This greatly simplifies gift giving.
I wish I’d seen it last week — I’m going to have to return a few items now.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This greatly simplifies gift giving.
I wish I’d seen it last week — I’m going to have to return a few items now.
Girlfriend showed this to me. I laughed.
Great. What about legos?
They’re both!!
Variation on the theme…as a teacher, often the staff room chatter would be interrupted by another staff with a request…”anyone got a few strong boys to spare to set up chairs in the gym?” A vocal, 1980’s, strongly feminist voice would inevitably pipe up with, “Oh, and will that require a penis?”
Looks at my shopping list. Looks at graph. Looks at shopping list….
Operate WITH your genitals, or operates ON your genitals?
Could use an extra branch indicating that if it’s a useless piece of plastic manufactured via sketchy labor practices and likely to be discarded within a month, it probably shouldn’t be purchased for any gender. Otherwise, agreed.
The TV station we watch for local(ish) news has a yearly Toy Mountain campaign (run with the Salvation Army blech), and it always drives me crazy to see the donated gifts separated into girls’ and boys’. Especially since the girls’ toys are filled with pink, dolls, stuffed animals, and blow dryers, while the boys get challenging toys, games, and sports equipment.
They’re both operated by ones genitalia and not operated by ones genitalia? I suppose that’s true; you could build a dinosaur, or you could build a sex toy.
Though, I’d imagine a lego sex toy would be bloody painful (literally, in some cases).
Nah.
Kind of annoying to clean though.
(I was a resourceful teenager. >.>)
Eeeeeewwwww, PZ! They won’t let you return those once the package is opened!
Thinking about it, that red circle should probably say, “This toy is for neither girls nor boys” for the sake of consistency.
The yellow circle should say “It is for both boys and girls”, that ‘either’ sort of makes one think that it could still be for either one but not both.
@rq:
I like recaptioning the bottom-right to say:
You’re right that it still admits the possibility of being a one-or-the-other toy, but with the stress on is and the emphasis on repeating the original language, it teaches them to hear the phrase itself differently.
right now, I don’t know if the flow chart causes readers to rethink the original question – it might cause them to rethink the original intent, but do they realize the question might originally have meant, “Is this toy for children?” if they had been less gender-obsessed? I’m not so sure.
Thus, the “yes” at the beginning: you realize you’re getting an answer to the original question. For the same reason, I think there should be a “No.” at the beginning of the text in the red circle.
Finally, I think the yellow circle should be at the top, and a green circle at lower-right.
It’s, “Caution, let’s think about this…” “Stop, don’t go there” and “Sure, make/get/buy this toy for a child”.
Obligatory child rearing story:
As a three year old my daughter’s favorite colour was black. She even wanted to have her room painted black in the house we were building. Then she started kinder. Less than a month later her favourite colour switched to pink. Sigh.
Cue Dad speech #27:
“Darling, you can choose any colour you like to be your favourite, that’s your decision to make. But it doesn’t have to be pink, right?”
“Yes Dad, I know! [six year old eye roll] “How many times are you going to tell me?”
“As many as it takes honey, as many as it takes.”
For a while her favourite colour was “rainbow”, and now it’s “Pink, Purple, Green and Blue.” :)
To be completely safe, this rule should also be applied to toys you operate with someone else’s genitalia.
Ibis3@7: Does the donor get to tell them which pile it’s supposed to go on? I know they never want wrapped toys (probably a good idea), but I can imagine bringing a “boy” toy to them, with a giant GIRL TOY label taped on it.
This requesting teacher isn’t named Sandusky by any chance, is he?
Donating pink legos or sports equipment might present them with some difficulties. :P
Ah. Well it is rather disconcerting to find your baby has crawled into your room and is examining your vibrator.
This is pleasantly pithy, but in being so, the image conflates genital configuration and gender, reinforcing (I’m assuming unintentionally) various cultural tropes that delegitimize the identities/bodies of transgender, intersex, and genderqueer people. The gender binary – and its biologically-essentialized version as the sex binary – is not a sufficient framework to describe how people actually are, and its continued insistence marginalizes and otherwise harms people who don’t fit ‘correctly’.
(I’ll leave discussion of the cultural erasure of infant and juvenile sexuality for another time.)
John Horstman #20:
I thought so too.
I was chatting to another dad at a birthday party only yesterday about how glad we were that some toy vacuum cleaners and brushes, and the little toy kitchen from IKEA, are sold in non-gendered packaging and without “traditional” boy/girl colour schemes. Both of our 2 year old sons love those toys – the kitchen has been my boy’s favourite for ages. (I also know quite a few parents of girls who would completely symapthise with FossilFishy @14)