Comments on: Hey, toy makers: Where are the non-princess girls?

By: Hafsa Mansoor

Hafsa Mansoor — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 19:43:00 +0000

Love, love, LOVE this article! It’s fantastic.

It reminded me of an article I read not too long ago about a study they did on females in animated films; they found that essentially all the face shapes of women in recent Disney and Pixar films were the same. Then they traced male face shapes…. Needless to say, the diversity in those facial structures was endless. (http://www.avclub.com/article/every-female-face-recent-disney-and-pixar-movies-l-216498)

I think both of these articles attest to the fact that there females and their possessions are paradoxically singularized/generalized and othered as very different; they are treated as all being exactly the same but entirely separate from the “mainstream” (male).

Again, LOVED the article 😀

By: Marion Laird

Marion Laird — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 18:31:00 +0000

Excellent article, and very true. Back last century, Mattel realized that females could do just about anything, and started giving Barbie (unrealistic figure notwithstanding) all kinds of interesting jobs: doctor, astronaut, race car driver… Can toy manufacturers do less in the 21st Century? (Well, obviously they can and are, but here’s hoping that changes.) I’m with you on pink. I had a few pink things as a child, but I loved blue a lot better. Green’s another great color choice. Purple. How about purple? 🙂

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 13:00:00 +0000

This was wonderfully written and something that’s been on my mind lately with the new Avengers movie and GotG. And it made me think, there aren’t a whole lot of female Transformers, either (my favorite fandom). They’ve retconned reasons for it in the comics (basically explained as “it’s not that they’re all male, it’s that there’s no gender at all–after all, they ARE robots–until a mad scientist who learned about the concept of male and female from organic species then created separate robot genders just to screw with everyone,” which led to some very interesting and somewhat insane storylines), but it would be foolish to pretend it didn’t start as “no boy wants to play with a girl robot.” And to be honest, most of the female Transformers they did have at the beginning were pretty useless without male-bots to tell them what to do. It’s gotten better in recent cartoons (Transformers Prime was wonderful with Arcee, who kicked massive amounts of butt and was no one’s love interest because her worth wasn’t predicated on her gender; and the new series, Robots In Disguise, has the typically male rough and tough enforcer-bot as a female called Strongarm), and in the IDW comics they take that retcon and run with it to a lost Transformers world where males are the rarity (Windblade series), but they still have a lot of catching up to do. Females are awesome in so many ways and they deserve a much bigger spotlight.

tl;dr–I liked your article lots and lots.