The BBC produced a video testing the theory that society stereotypes boys and girls. They dressed a boy up as a girl and a girl up as a boy and then threw in an ignorant children’s worker in the room to play with the babies. Naturally the workers give the “boy” a “boy” toy and vice versa and then the BBC chided them for perpetuating gender stereotypes.
It’s simple and stupid and wrong.
Are you sure you don’t gender-stereotype children?#NoMoreBoysAndGirls pic.twitter.com/iThZ2P6REW
— BBC (@BBC) July 28, 2018
First, children are not gender neutral and no amount of attempt at cultural change will make them so. No matter how hard toy companies and gender-neutral advocates try to make children abandon the toys they are drawn to, girls will still take a stuffed animal and tuck it into a carriage with a blanket and a bottle. Boys will still prop that same animal up on a chair so they can “shoot” it down with a Nerf gun. Lego tried to apply the ideas of gender-neutral toys and simply found that while boys want Star Wars sets, girls still want veterinarian offices and cafes. They still sell both types of sets well despite failing to satisfy the gender-neutral mob (yay, capitalism).
I have four children: two boys and two girls. I basically stopped buying toys after the second child, a girl, was born, so we had plenty of “boy,” “girl,” and neutral toys (for example, blocks). Without fail, my girls have been drawn to things that require fine motor skills (like drawing) and dolls, while the boys want to do things that require their larger muscles and spatial awareness, like building forts and stage “Civil War battles.”
The bigger problem here, in addition to the odd desire adults have to tell children how to play, is the strange movement to eradicate gender differences altogether, to encourage society to enjoy an androgynous society (while making the children go first, while they’re at it). Notice the BBC’s tweet includes a hashtag “No More Boys and Girls.” What?
First, the BBC and others like it who are determined to eradicate the proven concept that boys and girls like “gendered” toys, they should ask, “what’s wrong with gender differences?” This recent study showed gender isn’t actually a social construct, but rather an innate fact. Not only that, but it’s actually a good thing, not a problem. In her “Factual Feminist” video about this topic, Christina Hoff Sommers noted, “Ignoring genuine differences between boys and girls is just as misguided as creating them where none exist.”
Gender differences should be celebrated. As for which toys girls play with and which toys boys play with — who cares? Adults forcing this issue may come to regret it. A world without gender differences might sound progressive, but it won’t be nearly as productive or unique.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
