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

[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*