Lyons - have my Barbies and wrestlers, too

When I was a kid, I loved Disney movies as much as any other little girl my age. I wanted to be saved like Sleeping Beauty, find love like Cinderella, be a badass like Mulan, and have as many admirers as Snow White (which may have been a bit strange looking back now, but hey). But having an older, influential brother by eight years who was obsessed with what was then the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), I also wanted to be the Women’s Champion like my idol at the time, Lita. 

As a child, I often times felt this strange disconnection from other children my age if I didn’t want to play with Barbie, or if I wanted the “guy” toy in my Happy Meal. As a twenty-one year old now, I can look back and see that the reason these disheartening occurrences happened is because of the way popular culture creates our hegemonic views that society then follows, and I think this is highly problematic. 

For one thing, when little girls are brought up believing that liking pink, Barbie dolls, make-up, fluffy stuff, and so on is normal, it does two things: first, it makes girls who don’t like those things feel like outsiders. Second, it subtly encourages girls who do like that stuff that the girls who don’t like that stuff are weird, etc. Even though it’s a big stretch, I think genderless toys (not “Pink for Girls!” and “Blue for Boys!”) would be awesome, and help reinforce the fact that, hey, we’re all just people and some of us have a penis and some of us have a vagina, but that doesn’t mean we’re restricted to different colored toys.

As far as superheroes go, I think it’s incredibly problematic for young boys. They grow up watching tough guys rip off their shirts, get pretty girls (who, let’s be honest, they usually don’t deserve), and basically just be immature violent dirt bags and still be seen as the “hero.” This is bad because it creates poor expectations of what a man should do/be to succeed. However, an even more harmful expectation that heroes like this set is that boys are not allowed to show emotions and feel the wide range of emotions that every human feels (which then leads to them suppressing the emotion and lashing out like the heroes described in the beginning of this paragraph). It’s a harmful, perpetual cycle.