Shapely Prose

Broadsheet remarks today on a fascinating/infuriating Washington Post article about how girl toys are tanking. And about how this baffles toy execs, who believe girl toys have to “hit the emotional buttons … such as nurturing or making things pretty.”

Jesus Murphy. I’m no toy engineer, but I can spot a pattern in one article and one friggin’ blurb on it: all the boy toys and successful girl toys they mention involve doing something (building, remote-controlling, crafting), whereas the sucky girl toys involve… nurturing and making things pretty.

What girls want, much as it pains me to say it, is to make themselves pretty–hence the toy companies losing market share to clothing manufacturers and makeover centers. Again, I don’t have any special insight here, apart from reading this article and having been a girl–but we always wanted to make ourselves pretty; earlier generations just had to settle for playing dress-up with Mom’s hand-me-downs, which was not much more satisfying than living vicariously through Barbie. The emphasis on prettiness completely grosses me out today, but honestly, I would have been all over Club Libby Lu and the Target accessories aisle when I was 8.

Girls haven’t changed, they’ve just suddenly got options they never had before. Options to participate, rather than sublimating all their daydreams into a piece of plastic (training them well to eventually give all their personal hopes and ambitions over to a real baby). And this is fucking rocket science to toy manufacturers? DOLLS ARE AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN BORING AS SHIT. People in the industry haven’t cottoned on to that yet?

The “age compression” thing also strikes me as major bullshit–once again, the difference is more options, and the problem is the toys aren’t fun. If you’re going to keep playing with the same toy for a whole year, either you have to really like that toy, or you have to have parents who aren’t willing to get you a new one. Anyone who’s seen a middle-class kid’s room in the last ten years knows that kids today have waaaaaay more toys than we did–not to mention 8 gazillion TV channels and video games and the internet–which means waaaaaay less motivation to play with the crap ones, i.e., most girl toys ever. What changed is, girls finally have the friggin’ option of “outgrowing” toys that always sucked.

In my day, you got a Barbie, you got bored in five minutes, and your parents said, “Well, if you’re bored, go run around in circles, but if you want a new toy, you’d better make sure Santa approves of your behavior for the next ten months.” Then, by the time Christmas or your birthday did roll around, you’d become attached to your Barbie in a Stockholm Syndromey kind of way, and you asked for more Barbie shit. Today, you get a Barbie, you get bored in 5 minutes, you let your little sister gnaw the feet off it and go do something else.

I suppose you could argue that one thing has changed for this generation of girls that might affect their willingness to play with dolls for hours on end. For playing with dolls to even remotely resemble fun, you need imagination–and when you’ve got 8 gazillion TV channels and video games and the internet, who needs that? The American Girl franchise ain’t hurtin’, as far as I know, but they provide at least two key things the average doll does not: pre-fab stories (they started as a series of books; now there’s a movie and a magazine) and kid-sized outfits, so you can dress yourself up to match the doll. (Furthermore, they actually attempt to make dolls that match kids, instead of operating on the assumption that every little girl fantasizes about growing up with blonde hair, blue eyes and crippling boob-related back pain.) Then you’ve got the cafes, the special events, blah blah blah. The dolls are totally beside the friggin’ point of why this works. It works because they hand girls the stories, the interactivity, and the community required to get truly obsessy, in the days before they start shelling out for Bop and Tiger Beat and getting obsessy about 14-year-old actors.

Once again, dolls, in and of themselves, are BORING. (Ditto washing machines, I might add. I may deplore the gender stereotyping that goes along with play kitchens, but at least it gives girls something to do. How the fuck does one play “laundry”? “Okay, I’ll fold–you Shout the pretend shit stains out of your pretend husband’s underwear!”) This dolls-are-boring thing really should not come as a shock to anyone who has ever encountered both a doll and a human being.

And once again, I really wish someone would pay me to be a fucking Common Sense Consultant.