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Hey liberal faggots! You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can't Make Him Play With It.

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We Do Not Like Faggots

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Dec 25, 2012, 8:41:23 PM12/25/12
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CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS - Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A revised edition
of her book The War Against Boys will be published next summer.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/you-can-give-a-
boy-a-doll-but-you-cant-make-him-play-with-
it/265977/?google_editors_picks=true

The logistical and ethical problems with trying to make toys
gender-neutral.

Is it discriminatory and degrading for toy catalogs to show
girls playing with tea sets and boys with Nerf guns? A Swedish
regulatory group says yes. The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has
reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys"R"Us and one of the
largest toy companies in Northern Europe, for its "outdated"
advertisements and has pressured it to mend its "narrow-minded"
ways. After receiving "training and guidance" from RO equity
experts, Top-Toy introduced gender neutrality in its 2012
Christmas catalogue. The catalog shows little boys playing with
a Barbie Dream House and girls with guns and gory action
figures. As its marketing director explains, "For several years,
we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the
Swedish market that we have had to adjust."

Swedes can be remarkably thorough in their pursuit of gender
parity. A few years ago, a feminist political party proposed a
law requiring men to sit while urinating�less messy and more
equal. In 2004, the leader of the Sweden's Left Party Feminist
Council, Gudrun Schyman,proposed a "man tax"�a special tariff to
be levied on men to pay for all the violence and mayhem wrought
by their sex. In April 2012, following the celebration of
International Women's Day, the Swedes formally introduced the
genderless pronoun "hen" to be used in place of he and she (han
and hon).

Egalia, a new state-sponsored pre-school in Stockholm, is
dedicated to the total obliteration of the male and female
distinction. There are no boys and girls at Egalia�just
"friends" and "buddies." Classic fairy tales like Cinderella and
Snow White have been replaced by tales of two male giraffes who
parent abandoned crocodile eggs. The Swedish Green Party would
like Egalia to be the norm: It has suggested placing gender
watchdogs in all of the nation's preschools. "Egalia gives
[children] a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to
be," says one excited teacher. (It is probably necessary to add
that this is not an Orwellian satire or a right-wing fantasy:
This school actually exists.)

The problem with Egalia and gender-neutral toy catalogs is that
boys and girls, on average, do not have identical interests,
propensities, or needs. Twenty years ago, Hasbro, a major
American toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse it hoped
to market to both boys and girls. It soon emerged that girls and
boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The
girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys
catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof. A Hasbro manager
came up with a novel explanation: "Boys and girls are different."

They are different, and nothing short of radical and sustained
behavior modification could significantly change their elemental
play preferences. Children, with few exceptions, are powerfully
drawn to sex-stereotyped play. David Geary, a developmental
psychologist at the University of Missouri, told me in an email
this week, "One of the largest and most persistent differences
between the sexes are children's play preferences." The female
preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-
and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species (with a
few exceptions�female spotted hyenas seem to be at least as
aggressive as males). Among our close relatives such as vervet
and rhesus monkeys, researchers have found that females play
with dolls far more than their brothers, who prefer balls and
toy cars. It seems unlikely that the monkeys were indoctrinated
by stereotypes in a Top-Toy catalog. Something else is going on.

Biology appears to play a role. Several animal studies have
shown that hormonal manipulation can reverse sex-typed behavior.
When researchers exposed female rhesus monkeys to male hormones
prenatally, these females later displayed male-like levels of
rough-and-tumble play. Similar results are found in human
beings. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic
condition that results when the female fetus is subjected to
unusually large quantities of male hormones�adrenal androgens.
Girls with CAH tend to prefer trucks, cars, and construction
sets over dolls and play tea sets. As psychologist Doreen Kimura
reported in Scientific American, "These findings suggest that
these preferences were actually altered in some way by the early
hormonal environment." They also cast doubt on the view that
gender-specific play is primarily shaped by socialization.

Professor Geary does not have much hope for the new gender-blind
toy catalogue: "The catalog will almost certainly disappear in a
few years, once parents who buy from it realize their kids don't
want these toys." Most little girls don't want to play with dump
trucks, as almost any parent can attest. Including me: When my
granddaughter Eliza was given a toy train, she placed it in a
baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some
sleep.

Androgyny advocates like our Swedish friends have heard such
stories many times, and they have an answer. They acknowledge
that sex differences have at least some foundation in biology,
but they insist that culture can intensify or diminish their
power and effect. Even if Eliza is prompted by nature to
interact with a train in a stereotypical female way, that is no
reason for her parents not to energetically correct her. Hunter
College psychologist Virginia Valian, a strong proponent of
Swedish-style re-genderization, wrote in the book Why So Slow?
The Advancement of Women, "We do not accept biology as destiny
.. We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate... I propose we
adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences."

Valian is absolutely right that we do not have to accept biology
as destiny. But the analogy is ludicrous: We vaccinate,
inoculate, and medicate children against disease. Is being a
gender-typical little boy or girl a pathology in need of a cure?
Failure to protect children from small pox, diphtheria, or
measles places them in harm's way. I don't believe there is any
such harm in allowing male/female differences to flourish in
early childhood. As one Swedish mother, Tanja Bergkvist, told
the Associated Press, "Different gender roles aren't problematic
as long as they are equally valued." Gender neutrality is not a
necessary condition for equality. Men and women can be
different�but equal. And for most human beings, the differences
are a vital source for meaning and happiness. Since when is
uniformity a democratic ideal?

Few would deny that parents and teachers should expose children
to a wide range of toys and play activities. But what the Swedes
are now doing in some of their classrooms goes far beyond
encouraging children to experiment with different toys and play
styles�they are requiring it. And toy companies who resist the
gender neutrality mandate face official censure. Is this kind of
social engineering worth it? Is it even ethical?

To succeed, the Swedish parents, teachers and authorities are
going to have to police�incessantly�boys' powerful attraction to
large-group rough-and-tumble play and girls' affinity for
intimate theatrical play. As Geary says, "You can change some of
these behaviors with reinforcement and monitoring, but they
bounce back once this stops." But this constant monitoring can
also undermine children's healthy development.

Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of early childhood education at
the University of Minnesota, defines the kind of rough-and-
tumble play that boys favor as a behavior that includes
"laughing, running, smiling, jumping, open-hand beating,
wrestling, play fighting, chasing and fleeing." This kind of
play is often mistakenly regarded as aggression, but according
to Pellegrini, it is the very opposite. In cases of schoolyard
aggression, the participants are unhappy, they part as enemies,
and there are often tears and injuries. Rough-and-tumble play
brings boys together, makes them happy, and is a critical party
of their social development.

Researchers Mary Ellin Logue (University of Maine) and Hattie
Harvey (University of Denver ) agree, and they have documented
the benefits of boys' "bad guy" superhero action narratives.
Teachers tend not to like such play, say Logue and Harvey, but
it improves boys' conversation, creative writing skills, and
moral imagination. Swedish boys, like American boys, are
languishing far behind girls in school. In a 2009 study Logue
and Harvey ask an important question the Swedes should consider:
"If boys, due to their choices of dramatic play themes, are
discouraged from dramatic play, how will this affect their early
language and literacy development and their engagement in
school?"

What about the girls? Nearly 30 years ago, Vivian Gussin Paley,
a beloved kindergarten teacher at the Chicago Laboratory Schools
and winner of a MacArthur "genius" award, published a classic
book on children's play entitled Boys & Girls: Superheroes in
the Doll Corner. Paley wondered if girls are missing out by not
partaking in boys' superhero play, but her observations of the
"doll corner" allayed her doubts. Girls, she learned, are
interested in their own kind of domination. Boys' imaginative
play involves a lot of conflict and imaginary violence; girls'
play, on the other hand, seems to be much gentler and more
peaceful. But as Paley looked more carefully, she noticed that
the girls' fantasies were just as exciting and intense as the
boys�though different. There were full of conflict, pesky
characters and imaginary power struggles. "Mothers and
princesses are as powerful as any superheroes the boys can
devise." Paley appreciated the benefits of gendered play for
both sexes, and she had no illusions about the prospects for its
elimination: "Kindergarten is a triumph of sexual self-
stereotyping. No amount of adult subterfuge or propaganda
deflects the five-year-old's passion for segregation by sex."

But subterfuge and propaganda appear to be the order of the day
in Sweden. In their efforts to free children from the
constraints of gender, the Swedish reformers are imposing their
own set of inviolate rules, standards, and taboos. Here is how
Slate author Nathalie Rothchild describes a gender-neutral
classroom:

One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-
coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys.
Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule
because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play
freely 'stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In
free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to
bullying.' And so every detail of children's interactions gets
micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing
minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form
friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

The Swedes are treating gender-conforming children the way we
once treated gender-variant children. Formerly called "tomboy
girls" and "sissy boys" in the medical literature, these kids
are persistently attracted to the toys of the opposite sex. They
will often remain fixated on the "wrong" toys despite
relentless, often cruel pressure from parents, doctors, and
peers. Their total immersion in sex-stereotyped culture�a non-
stop Toys"R"Us indoctrination�seems to have little effect on
their passion for the toys of the opposite sex. There was a time
when a boy who displayed a persistent aversion to trucks and
rough play and a fixation on frilly dolls or princess
paraphernalia would have been considered a candidate for
behavior modification therapy. Today, most experts encourage
tolerance, understanding, and acceptance: just leave him alone
and let him play as he wants. The Swedes should extend the same
tolerant understanding to the gender identity and preferences of
the vast majority of children.

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