DorrieDorrie

Pink Bus2

Quite a while go, we bought Dorrie a Fisher-Price people airpline for Christmas. Since she had been scared of large toys and had gotten so many other toys for Christmas anyway, we hadn’t given it to her until the middle of February. To our surprise, she didn’t just want to chew on the people, she wanted to play with the airplane.

So we promptly went on a hunt for other toys in the Little People line (digression: this line has been seriously revised since we were children, and NOT for the better; I hate the new people designs) which were similar. The one I wanted the most was the school bus, because I remembered spending quite a lot of time playing with the two buses we had when I was little.

But every store I went to only ever had the Pink Bus.

What is the Pink Bus? It is part of the idiotic idea that pervades the toy industry that requires all popular toy lines to have a separate sub-line “for girls” that consists of the same toys colored pink. There are pink legos, pink ring stackers, pink shape sorters, pink activity centers… sometimes I’m surprised that our medical supplier did not deliver a pink ventilator and oxygen tanks.

The pink toys are almost always vastly inferior to the other, regular toy line. They are less complicated, focus only on things like princesses and houses, and are less interesting to look at, since instead of using a large palette of colors, they tend to be pink with purple highlights.

The Little People pink toys are especially troubling. The pink toys I have seen so far contain no obviously male characters (several androgynous people were allowed to remain). The characters seem also to be predominantly white.

We finally managed to track down the regular school bus at Babies R Us yesterday. It was then that I discovered that the Pink Bus not only contains 3 white female characters rather than the more multicultural Regular Bus, but the Regular Bus contains a wheelchair which was omitted from the Pink Bus. Apparently little white girls do not associate with the handicapped?! I really wonder what kind of message Fisher-Price thinks it’s sending with all of these gender-segregated toys.

Posted by mom, under tales of interest, wtf, people