Wednesday, 14 December 2011

War of the sexes: latest!

Hamleys toyshop in London has been operational for about two centuries.It is under attack.Agree or not with the PC attack, the controversy is hot copied below, you have plenty of vocabulary and so on here. I may fisk it some day, when I get around to it.
Mike
Hamleys, temple to political correctness


Toby Young

Toby Young is the author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2001) and The Sound of No Hands Clapping (2006). In addition to being a freelance journalist, he is the co-founder of the West London Free School, the first free school to sign a funding agreement with the Secretary of State for Education. To learn more about the WLFS, visit the school's website on www.wlfs.org. Toby's personal website is www.nosacredcows.co.uk and he tweets under the name of Toadmeister. He has just written an ebook called How to Set Up a Free School that you can download here.

Hamleys sexism: there's no point pretending kids are 'gender neutral'

By Society Last updated: December 14th, 2011
222 Comments Comment on this article
Hamleys, the new bastion of gender-neutral child-rearing
Hamleys, the new bastion of gender-neutral child-rearing
When I first learned of the internet campaign against Hamleys "gender apartheid", ie allocating separate areas to boys' and girls' toys, I thought it was a joke. Here's an extract from the campaigning blog, written by someone called Laura Nelson under the pseudonym "Delilah":
We have a severe lack of women in senior positions in our society and a severe problem of inequality. Only 22 percent of UK parliamentarians are female. A survey of Britain’s top 100 companies find that, of 329 executive directors, only 20 are women. In the media Guardian top 100 this year – the most powerful people in the industry – the first woman is at number 18.
Despite laws and measures to introduce gender equality of rights and opportunities in our society, there is still a gaping gap between the actual proportions of men and women in our leadership positions today.
There are many contributing factors, and one is conditioning of children from an early age. Deep-rooted in our society are stereotypes that dictate to women and men and influence them on the roles in society that they are expected to fill.
Reading this, I was reminded of a famous short story by Saki called 'The Toys of Peace'. It concerns the efforts of two earnest, middle class Lefties to re-educate their military-obsessed nephews by giving them 'peace toys' to play with. Trouble is, the progressive intentions of the manufacturers are lost on the boys. "It's a fort!" exclaims one of them, after tearing off the wrapping. His uncle hurriedly explains that it's a "municipal dust-bin". The next toy to be unwrapped isn't a fort either – it's a model of the Manchester branch of the Young Women's Christian Association. "Are there lions?" asks one of the boys, having recently learned about Roman history. Alas, there are not.
After their initial disappointment, the boys soon find a use for the 'peace toys' in their ongoing re-enactments of bloody battles:
Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dustbin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannon, and now represented the principal fortified position in Manchester.
The moral of Saki's story is clear: nature will always trump nurture and any attempt to re-educate children so they grow up to be model citizens in some socialist utopia is bound to fail.
You would think Britain's most famous toy shop would be aware of this lesson, but apparently not. In response to Laura Nelson's campaign, which was not a joke, Hamleys has decided to remove the signs indicating which toys are intended for boys and which for girls. Henceforth, dads looking for Scalextric and mums searching for My Little Pony will just have to wander aimlessly around the shop's five floors until they stumble across them. Most, I imagine, will give up and go home.
Needless to say, Nelson is delighted. In her latest blog post, she writes:
Congratulations everyone! We still have work to do on the nature of the toys themselves, and the gender stereotyping of their marketing – but we have come to a milestone. Great work!
Onward Delilah! With luck, Hamleys will soon replace its Star Wars and Transformers toys with municipal recycling centres and models of Erin Pizzey's first women's refuge in Chiswick. After that, it will be just a short step to a glorious new era characterised by sexual equality and world peace.
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226 comments

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  • Commenter's avatar
    digital_digits
    2 minutes ago
    If guardian reading militant feminists are so against 'gender apartheid', why haven't they put an end to the womens' section in their favourite snoozepaper?

    Soon they'll be demanding that boys sit down to pee.

  • Commenter's avatar
    elijahsreturn
    4 minutes ago
    Another raging jezebel feminist

    note the name 'delilah', the wicked queen who sapped the strength of samson. The same thing extreme feminism would try to do to the heart of man.

    Men everywhere have to start speaking out against this wickedness

  • Commenter's avatar
    ub313
    7 minutes ago
    Does Toby Young know that "short story" refers to a piece of fictional
    writing. In order to back up an empirically verifiable claim, it is
    necessary to cite more than a piece of political propaganda. Yet more
    argument by assertion from squirming righties.

    Most probably there are statistically significant biological differences
    between the sexes. If there are, then they will not require childhood
    conditioning for their reproduction. On the other hand, it is clear that
    many of the social realities that conservatives have blithely
    proclaimed to be rooted in "nature" have turned out to be otherwise. No
    matter how loudly reactionaries scream at women that they have no
    interest in pursuits that the fragile sexualised ego needs to be the
    sole preserve of men, strangely they haven't listened.

  • Commenter's avatar
    Social Trap
    9 minutes ago
    I understand the science section was in the boys section - that is dumb.

    Most kids don't even regard science as a toy theme. If they do, they are a little weird and could be a weird boy or a weird girl.

  • Commenter's avatar
    mjtvalfather
    12 minutes ago
    Let's boycott Hamleys

    I think its time that those who are sick and tired of this poisoning of society against men and boys should boycott Hamleys.

    It's time retailers - and after that politicians - started getting the message that its not okay to give into feminist hatred of men.

  • Commenter's avatar
    whitmarsh
    17 minutes ago
    What a stupid woman and what a limp-wristed management!

  • Commenter's avatar
    bob3
    29 minutes ago
    Having only girls I did buy them train sets and scalextrics, just as an experiment mind. 
     
    VERSUS :


    Jenny McCartney

    Jenny McCartney is a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. On her blog, she offers hard-hitting analysis of social and political concerns and a witty deconstruction of modern celebrity culture.

    It's not PC zealotry to suggest a reorganisation of Hamleys

    By Society Last updated: December 14th, 2011
    21 Comments Comment on this article
    Hamleys, temple to political correctness
    Hamleys, temple to political correctness
    Who would be Laura Nelson today, eh? Because she thought it would be a good idea if Hamleys toys were organised around interests – dolls, arts and crafts, and dress-up, for example – rather than “boys” and “girls”, and wrote to the company saying so, people have reacted as if she just proposed banning Christmas, or boiling the Easter bunny.
    It’s political correctness gone stark raving bonkers! Doesn’t she realise that little girls LIKE pink and boys LIKE blue? Who does this fun-wrecking, hairy-legged, beetle-browed feminist think she is, to run around thoughtlessly ruining the traditional right of parents to shop in separate designated areas for boy and girl children?
    Well, good on her, I say: pace my colleague Toby Young, I think she’s absolutely right. I have both a boy and a girl, and a pretty accurate general idea of what they’re likely to be interested in. When I enter a store such as Hamleys – frankly, enough of a head-spinner as it is – I want to be able to find goods by category, rather than stumble around in what the store itself has decided might be gender-appropriate. Now Hamleys has decided to reorganise things along those very lines, which makes simple good sense.
    And no one is saying you can’t buy your daughter something pink, or your son something blue: go right ahead, if it makes you and them happy. But why, in a world full of beautiful colours, has a slightly lurid candy-pink been widely decreed as the go-to shade for the overwhelming bulk of girls’ toys and clothing? It’s not “traditional,” or at least certainly not in the toxic concentrations that we see now: when I was growing up in the 1970s, regarded as much less “progressive” era, clothes and toys were significantly less colour-coded than they are today. Quite often red got a look-in, or even green and yellow. And my favourite toy, which nicely combined mock-violence with domestic materials, was a little metal gun that shot out pellets of raw potato.
    Sure, little girls get to the point where they ask for pink, because when they go into a shop, the designated “girls’ stuff” is all pink. They quickly absorb the lesson that pink is the girls’ colour, and they want to demonstrate that they are a girl: it’s a circular phenomenon.
    The endless colour-coding has practical implications, too. Let’s say you want to buy your small boy a tricycle, as I once did. They come, naturally, in just two shades: pink and blue. Oh dear, they’re all out of the blue. Do you want a pink one? No thanks, because that’s now the officially designated “girl” colour. Why don’t they make anything in RED?
    Pink’s an all right colour. It’s cheerful enough, and it has its adult defenders: Diana Vreeland once called it “the navy blue of India”. But when it’s the only colour on offer, it becomes a bore. If you want to buy a three-pack of long-sleeved vests for a two-year old girl, for example, I can bet that at least two of them will come in shades roving from salmon to bubblegum.
    You can, of course, find childrenswear that is beautifully made in an imaginative range of hues: in my experience, it’s usually at the top end of the market, where the price of a dress that lasts six months would equal the average monthly mortgage repayment.
    Nelson isn’t arguing that anyone must stop their daughter playing with cookery sets or dolls. She’s simply asking for stores to be more open-minded about what little boys and girls might like to do, and the colours in which they do it. I don’t think it represents a muesli-muncher’s subversive assault on Western civilisation. What’s really weird, though, is how many people seem to think it does.
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    21 comments

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    • Commenter's avatar
      NonAlignedUK
      10 minutes ago
      Jenny,

      Nelson wrote on her own blog that Hamley's categorisation policy, "contributes to gender stereotypes and inequality".  She goes on:

      "From birth, boys and girls are bombarded with stereotypes; boys are allowed to be more aggressive and climb trees, while girls are encouraged to be passive and play with plastic teapots."

      So I have to disagree with you.  It is a muesli-muncher's subversive assault on Western civilisation.  Or rather, the muesli-mucher's fantasy that testosterone and oestrogen have no effect, either in the womb or thereafter.

    • Commenter's avatar
      bob3
      54 minutes ago
      Maybe adult department stores will have to follow suit.

    • Commenter's avatar
      redfreezone
      55 minutes ago
      Toby Young, Jenny McCartney - FIGHT!

    • Commenter's avatar
      germanicusrex
      Today 05:11 PM
      No amount of sisterhood weaseling will hide the fact that this change WAS PC idiocy driven by a man hating misandrist.

      Perhaps you actually believe it was not, anyone not ruled by the PC agenda will see it exactly for what it was.

    • Commenter's avatar
      simon
      Today 05:07 PM
      Don't you just love it: the stock market's collapsing; we are (nearly) at war again with Europe; unemployment is rising, etc, etc, and we spend time debating how to organise bookshelves and toy cupboards.  It's what I like about England. I think we call it the Blitz spirit.

    • Commenter's avatar
      sheumais
      Today 05:02 PM
      As it is easy to check what Laura Nelson claims, your blog is extremely foolish.

    • Commenter's avatar
      lobrio
      Today 04:56 PM
      Maybe this  Nelson individual may target art galleries next.

      After all, those that I have been through around the place have nothing but male masterpieces on show in prime viewing areas !

      Or pick on Classic FM for continuously playing only male composers !

      Or broaden her attack and aim her tripe at the worlds major hotels and demand that they select female chefs.......I really would like to see that !

    • Commenter's avatar
      leroy_jenkins
      Today 04:36 PM
      "It's not PC zealotry to suggest a reorganisation of Hamleys"

      To be fair I think thats about right, to me this doesn't register as  being important enough to be PC zealotry. It's pretty obvious that Nelson has just decided she really doesn't have anything more interesting to complain about and decides to pick on boys vs girls toys.

      If anything the fact people are complaining about this means that we have finally fixed all other problems in the world, the EU isn't imploding and trying to screw us for the sake of making sarkozy look good in time for the french elections. In Jerusalem, christians, muslims and jews are hand in hand singing "I'd like to teach the world to sing" and all diseases are finally erradicated!

      Good times! Merry Christmas to one and all!

    • Commenter's avatar
      oscar_frye
      Today 04:35 PM
      Don’t be soft.

      Most people don’t especially care about how this shop markets its wares. What is laughable is Goodie Nelson’s argument that this marketing contributes to

      “a severe lack of women in senior positions in our society and a severe problem of inequality”

      and is the reason why

      “only 22 percent of UK parliamentarians are female”

      and is why

      “a survey of Britain’s top 100 companies find that, of 329 executive directors, only 20 are women.”

      As has been extensively pointed out in and under Toby Young’s blog, this is plainly bollocks.

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