A couple of years ago I went shopping for wall decals for my daughter’s room. At that time she had not yet taken to any particular character or any kind of toy. She seemed to be curious about everything around her, so I went with an open mind.
I walked into the kids room decor aisle at a popular home store. I observed a lot of pink and purple on one side of the racks. I walked further down the aisle and found planet and animal-themed wall-decals alongside car/ vehicle-themed decor. I paused, curious about the grouping of cars, animals and planets trying to register the clear demarcation between this and the pink-purple section of the aisle.
I knelt down and observed the labels for the dinosaurs, planets and cars themed stuff – they were all prefixed with something like ‘Boys room decor – planets’, ‘Boys room decor -dinosaurs’ and such. I was amused.
That was circa 2015.
Fast forward to 2018.
My girl is now a pre-schooler. She seems to have taken a liking to the evergreen Disney characters Mickey and Minnie. So the other day when we both were shopping, she pointed out this set of 8 Disney books featuring Mickey & Minnie. Since she did not have anything other than a little Mickey toy with her, I indulged her and purchased the book set so she can know more about these characters.
For the next few days, she was engrossed in these books. The usual pretend-plays and dancing and other activities went out the window and she buried herself in these books for hours on end. Rinse-repeat mode.
So one night after work, I sat down and offered to read all these books with her. This was our favorite ritual of the day when I read books to her. We started with one, ‘Astro-nutty Adventure’. This book is about this group of friends going on an adventurous journey to the outer space. All is well so far. And then there’s the part where Daisy brings pieces of paper to make the spacecraft, Donald clearly is stumped by her idea. I try to shelve this as a well-intended joke and move on. The story then moves on and the friends are now traveling in a spacecraft. And Minnie now offers everyone food that she has prepared for their journey, which the others nonchalantly refuse. In a nutshell, Mickey is the one driving the space shuttle, Donald is the one getting things ready for the spacecraft, Daisy appears to be ignorant of how spacecrafts are built and Minnie is the food-provider. Let’s give a minute to take that in.
Next up, is a book about Goofy being a Zookeeper. The animals of the petting zoo (cows, pigs & an elephant) have gone missing. And going by how close this group of friends are, everyone should be looking actively and helping. But no, Mickey and Goofy play the lead, while Minnie and Daisy are spotted in the background, one of them even sitting down and painting on a canvas board. What I cannot decide is this: Are they trying to portray the chivalry of the male characters or the disinterest/ daintiness of the female characters?
I have never owned anything Disney so I was not prepared for what I saw. In my mind I went, how could a giant like Disney do this?
Every parent knows how kids are astute observers, they draw parallels and inferences that even us adults may sometime miss. The devil is in the details here. How many women astronauts has humanity seen? How many more male chefs, female scientists, male dancers, female race-car drivers, female zoologists, male botanists is it going to take to move this needle? How much longer for big corporations like Disney to revisit their narrative? As the promoter of “Dreams Come True”, Disney needs to do a better job at every artifact they create to let kids dream bigger. Bigger sans gender-barriers. After all, we all reap what we sow and we need to sow the idea that if we believe, we achieve. And it applies to all. Boys or not.
PS: The book-set in question seems to have been published in 2015. May be that’s why! 🙄
Stop. Breathe. Relax 