More on the gender-typing of innocent little infants...

[conuly]

Here I am, searching Google to see if I can find an image of that spaceship onesie I want to show you guys (no luck yet). And I come across the following site: Tell me this isn't just the cutest stacky toy you've ever seen!

I wander slightly, and notice that they have gifts for baby girls, and gifts for baby boys... no gifts for plain old fashioned "babies". This can't end well...

Boys get an astronaut set, or a dragon set, or one of three different sports sets, in addition to the fairly bland-and-banal layettes and whatnot that you see everywhere.
A lot of stuff chosen because they're pink. No stacking toys. No dragons to stretch their little minds. Nope. There's a princess gift....

You tell me. Which overpriced gifts do *you* prefer?

Comments

[davidkevin.livejournal.com]

If the stuff is in fact hand-made, the prices aren't that unreasonable, given the number of individual labor-hours which would be required for knitting.

I agree with you about the sexism of the categorization -- but that doesn't mean you have to go along with it. Buy "boy" stuff for the girl babies you know, or vice versa as you think best. Babies don't care. [ smile ]

I don't remember if it was to you or to someone else I told this story in a comment a few months ago, but when my son Kevin was around one-year-old we ran out of clean onesies after he wet himself more than we expected him to do while we were at a mall, and all we could find in his size in a hurry was a pink one. We bought it and put it on him. Didn't bother him, he ran around the mall with aplomb. (I told nosy-parkers that he was secure in his sexual identity, thank you very much.)

I once read of a "liberated" couple who bought "boy" toys for their daughter but were distressed when all she wanted were cooking toys, which they saw as "girl" toys. It finally occurred to them that as self-employed home-workers, the girl saw both of them cooking at home every day, and wanted to do what saw both mama and daddy were doing. "Boy" or "girl" had nothing to do with it.

[conuly]

I always work backwards....

"Boy" or "girl" had nothing to do with it.

I made a post about this very thing not that long ago! Well, a few months... Children at the SICM love, universally, playing in the part of the blocks room that has the toy kitchen. Children Ana's age seem to love, universally, toy strollers. It's not a mom thing - they just want to be like the adults around them!

that doesn't mean you have to go along with it. Buy "boy" stuff for the girl babies you know, or vice versa as you think best. Babies don't care.

Oh, *I* know that - but that doesn't mean that there aren't silly people who don't get it at all. More's the pity.