In his piece over at Acculturated, Jonathan V. Last says he believes that one of the incongruities in our culture is that “polite society currently insists that you are ‘born this way’ if you are homosexual or misgendered. But when it comes to boys who like to play with swords and build fighter jets? For some reason, this is viewed as a societal construct that should be eradicated so that they’ll want to play with dolls.”
Most parents will tell you that boys do not play with dolls. Give a boy a doll and he’ll want to blow it up. Give a girl a GI Joe and he’ll become her Barbie doll’s boyfriend. Boys and girls are different.
So now to Last’s article:
Christina Hoff Sommers—who literally wrote the book on the war on boys—notes that there’s a movement afoot to de-gender toys. Target has pulled the “boys” and “girls” labeling from their toy aisles. The White House recently hosted a “summit” on the perils of gender-specific toys. Time proclaims that “the next generation of kids will play with gender neutral toys.”
This is crazy on two counts. First, the kind of people who obsess about gender-neutral toys don’t, as a demographic fact, have many children. In America these days, childbearing tends to be the counter-cultural province of people who aren’t social justice warriors.
Second, even if you give kids gender neutral toys, they’ll gender the heck out of them on their own. Trust me, I know.
