Guys and Dolls

Color is key in marketing children’s toys, before young boys and girls can talk or read they are keenly aware and consistently bombarded with visual advertising. While stores are becoming more sensitive to the gendered nature of the toys they sell, the clear divide between pink and blue centric isles is astonishing. Specifically, Target seemed to more heavily rely on the use of these binary colors (pink and blue)  in toys targeted to younger children. Visual persuasion and gendered color assignment seem to occur in toys marketed to children who cannot yet read, and as they grow, toys more subtly hint at a gendered audience through shapes, print/ descriptions, and touches of pink or blue mixed with other colors. Toys geared toward boys tended to have more sharp edges and descriptions which include the words ‘super’, ‘action’, or ‘hero’; toys geared toward girls tended to have round edges, in both the toy’s makeup and the lettering of its description, and often include the words ‘baby’, ‘love’, or ‘doll’.  

The most unrest I felt when looking at these segregated toy groupings occurred after I saw a pink Melissa & Doug Feeding set—including bottles and a bib—decorated with butterflies, hearts, and a curly script across the bottom which read “Mine to Love”. Targeting this doll feeding set to young girls is potentially problematic because it implies the responsibility of caring for and being affectionate toward a child is decidedly individual and female, “Mine to Love” well, “Her’s to Love”. This example not only plants a marketed pressure for increased responsibility and affection on girls at an early age, but also seems to wrongly imply that the boundary of loving, sensitive, nurturing behavior is one not to be crossed by boys. While this may seem like a harmless way to sell doll accessories, it is only one poor example in a sea of questionable marketing choices. Toys are stepping stones through which children imagine and discover their society, it seems we are limiting young boys and girls with the very artifacts that could and should be used as incredibly influential teaching tools.