Girls' Games II - 2010

In 2010 7-10 years old boys play football and/or hockey. Girls too, 'it’s so good with team sports'. Then girls also do the gymnastics, ride horses and dance. No boys do that. Obviously it’s not considered important for the future.

Girls’ and boys’ outfits are more clearly separated both in colors and styles than back in the 80s, and the toys provided are still different according to current gender. Girls play with Littlest Pets and boys with Star Wars dolls, sorry figures, and Pokemon collectibles. Barbies are often passé already by 7. The ‘throw ball on the wall’ game has completely vanished. There were of course little commercialism in that, and no status gained.



But even though girls and boys seldom mix, the love games appear in the same age as before, around 7 or 8, and offer opportunities to spend some time together. Otherwise it’s only in computer games that I see girls and boys unite.

Today the computer experience starts a lot earlier though. Seven years ago we played on Disney.com with our one year old daughter. Today our youngest boy’s first words in the morning are ‘I want to play the veggies’ (veggie samurai for iPad).

My girls and their girl friends join at someone’s place playing Indiana Jones or Wii , and iPet. The family favourite is Little Big Planet. The girls spend most of their gaming time customizing their sackboy while dad is running the game forward.


The girls also play online. I’d say none of their male friends would ever join in the favourites girlsgogames or Stardoll, but otherwise it’s both online and by the consoles that they and their class mates find a common interest that today is gender neutral. The girls sit in the phone with Eliot and Linn while playing Panfu. They suddenly spend a couple of hours at the boy next door – playing Star Wars – a game they would not choose themselves, but that is fun enough and the console itself is not a problem.

Somewhat we’re back to the start of the games. I’d say many children don’t see the games, computers and consoles as male gendered. They don’t see them as techniques or machines, but as media for entertainment. They are not afraid to handle a joystick, even though I admit that the girls still want to watch for a while before trying a game, while the boys just jump into the game giving it what it takes.

Why this has changed lately? Both computers and consoles have become a standard in our life style? Lots of dads (and some moms) keep buying new consoles and want their kids to play too? Computers are both tools, entertainment and communication today?

I know I generalize a lot. Also there are more local preferences today as the supply is much wider than 30 years ago (at least in Sweden who has shifted from a social state to a capitalistic model), but I have also run communication with millions of girls word wide for the last 5 years, why I believe there is some truth in these generalizations.

There are some stronger separations in real life toys and spare time occupations than 30 years ago though and there are yet not many games that are built for girls by girls, or even for boys and girls, by girls. And why don’t women play as much in the middle of their lives and returning stronger than men later on. And what do the girls find so great about the sackboy? To be continued…

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Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

Barbie is a fake, pink is not

Some seem to say that Barbie and pink is pretty much the same, and it striked me that what if it is Barbie who so completely degraded the color of pink in so many minds. Barbie is known to be a toy for little silly girls only and maybe the color has gone the same way in their affinity?

The color of pink was first recorded in the late 17th century and is the color of the dawn, of rosy flowers and of blossom cheeks. These nouns associate further to youth, freshness and naivety. With this in mind it feels even strange that pink not long ago was a masculine color.

I just learned that less than 100 years ago pink was assigned to gender for the first time, and by then to men as deriving from the red. The blue had been a female color for a long time, associating to melancholy and dreams. It was first in the 40s that it turned the other way around and little girls started to get dressed all in pink.

Well, Barbie was launched in 1959, and the early dolls were not packaged in all hysteric pink plastic boxes, so at least it wasn't her making pink to a girly color. The overwhelming pink color must have been added by time according to sales successes and today Barbie is more pink than ever. The more Barbie presents an unattainable dream of perfect girlyness, the more parents seem to think that the doll is appropriate for their daughters. Of course they are right, only that it’s not preparing the girls for the upcoming future where they will have to learn that everything girly is worth, if not nothing, so not so much. Barbie has been criticized for many more ideals, but I stay with the color and the fake here.

Pink has gained status the past 5 years or so. The romantic fresh pink has maybe never left the upper class cleaned look, but the stinging version was considered vulgar and tacky for a couple of decades.

The first gender revolution was in the 70s with an attempt to not let the colors determine who you are. I guess women felt denied and the following 80s was ruled by power women using the pink color to state that there is nothing wrong being a tough girl.

Again there was a contra revolution in the 90s where the grunge fashion was extremely gender neutral, followed by another contra revolution of very strict black. Again girls grew a new believe in their interests of femininity resulting in expressing their desire for pink. This time the commercial forces are strong and enhances all group selected attributes for mass sales.

What’s next? Up til now the need of pink seems to reappear everytime it disappears. Women want to express that they are women and that it's just as much worth as being man. As for right now more parents than me want their girls to know that they are aloud to be the girls they are with the interests they have. We don’t want to prepossess them to just want to be a specific kind of girl with a specific set of interests, and that’s what we are worried about when it comes to the pink color.

I love pink, and I think we can use it to attract girls to do things they wouldn't dare to try if they weren't safe to be welcome, but I don’t want it to be loaded with values as naivety, youth, stupidity or tackyness as Barbie has made it to be with help of a fake smile, a fake body and fake future. To me it is actually Barbie who adds the dilemma to the color.