A very pink Christmas

Tis the season to be pink, gentle and nurturing. Or maybe that's aggressive, handy and active?

Once upon a time feminism opened up an exciting new world for girls where we could be free from our perpetual engagement to Ken and grow up to be firefighters, doctors and truck drivers.

But take a stroll through the local Toyworld or department store this Christmas and today's tiny tots are living in a world reminiscent of decades ago.

Garish plastic dolls, miniature kitchens, prams, ironing boards and make-up sets scream out nauseatingly-pink colour-coded expectations from girls' sections. Here Santa's message is clear: Stay at home, make sure you always look gorgeous and breed.

Over in the boys' section, life is starkly different. Days are spent outside of the house, travelling at high speed in a bright red sports car or even a space ship. And in Boys' World it doesn't matter if anything ever breaks because you've always got a handy plastic tool set to fix it.

While society increasingly expects gender balance in the workplace and boasts girls and boys can be anything they want, experts worry about what children will make of the messages they could get under the Christmas tree this year.

How can "girls do anything" if all they've got to practise with is a bright-pink Girls Only Toaster and a Pretty Model make-up kit?

Debate has raged for years about whether girls and boys are naturally inclined towards certain toys or whether their environment, parents and peers pull them towards certain play things.

Much of the research has focused around "Barbie politics" and, when you look how popular she is, it's no wonder. If all Barbies in the world were laid end to end their skinny legs would circumnavigate the globe more than 50 times. In Australia there are more Barbies than people and in America more than three quarters of girls own one.

To some researchers Barbie is feminism's secret weapon. She has had a range of jobs including an executive, a dress designer, and a TV news reporter. She's a trend-setter. After all, Barbie was one of the first female astronauts.

To others Barbie sends confusing messages to girls who are told they can do anything in life while at the same time learning that Barbie's ready-made success is assured by her voluptuous figure and her ability to coordinate her unlimited supply of designer outfits. This camp worries about the messages Barbie may send. Is it any accident that her best-selling outfit remains the wedding costume?

While most modern women grew up relatively liberated despite a childhood spent dressing and undressing Barbie, lecturer at the Otago's Children's Issues Centre Dr Judith Duncan says there is enough evidence now to prove that gender stereotypes are harmful - and possibly more so now for little boys.

All Duncan's five-year-old son wants for Christmas this year is a Care Bear - a soft bear with a heart on its chest. But when he opened the Toyworld Christmas catalogue recently he found his special toy in the section of the pamphlet called "Girlzone".

"He said I should write a letter of complaint because he thought that wasn't on," says Duncan. "For him it signals that it is an unacceptable toy for him. He said 'it's unfair, Care Bears are for everybody'."

By closing off options for boys and girls through gender stereotypes, Duncan argues that children are not able to develop to their full potential.

But for Toyworld buyer Paul Hodgkiss of Associated Retailers, Toyworld's "Boyzone" and "Girlzone" labelling is all about convenience, and is driven by parents trying to pick the right toy.

"Basically what I look at is, are there going to be more girls buying this than boys? It's nothing more scientific than that."

It's no surprise then that one of Toyworld's top sellers this year - a robot called Robosapien - is bought almost exclusively for boys. It is advertised in "Boyzone".

Says Duncan: "They may say that's consumer driven, but if that's all you're being fed then that's the only way you are going to shop."

To test what direction feminism, and indeed boys' rights, was heading, we took director of Victoria University women's studies department Alison Laurie shopping at Toyworld last week.

In the more explicit girls and boys areas she pointed out almost universal gender stereotyping with construction sets, cars and trucks modelled by boys and fathers on the boxes and toys to do with homely functions such as doing the laundry, or the kitchen modelled by girls and mothers.

Laurie has heard the arguments from parents before. "One mother said she thought it was all genetic because her boy just loved trucks from the minute he could crawl. Of course they themselves are very modern and progressive people and say it's just what the children want. Well, there is interesting research on how we gender-train children."

She cites an Otago University study that put identically dressed babies in a room and asked adults to play with them, and found that the babies presented to adults as boys were given cars and trucks to play with and the babies presented to them as girls given dolls. The "boys", in fact were a mix of both sexes, as were the girls.

Though she is impressed with the range of unisex toys for sale in Activity and other "zones" at Toyworld, what strikes Laurie is how different the world of Boyzone and Girlzone is from real life where women have jobs and drive cars and men help to raise children.

"Now we have All Blacks experimenting with make-up. Why can't we have those things for boys?"

Research from the University of Texas suggests there may be a scientific basis for the belief that children are wired to like certain toys.

Psychologist Gerianne Alexander gave vervet monkeys a range of toys to play with and found the males chose balls and cars, and female monkeys played more with the dolls.

Alexander suggested males had evolved a preference for objects that move and females preferred nurturing. But when the Herald on Sunday asked a class of seven and eight-year-old pupils whether there was any difference between boys toys and girls toys they rejected it out of hand.

No, they said, they're the same. What about dolls? Boys and girls both like them, they say. Though they did list boy-appropriate dolls as teddies, male Bratz dolls, and action man. Did the group think that girls' toys and boys' toys should be separated in the shop? No, they insisted, because boys might like some of the toys in the girls' section.

Duncan is not surprised with their responses. But, she says, fast forward another three or four years and the stereotypes are much more entrenched, and even more so for boys.

To an extent, feminism has made it much more acceptable for girls to play with robots, cars and action computer games, but the rules are more rigid for boys who can be labelled gay, or a sissy if they step out of line. And that's precisely why Duncan says older boys will be reluctant to cross that line, possibly to their detriment later on.

"You walk down the aisles in the toy shop and you're blitzed by pink. What boy in his right mind is going to be caught in there?"

- HERALD ON SUNDAY