EDITORIAL.- The Christmas holidays are inexorably approaching, the television channels bombard us with advertisements for toys and pages, Kings, elves and even Santa Claus himself have begun to browse catalogs of toy stores and shopping centers to get an idea of what that is coming to them. And this year they are going to get a surprise again, we hope it is pleasant, when they stumble upon the catalog of the toy store chain Toy Planet, a clear example of what should be a non-sexist catalog.
In it we are shown children pushing carts with babies and girls driving motorcycles and fiddling with tools. Although in fact the most important thing is that both boys and girls share all kinds of activities, because it is not a matter of reassigning the roles, but of exchanging them indistinctly, of not marking the toys as appropriate for boys or girls, but of classifying them by type: bicycles, kitchenettes, construction, dolls and let each creature decide what they want to play with. It is so obvious that this would be the correct way to offer toys to children that what causes blush is that it is news that a brand decides to do it.
Ignacio Gaspar, CEO of Toy Planet, explains that the initiative started 3 years ago with some photos on Twitter and Facebook and, given the good reception they had, they decided to pass them to a paper catalog. "We could not miss this opportunity, having been the first. We were hoping someone else would sign up, but for now we have not seen it. It is a pending subject of the sector. We would like more people to join us. "
The most curious thing is that girls and boys tend to reproduce the roles that they live in their environment and that translates into phenomena such as the fact that children who see their father or mother cook indistinctly ask for kitchens or that girls are more and more interested in motorcycles, construction games and super heroes. In this situation, the toy industry plays a role not only of brake and stagnation, but even of setback. Everything that is advanced in schools and in the family environment is destroyed at a stroke when someone reprints a catalog in which they are educated on gender discrimination and the apriority of roles that, in the best of cases they limit both their access to certain games and, in the worst case, they condemn the girls to the denial of certain professions and the boys to not knowing how to function in daily tasks.
We can not treat this issue as a minor issue because the children who browse the catalogs today will be adults of the future and it would be absurd to be fighting for a society without gender discrimination while letting the commercial interests of certain manufacturers keep sticking to the wheels of social evolution. At the risk of being somewhat repulsive, when we ask ourselves in a toy store if what we are looking for is a child or a girl, let us say that it is for a person, for someone who in the future may be an astronaut, gardener @ or simply someone who will like to know how to cook and have a moderately neat home.
Let the toys be toys, but above all we work because the universe of the children's game is a previous step, a reflection of the society in which we want to live and of the world that we want to bequeath, not a sick look towards a past that does not exist already or should not exist.
Editorial Gayles.tv
Online TV
