Early Learning Centre: make sure she's a mermaid and he's a pirate

So I go on to the ELC site. It is a UK shop which has developmental toys for kids of all ages. I was often taken there as a small child, and was highly impressed with all the toys because they let you play with a lot of them; it was forward thinking and different from other toyshops. That brand image persisted in my mind until recently, when I went to the shop and then went to the website to buy something. 

It seems that Early Learning includes one important element which takes away the fuzzy warmth of the brand for me. Along with developing fine motor skills or hand-eye coordination, ELC seems determined to teach and reinforce traditional gender stereotypes in the most obvious way, starting with blue and pink segregation and going on to limiting types of toy by gender.  Someone has devoted considerable time to assessing which of their toys are, and are not suitable for little boys and girls, and we are talking little, here, from birth onwards.

I won't even mention the boy-dressed-up-as-doctor, girl as nurse which they repeat faithfully in their dressing up gear for kids. The boy-doctor is even taller to emphasise his authority.

I'll rein myself in to just two issues.

First the blue/pink divide. You want to buy an easel for your 2 year old to do some chalking or painting at. The main thing about the easel: whether it's blue or pink. What is that teaching very young children? They quickly have to learn to identify with one or the other, and the spiral into princesses and mermaids versus pirates starts here.

If you search for arts and creativity toys for 2-3 year olds, boys versus girls, ELC tells you that it is OK for girls to have blue or pink variants, but it is not OK for 2 year old boys to have a pink art centre, pink plastic table, pink wooden table, a messy mat depicting flowers rather than bugs, a pink height chart or a pink bookcase. For them, it is blue only. 

So in more gender neutral categories like art, girls just have additional girly versions of things, which are forbidden to boys. Boys are narrowed into blue, and girls are conditioned towards the next stage of princessdom.

In the next stage, there are attempts to steer boys and girls towards gender appropriate toys. In the dolls section, there are twice as many toys deemed suitable for girls as boys, and the reverse is true in the construction section. 

It still starts young, though. It is not OK for 2 year old boys to have a play sewing card, but it is ok for girls. It is not OK for girls to have the dinosaur adventure set or the pirate cove. It is not OK for boys to have any dolls apart from rag dolls or dolls linked to an activity (that come with a highchair or bed). Baby dolls are out.  It is also not ok for girls to dress as a pirate, doctor or astronaut, or to have most of the Thomas the Tank engine trains, only a basic selection, or have the wooden garage set.

I'm not even going into the genders of the children showed playing with the toys, you can guess.

From 2 years old, girls can only have 13 of the 19 construction toys. The ones deemed unsuitable are the Bosch workbench, build your own vehicle, hammer drill, meccano easy and mechanics and the Build it Up. The bigger, more active toys where you really build something.

So if you want to gender-condition your child young, ELC is a great place to buy toys. n the 1-2 year old section, boys and girls even have their segregated colour scribbling pads, blue for boys, pink for girls, just in case they're not sufficiently conditioned by the time they reach 2 years old to ask for the correct colour of easel. 

And in case you want to start even earlier, there is the same blue versus pink version of 'buggy driver', a little steering wheel that fits on a baby's pram for them to play with (suitable for conditioning gender stereotypes from 3 months)

The swim toys range lays it on particularly thick: you are either a mermaid or a pirate, and that is that!

What hope is there of our children really having equality of opportunity when developmental toys intended for such very young kids are already pushing them firmly into these little boxes?

ELC has lovely creative toys, but the gender stereotyping is so insidious that I am scared to buy anything from them except crayons.

Let your monkey do it: pregnancy in the Noughties

There are many worlds lurking under the surface of our daily existence, both magical and unsavoury, and one of them is pregnancy. The two blue lines on the test are a bit like getting that letter from Hogwarts to say you're special, and you are about to enter a steep learning curve involving complicated ritualistic jargon, transformation of your body up to the bounds of physical impossibility, potent and behaviour-altering hormonal potions as well as spiritual visions tacked on to your everyday consciousness, and of course training for the final battle of labour, where life and destruction collide.

However, the subject of this post is how we pregnant women are viewed in society and that part of our gender regime which governs fecundity.

We have just about emerged from the sailor-collar-and-tent Princess Di maternity look where maternity clothes actually tried to minimise the bump in a kind of modesty drive, and where the pregnant woman was a kind of non-sexual being, looking as if she was on her way to baptism by immersion, robed up and ready for surgery or rebirth. Now you can have your bump out, well not usually as out as this but at least a tight-fitting top is an option. 

As someone who is heavily pregnant but walks in a jaunty, unencumbered manner down Amsterdam streets and in local neighbourhood, these are the reactions you get:

Anyone over 65: kind, sentimental smile, tells you to enjoy it while you can

Young men: terrified, ignore, ignore, ignore. There might be a leak. Avert eyes.

Younger family men: quick medic-style visual assessment of bump, rapid worried eye contact.

Older family men:  Cynical smile bordering on the suggestive, visual assessment of breast growth, more likely to attempt to stroke bump

Young women: giggle helplessly, glance at bump, look away, giggle

Women with small children: pure pity, on the point of offering help of some kind

Other pregnant women: unashamed mutual fascination and longing to co-emote 

Older women who probably have school age/teenage children: knowing stare with more of a gloat to it, never, ever, give up their seats on the bus.

Now we move on to any medical personnel who are aware that you are pregnant. They display a very calm manner but they always make sure they are facing you and there is an edge to their voice like a metaphorical hypodermic held behind their back, as if dealing with a large chimp trained to be with humans from birth but always with that risk that they might lose it and rip your arm off. 

Once you're in labour in a hospital, you really are treated like a brain donor. When I gave birth last time, I questioned or refused certain interventions, and asked for more time for things to progress naturally. The doctor, for whom it was her first day working in the hospital, was beyond incredulous at my attitude.  She could not believe it when I reminded her that she as a medical professional was recommending a certain course of action, and I would let her know whether or not I was all right with that. It was unfortunate that my statement had to be delivered to her in the form of hysterical yelling, but then I was in a lot of pain and truly hysterical; those words came from the womb.

I looked up the human rights implications of being in labour, and found that as with any hospital patient, a woman in labour can refuse treatment, but there is a particularly strong culture of pressurising women into whatever routine interventions make life easier for the hospital, rather than leading to a better birth outcome. After all, if you have a rampant chimpanzee in pain roaming your hospital corridor, they can't get as far if they're hooked up to a drip.

In summary, pregnant women's bumps are a locus for people's hopes, fears, something to rest their beer glasses of personal philosophy on. Society sees us as temporarily both vulnerable and slightly dangerous, a powder keg, due either to explode or just to ooze something unknown and distasteful on to the seat below, morally superior (unless caught swigging a beer: I had to laugh at the little picture of a pregnant woman with a line through her which is now depicted on bottles of wine and the stronger Belgian beers), sexually off-limits, our impending and inevitable surrender in labour and motherhood evoking awe and pity and reminding people of their own final surrender to death, or just life.