It's every feminist's dream: a four-year-old girl standing in the pink-doused aisle of a toy store, issuing forth about the lack of choices for girls. 'Why do all the girls have to buy princesses and all the boys have to buy superheroes?' the girl, Riley, asks with exasperation of the man — presumably her father — who is filming her.
Riley is clearly displeased at the manner in which manufacturers and advertisers have attempted to pigeonhole little girls, but her outcry is gender-inclusive, for it acknowledges — after some hesitation — that girls are not the only losers in this great big marketing machine.
'Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses, some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses. So then why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different coloured stuff?'
'It's a good question, Riley,' her father answers.
A good question indeed, and a reminder that for every little girl who feels she is being forced to choose between a thousand shades of pink, there's a little boy hemmed in by society's expectations of what a boy should be.
No child — not even those raised as 'gender-free' — is ever entirely immune to the societal value and meaning that is attached to their sex: in the past, studies showed that babies dressed as girls received more smiles than those dressed as boys; that parents gave more positive non-verbal responses to their toddlers when they picked up 'gender appropriate' toys, and more negative responses when they picked up toys associated with the opposite sex; and that parents and schools employed imperceptibly prejudiced practices vis-á-vis boys and girls.
If these studies were to be replicated today, their findings would surely reflect our enlightened consciousness. But they might also find that while girls have become well-practised in articulating their distaste for the narrow stereotypes applied to them, there is conspicuous silence on the concomitant lack of choice for boys. Girls have been revolutionised by the feminist movement; boys have simply been encouraged to make way for girls.
'No-one ever tells him what to be, only what not to be,' says American filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt in his documentary The Smell of Burning Ants. 'Boys become boys in large