Cute video

[conuly]

SOMEbody is very concerned with toy marketing and the color pink.

There are two types of comments here. The first runs "Well, you can buy a boy girl toys, or a girl boy toys, so it doesn't matter". This one is so frustrating that I have no coherent response to it.

The other goes "Oh, there's no way this kid made this observation herself, she's just parroting". To that I say "So what?" Okay, maybe she's not, and likely she is - but again, so what? How do you expect children to learn your values if you don't talk with them about them? (And if she'd decided she wanted a pink princess tea set because that's what she'd seen on TV or that's what Grandma pushed on her, that would be... what, exactly? Not parroting?)

But regardless, it's still a nifty video.

Comments

[mc776]

I have a coherent, if subjective, response to that:

If I were that age or a little older and you bought me a girl's toy, I would have raised a hell of a scene, right then and there swearing in front of the parents and everything, because my conditioning at that point was that you've just put my very honour at stake - and triggered all sorts of aversion taboo reactions developed over years of "don't touch that it is bad for you". I only started to outgrow that sort of thinking sometime in my early 20s and I think there's a real possibility I will never fully shake it off.

There's "can" and there's the "ought" that gets drilled into us every waking moment of our lives. (and then there's the difference between "ought" and "there oughta be a law" but that's another discussion entirely.)

(Thing is, though, do girls get this sort of thing in the reverse? The "boys'" section seems to me to be a general section with a more specifically testosteroned "black and green" subsection - that is not, I recall, at all demarcated and colour-coded away from everything else the way the pink section is. I think the girl in the vid seems to notice this too - at one point she tries to make a symmetrical comparison but falters when she realizes that the theory doesn't match the data at all.)


Agreeing with you re: second. Seems to me like

1. Girl starts complaining about the pigeonholing
2. Parents start notice, start talking about stuff
3. Girl picks up on that stuff (or specifically asks for it) during their convo
4. It finally occurs to someone that this could be great Youtube material
5. What she's saying into the camera is pointedly processed to contain the new material

with the result that there were certainly a few points where it definitely sounds like she was restating words an adult said, but it does not affect her sincerity. (although the father could just as easily have explained that it was the lizard Zionist Illuminati instead of the toy companies and she would've said that...)

[erisiansaint]

Even if she's parroting, she's doing it /at the right time/, which means she's thinking about it.

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things ABOUT this video, but I can't make out most of what the little girl is saying, and since there are no captions, it's kind of lost on me.

[conuly]

Short version: It's ridiculous that girl things are pink and boy things are all the other colors, because girls might want boy things and vice versa and it's just wrong.

SO MUCH YES.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

When I was around eight or so the PINK PINK PINK drove me nuts because I hated it.

I had hand-me-down Barbies from my cousins, and I proceeded to stripe one's hair with green and yellow poster paints for a Punk Rock Barbie. (I don't believe Mattel got around to that for decades to come. And then it was of course PINK hair.)