Reading the other blogs entries was making me depressed, so I’m setting aside the blog entry I had about California's new, badly written anti sex-trafficking law...
Let’s talk Christmas gifts for younger kids. Feminist Christmas gifts.
I'm an atheist, but this being America I still celebrate our corporate/pagan gift-giving season that has vague trappings of Christianity. Because honestly pagen gift giving celebrations during the winter is a European thing.
Anyway, it’s after Thanksgiving. That means it’s time to start Christmas shopping. I have younger cousins (of both sexes) and I’ve been thinking about what kinds of Christmas gifts to get them. The toy aisle is mostly out of the question two reasons: 1) I am a jobless college student and 2) I really, really don’t like the messages about gender (and sexuality in some cases) that many toys have attached to them.
For instance, barbies (and imitators) and action figures, while both dolls, are gender-targeted toys. I think both have inhuman figures- most action figures have bulging muscles and well defined abs, and many have shooty plastic bits. The problems with girl’s dolls appearances is well documented. The thing that interests me the most about these two groups of dolls, however, is that most dolls for boys have painted-on cloths (with the exception of masks and helmets, usually), while most girls dolls allow the cloths to be changed.
If I had the money, I would get my youngest cousin a gender-neutral dollhouse, but they’re pretty expensive.
The
same goes for legos, and legos have gender issues in their marketing
and toy lines which I could spend all day going on about, but basically
boils down to the fact that they’ve been marketing legos as a “boys toy”
for decades and, instead of returning to their gender-neutral origins,
decided to make a separate line of legos for girls.
Video games can be very, very expensive, but with the advent of digital distribution services like Steam the price of games has gone way, way down. Then the problem becomes finding age-appropriate games that aren’t sexist and that they will like. And hopefully get hours and hours of play out of. That eliminates many “girl” games, because they tend to be soulless, mass produced things meant to extract cash from a demographic by playing into stereotypes. I also want to avoid games that require online play.
Right now games on my list include:
-Minecraft. Everyone likes Minecraft because it’s like virtual legos.
Botanicula and Macinarium are good point-and-click adventure games, and the first one is good for very young kids.
-World of Goo. You build structures things out of goo balls to try to reach the level exit.
Now, there are games that I play that I would love to give them, but they aren’t quite old enough for yet:
I would like to give my cousins Dungeons of Dredmor, but it’s got some innuendo and an entire subtype of monsters called a “Thrusty” (demons with Elvis hair styles that attack with pelvis thrusts). Yesterday I realized that they do not have tails, and we will leave it at that. However, the thrusties’ “tail” isn’t particularly phallic looking, and their color scheme (blacks-grey) makes it hard to notice. They are, however, but one of many monsters, and the game is tongue-in-cheek enough to get away with it. You can play as a red-headed, big-eyebrowed heroin, who plays exactly the same way her brown haired, big-eyebrowed hero counterpart does. It's also not a particularly gory game.
Analog: a Hate Story is supposed to be a very feminist game. I haven’t played it. From what I know of the plot, it revolves around a woman waking up from cryogenic sleep on a star ship and finding herself in a society which has digressed into a feudal society where women have no rights. You play as someone investigating why the ship was abandoned years afterwards and found drifting through space.
It's kind of sad that its easier for me to think of reasons why games aren't "girl friendly", for lack of better words, than why they are. Overly sexualized or lack of female characters? Bad. Out right misogyny? Bad. Pandering to "women do this, men do that?" Bad.
But I don't really know what a feminist, kid-friendly game would be like.
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