children has burgeoned into a multibillion-dollar industry, and our consumerist ethos has saddled kids with mountains of stuff, the gender divide has grown wider. …

The first thing that hit me in this story was 40 gifts for a six year old! Holy cow! But the proliferation of pink everything is something else I've noticed as well. Some time back I remember reading that as more women have had more financial independence we have seen an accentuation of what has been considered feminine consumerism, not a melding toward men and women purchasing similar goods. So is this "everything pink" for girls just an extension of that?