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Mar. 28th, 2012 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kd7sov...Huh.
May 30, last year, I began to watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. And ever since then, I have tried to have an open mind about gender roles. But it seems I still have a long way to go.
This is, in some ways, a reversion for me. My parents occasionally tell a story from when I was quite young, and we were waiting for something. I was playing with some action figures, and someone asked what they were doing. My answer was "dancing". I doubt I knew anything of how to dance at the time, but certainly other children my age might well have derided it as a "girls' thing".
And as I said, I have made a conscious effort to be open-minded in the last several months. It has come to the point where I don't like the word "girly", because of its promotion of segregative prejudices. And yet.
Today in my sociology class, we had a discussion about gender roles and such. And I was feeling vaguely smug because of how my perceptions and outlook have changed. And then the teacher asked a question. She said, "How many of you would be willing to buy your little boy a baby doll?" And... I stopped. My first reaction was "Ponies are one thing, but-" and then I wondered, why? What is different about toys of fictional equinoids, as compared to toys of fictional humanoids? It's not the story - at about seven or eight I quite enjoyed having a Blue Ranger action figure, despite having no idea of his role or the Power Rangers' significance. Even now, I have a Honeybuzz (and one of these days I want to know why the wiki conflates her with Bumblesweet, who is a different pony with different mane and hide colors and a different name), despite her not appearing at any point in the show - her entire story (as far as I know) consists of what I made up on the way out of the store. The closest thing I can get to an answer is "it's not part of the Way Things Have Been", which is not in itself a good reason for anything.
In the end, the answer I would have been able to give the teacher was "With reservations, and a recognition that there is no good reason for those reservations."
May 30, last year, I began to watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. And ever since then, I have tried to have an open mind about gender roles. But it seems I still have a long way to go.
This is, in some ways, a reversion for me. My parents occasionally tell a story from when I was quite young, and we were waiting for something. I was playing with some action figures, and someone asked what they were doing. My answer was "dancing". I doubt I knew anything of how to dance at the time, but certainly other children my age might well have derided it as a "girls' thing".
And as I said, I have made a conscious effort to be open-minded in the last several months. It has come to the point where I don't like the word "girly", because of its promotion of segregative prejudices. And yet.
Today in my sociology class, we had a discussion about gender roles and such. And I was feeling vaguely smug because of how my perceptions and outlook have changed. And then the teacher asked a question. She said, "How many of you would be willing to buy your little boy a baby doll?" And... I stopped. My first reaction was "Ponies are one thing, but-" and then I wondered, why? What is different about toys of fictional equinoids, as compared to toys of fictional humanoids? It's not the story - at about seven or eight I quite enjoyed having a Blue Ranger action figure, despite having no idea of his role or the Power Rangers' significance. Even now, I have a Honeybuzz (and one of these days I want to know why the wiki conflates her with Bumblesweet, who is a different pony with different mane and hide colors and a different name), despite her not appearing at any point in the show - her entire story (as far as I know) consists of what I made up on the way out of the store. The closest thing I can get to an answer is "it's not part of the Way Things Have Been", which is not in itself a good reason for anything.
In the end, the answer I would have been able to give the teacher was "With reservations, and a recognition that there is no good reason for those reservations."
