Let Toys Be Toys!

Remember when your brother's friends wouldn't let you play with them and their toy cars?  Or when you couldn't play with your brother's gameboy because it was "for boys only"?  Or how about the look of disgust on a neighbor boy's face when you asked if he wanted to play with your dolls as he said "thats for giiiiiirls"?  I do.  Here, we see the how advertising affects young children by classifying toys into two separate categories--pretty, delicate, and girly for girls, and rough, exciting, and bold for boys.  Even at this young age, we see how advertising is blatantly forcing boys and girls to separate, and interact in different ways because of the differences in their toys.  This often leads to the Mean Girls-esque mentality of exclusion outside the group (in this case, gender), reminding me of this little tidbit: 

HOWEVER, (cue valiant day-saving music) a new movement targeting these kinds of advertising has begun! Let Toys Be Toys is an organization that's targeting this exact thing to put an end to it--and it has already had some mild success.  Already, Toys R Us's in the UK have pledged to stop labelling and separating their toys by gender.  AND, the organization has recently become popular on social media sites like Twitter.  

What does this mean?  Well it'll take some work for parents to abandon the idea that dolls can be for boys too, just like cars can be for girls; pink and purple doesn't = GIRL just like blue and red don't = BOY.  

And just what sort of effect will this have on the children?  Well, they might, oh I dunno, maybe NOT be forced to segregate themselves because of their different toys, not be ashamed to play with different things, and *gasp* PLAY TOGETHER?? WHAAT? 

On a related note, here's a great advertisement that the Let Toys be Toys Twitter account posted a few days ago.  You'd be hard pressed to find anything like this today, but hopefully with the LTbT organization, we can see more of these.