Food for Thought -

[kyburg]

haikujaguar offers up some interesting musing on a certain type of toy - those who come in community collections. In this case, My Little Pony:

Hundreds of ponies I'd thought to be both male and female now revealed to me as all female. Dozens and dozens of baby ponies.

It's incredibly simple and to the point - and echoes my own experience with toys you normally played with as a group. (Take any set of action figures or dolls.)

Even when the group was undeniably female (like all the Barbie dolls I owned...I never got a single Ken until I started collecting them in my twenties), I had both genders in my "community."

It makes sense, after all. There are two genders in the real world - why wouldn't I have both in any imaginary one?

And I like how she notes that when they added male ponies, they added stupid male ponies.

Since when is the "other" gender inherently inferior? Question authority, folks.

In my imagination, at least, you don't get to be moody or capricious because you're one or the other.

Comments

[scrapyard.livejournal.com]

Almost everyone I know had male and female ponies, and was utterly baffled by the appearance of Lucky, the "first" male pony. (Most of my friends invariable say that Gusty was a boy.)

In my childhood, I lived so far outside of town that my brother was the only other child I played with, so the ponies and the Transformers were good friends with Rainbow Brite and G.I. Joe.

My brother (who is on the phone with me), points out that it is interesting that I always assumed that the ponies were male and female, whereas he never assumed there were transformers of both genders. I maintain that had the cartoon not been out at the time, he would TOTALLY have insisted that Bumblebee was the girl bug and Cliff Jumper was the guy bug, and that Jazz was also perhaps female. He thought about it a minute and said, "... you know? You're right."

This is also one of the things I think makes dating and puberty very awkward for many children, because your entire adolesence, you're being pummelled with PLAY WITH YOUR SAME GENDER, what with He-Man and She-Ra's teams being totally separate, with the former having its token woman and the latter having its token man, and then suddenly you hit puberty and everyone is all, "NOW YOU SHOULD NOT BE INTERESTED IN YOUR SAME GENDER THE OPPOSITE GENDER SHOULD BE MORE IMPORTANT," and a lot of kids, particularly the late bloomers, are stuck in confusion all, "Wait. What?"

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

And then there are folks like me, who never liked our own gender - and ended up being "one of the guys" forever.

Uh, nobody thinks "one of the guys" is sexay. Trust me on this one.

[moropus.livejournal.com]

I'm moody and capricious and female.

I remember when my girlfriend and I kidnapped her brothers' GI Joes so our Barbies would have somebody to date, they were not amused. There were also a lot of cowboy dolls of the same size in the early seventies who's names I cannot remember. They had horses.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

My Barbies were used by the boys for anatomy lessons. No kidding. They were very dissapointed to find they were far from anatomically correct. Like, totally absent. *laughs*