About a year ago,
the Reverend Jerry Falwell distinguished himself on the national front
by speculating in public that Tinky Winky, the purple, be-pursed Teletubby
of the children’s television show by the same name, was a gay role model.
Rather than delight in this possibility, Falwell chose instead to warn
less discerning people of the dangers Tinky posed to their children, chief
among which was the likelihood of their following Tinky down the path of
vice and into what Falwell insists on calling “the gay lifestyle.”
Fortunately, Falwell’s brief excursion into children’s popular culture
met the ridicule it deserves and, if anything, appears to have caused a
run on Tinkys at toy stores, if not also a change of heart in Falwell himself
as evidenced by his more recent meetings with gay and lesbian Christian
groups. Of course, Tinky Winky was not the first representative of
children’s culture to be outed—some of us can remember the suspicious glances
cast Bert and Ernie’s way—but his recent fame highlights again the high
stakes at play in children’s cultural choices and the confidence with which
adults presume to judge them.
If the silliness
of Falwell’s remarks underscores the limitations of such presumptions,
and particularly the danger of confusing the meanings adults ascribe to
children’s toys with the meanings children themselves find in them, it
should not distract us from the seriousness of children’s culture itself.
Roland Barthes’s early and prescient observation that, whether we like
it or not, “toys always mean something” might be extended to other aspects
of children’s lives and help us understand how the cultural forms and social
practices that together produce cultural articulations of “childhood” reflect
and reproduce social relations at work in the adult world these children
will soon inhabit. For Barthes, this last point is first literal
since, for him, toys generally prefigure the adult world and the child’s
future relation to it essentially by offering a microcosm of it.
His favorite example is the baby doll: “There exist, for instance,
dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle,
they wet their nappies; soon, no doubt, milk will turn to water in their
stomachs. This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality
of house-keeping” (53). That children’s toys might be implicated
in the reproduction of dominant social norms is hardly an original notion,
particularly at a time when the line of “causality” seems fairly direct
between Easy-Bake Ovens and the normative gender roles that continue to
define meal preparation and other forms of domestic work as outside the
sphere of productive labor. Barthes’s primary concern, in fact, is
not gender, but with the way most toys—he excepts blocks—are already functional,
their use inscribed in the very design of the toy itself rather than in
the possibilities the child can imagine for it. Thus “play” amounts
to emulating the habits and posture of adult ownership as children learn
the proper use of objects already made by someone else. This is perhaps
most obvious in girls’ toys, so many of which simply are younger, pinker
versions of the accessories and beauty aids they will buy later.
It may also help explain some of the hostility to Tinky’s purse.
In other words,
children’s play is really a form of work, one that poses as an alternative
to the adult world, yet which habituates children to their future labor
in it, of which consumption is a significant part. In the discussion
below, I hope to contextualize our understanding of children’s toys and
play in terms of this work, particularly the modes of production and consumption
that increasingly circumscribe their lives as it does that of their parents.
These include the intimate relation between children’s commodity culture
and women’s work outside the home; the production of childhood as a distinct
and definable stage in life either through symbolic appropriation or the
consumption of specific commodities; the consequent reproduction in children
of dominant social norms and tastes; and the central role of consumption
in children’s daily life, especially the alternately degraded and creative
work of consuming toys and other forms of the mass culture available to
them and which otherwise goes by the name of “play.”
This last is
crucial in getting beyond easy judgments about the character of children’s
toys and what children do with them. For example, the suggestiveness
of Barthes’s recognition that ownership is an integral part of children’s
play should not blind us to the fact that in terms of its conception of
both the child and the child’s relation to her world, his commentary on
baby dolls is not significantly different from Falwell’s homophobic analysis
of Tinky Winky or even a feminist critique of Barbie that blames her for
eating disorders in young girls as well as a host of other gender-related
dysfunctions said to be a consequence of Barbie’s unrivaled career as domestic
uber-babe. All assume that children uncritically consume their own
culture and, even then, consume it in the same way adults would or in the
way adults believe children would. More importantly, each relies
for the force of its critique on an image of children’s essential innocence,
on a belief in their separation from a larger adult world seen as alternately
hostile or foreign, always threatening to invade and corrupt that innocence,
and on the need for children to be protected from that world by adults
who act and speak for them.
The dangers of
seeing children in these terms, as existing outside the political, as almost
pre-social and naturally good as a result, should be evident to anyone
who follows party politics in the United States. Emptied of any meaning
or political agency in their own right, children are routinely converted
in national discourse into blank slates that can then be made to exhibit
and maintain the symbolic demands subsequently made upon them. As
with Falwell and the unnamed Barbie-bashing feminists, this violence occurs
on both the left and the right. Thus, every election year we can
hear Republicans invoking childhood innocence as a link to a putatively
better past and as a tool for enforcing normative sexual identities and
gender roles. Democrats, meanwhile, position the child as a bridge
to a better future in the service of their own myths of progress.
That we may prefer one or the other of these social narratives and the
specific social policies they reinforce does not change the fact that both
deny children their own political voice and agency. The insistence
on children’s innocence is particularly disturbing since, in universalizing
the child, it simultaneously refuses to admit which children need to be
protected (since we don’t actually protect them all) while clearly announcing
who and what constitute threats to them.
Of course, as
the Falwell story reminds us, nowhere has this manipulation of the category
of the child and of the myth of children’s innocence, especially as it
is marshaled in response to some “threat,” been more evident and more potentially
damaging than in its use to police adult sexuality and children’s bodies
and to terrorize working women with the specter of endangered children
at day care centers staffed by Satan worshipers and pedophiles. While
we may feel repelled by images of little JonBenet tarted up for her next
gig, we should also recall that the impulse to see in her life and death
a morality tale about the invasion of adult sexualities and gender into
the otherwise pure space of childhood also denies children like JonBenet
any role in creating, shaping, and using their own fantasies simply because
they are fantasies we don’t like or will not admit to sharing or because
we fear they will lead to just the kind of assault she endured.
JonBenet’s may be an ugly story, but it is not a simple or obvious one.
Its complexities should alert us to how an overemphasis on pedophilia in
our discussions of children may actually displace consideration of the
myriad other ways children are imbricated in social relations with adults,
not to mention the ways children attempt to negotiate them.
This notion of
children’s innocence is the product of the historical development of childhood
as a category in the West and is directly related to children’s central
place in contemporary commodity culture. Indeed, historians have
demonstrated rather convincingly that the period of life we now identify
as childhood comes into being and develops as a distinct division in human
life parallel to and in conjunction with the creation and development of
a market economy. There is, for example, little that resembles the
condition we think of as the innocent child in medieval culture, where
casual nudity and touching among adults and children were common and where
children routinely heard dirty jokes and shared beds with each other and
adults. The rise of the middle class altered much of this by elevating
the need to define distinctly middle-class behaviors that must be now learned
and reproduced in order to keep the class distinguished from everyone else.
Thus, childhood emerges as a period of education when one must be taught
a specialized body of knowledge in order to conform to evolving social
norms and, for boys, in order to succeed in the marketplace. Increasingly
in the Eighteenth Century, childhood is seen as a time of freedom before
work and children themselves as closer to nature and valued precisely for
the fact that they were not yet like adults. By the Nineteenth Century,
this belief was manifested in efforts to prolong childhood beyond its usual
length and to represent children by actions and goods specific to them.
It is in the Nineteenth Century, too, when the law catches up as, for the
first time, legal protections for animals against physical abuse are extended
to children and when child labor laws begin excluding them from the world
of work. Later, they will be made exempt from the adult criminal
justice system as well. Now, increasingly, the lost value of children’s
labor is compensated for by the growing sentimental and symbolic value
attached to them in the home, particularly the middle-class home, and,
as we have seen, in the public imaginary.
More than anything
else, the articulation of the modern child is visible in the growth of
products marketed specifically for this new category of persons and designed
to reinforce the idea that they are, in fact, distinct and thus require
their own kind of stuff. For the first time, department stores devote
entire sections exclusively to children’s goods. These include special
clothes that are now clearly identified as “children’s clothes” and distinguished
from the clothes adults wear; special furniture like high chairs, school
desks, and sitting chairs requiring special rooms like nurseries and playrooms
to house and maintain children and their possessions; special foods like
breakfast cereals advertised in terms of their ability to fulfill the unique
nutritional requirements of children; special medicines and soaps geared
toward children’s sensitivity and medical needs, both ostensibly required
by children’s greater delicacy and purity; and, finally, special tools
for children’s play, by which I mean their toys. As Stephen Kline
has argued, the intense cultural stylization of the child, particularly
in the last hundred years, is one reason why it is much easier to pick
out children in twentieth-century art and photography than in the artwork
of earlier periods (55). They are just marked off as different, and, certainly
by the 1920s, they are used in advertising to promote normative ideas of
family and culture. The modern family, for example, increasingly
is figured in relation to its consumption by and for children, as the entire
family’s prosperity is measured in terms of its children’s health and well-being.
As the standard of living increased throughout this century, the burden
of establishing the family’s prosperity is manifested in changes in child-rearing
and consumption habits as the new locus of concern shifts from preserving
children’s health to overseeing their psychological and moral development.
This is, I suspect,
pretty much where we are now, and one can register the effects of this
progress not only in changes in toys themselves, for example, in increase
in “educational” or “cultural” toys designed with the intention of making
children better people, but also in the competing social anxieties with
which adults approach children’s culture, specifically guilt and nostalgia.
One hears the former in a mother’s insistence that her child was never
given guns as toys and that he grew up with “‘good’ educational shows”
like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Both in this and in her honest
admission that parenthood is a humbling endeavor, she speaks for many people
in their efforts to shield children from some of the more apparently disabling
aspects of dominant culture and in their disappointment in discovering
how genuinely difficult that is to do. I want to put this idea of
parental guilt squarely on the table because I think it is something that
is marshaled and manipulated in ways parents often do not see, probably
because they are too busy feeling guilty or running around after their
kids, but which needs to be diffused and understood for what it is.
First, it is
seldom remarked, but certainly the case, that the changes in children’s
consumption and in marketing geared toward them are directly related to
changes in women’s roles in the workplace. It is simply not possible
to talk about children’s commodity culture or children’s play without considering
both the remarkable amount of unpaid labor women perform in the home and
the increases in their paid work outside of it. The exponential
increase in the number of doo-dads for kids—not just toys, but convenience
foods, videos, strollers, car seats, and other gadgets for hauling them
and their stuff around or for feeding and entertaining them as they move
from home to car to day care to the store and back again—is self-evidently
related to the fact that women do not have as much time to take care of
their children as they would if they did not work outside the home.
Advertisers certainly understand this and have responded accordingly, for
example in the promotion of goods in terms of their ability to occupy or
distract children so that parents can do something else. Thus videos
and cartoons allow women to cook supper or do other things around the house,
or the right toys have to be assembled for every outing to the grocery
store to keep the kid from wreaking havoc in the aisles. Indeed,
I have had more than one student come to my office with a child in tow
and a collection of crayons and coloring books to keep her occupied while
we spoke. Something similar is at play in those things hawked for
their ability to defuse conflict in the home. People of a certain
age will remember that Life cereal supported itself for over a decade with
just this kind of plug as we all watched to see if “Mikey” would ever eat
his breakfast.
These things
have become so naturalized for us, that we no longer connect them to the
social relations they reflect and support. But it is not hard to
see how behind our concerns for children’s culture, especially our concern
for their “psychological and moral development,” is an image of the mother
as a figure of neglect. You can hear it in how we talk to each other:
“Oh, your children watch TV?” “My Timmy’s never been interested in
guns, but, then, I never liked Barbie either.” But this cattiness
only masks the greater fear: that our own efforts for Timmy’s welfare might
not be enough and are, regardless, poor compensation for what he might
have if we stayed at home. Now, my point is not that we should stay
home, but that we need to understand how our guilt about our children’s
cultural choices—the toys they like, the shows they watch—is related to
and manipulated by this image of the neglectful mother, how powerful a
pull that is on us even when we do understand it, but, most importantly,
how that image can be sustained only by abstracting it from a broader historical
analysis of the social and economic relations in which children and
adults find themselves. Such work could, at the very least, give
us more and better ways of understanding how we are pulled into these cultural
constructions even when we think we are separating ourselves from them.
Some careful
historicizing, for example, would quickly deflate many people’s expectations
for the educational materials and toys they encourage their kids to play
with. After all, the rise in the availability of educational toys and of
specialized toy stores has less to do with parental demand for these things,
even less with the good intentions of toy makers, than with the overall
fragmentation of the toy market itself and corporate attempts to adapt
to it. So all those people buying the “American Girl” series’ Reconstruction-era
Addy with her various companion books and assorted accessories, including
a miniature version of the Union Reader to go with her school desk and
tin lunch pail, instead of Puerto Rican Barbie on the theory that they
are at least not buying into this mass-produced clone doll and are somehow,
therefore, opting out of mass culture, are really just being targeted in
another segment of the toy market itself, and probably one that has already
figured you would end up there. This is only one of the ways in which
our various attempts to circumvent or short circuit the overwhelming presence
of consumption in our children’s lives backfire and turn into de facto
endorsements of it. The discourse of children’s rights or a preference
for a kind of permissiveness in their upbringing, for example, emphasizing
children’s roles in decision-making in the family, can actually be said
to play into advertisers’ needs, not only by encouraging children to think
of themselves as consumers, but by encouraging a notion of the family as
really just a collection of privatized consumers who happen to live together
because it provides an economical way to house all their stuff.
Clearly children
learn from owning and playing with toys a number of our cultural conceptions
about possessions: how to share, how to give gifts and receive them graciously,
how to wait, organize, and lend their things. They also learn something
about the rights of ownership and fairness, and about the unequal distribution
of wealth and the relation of wealth to social status. For their
part, advertisers quickly came to understand that what kids looked for
in commercials was other kids. This is why you do not see or hear
adults in toy commercials. You also don’t see or hear kids talking about
their toys; what you do see are kids playing with toys, always in groups,
usually same sex. As one researcher from Mattel put it, “kids like
to watch other kids on TV or in the ads for toys—to gauge their own reactions
against those of other children” (qtd. In Kline 171). This seems to go
hand in hand with the widely confirmed observation that children are extremely
peer conscious, that they want to be with others who share their judgments
about their toys, and are hyperalert to any suggestion in a toy commercial
that a particular toy will either augment or compromise that goal.
For example, Mattel and Hasbro discovered that toy commercials with just
one kid never went anywhere, that their test audience of kids actually
said things like “that toy can’t be any fun” or, worse, “that kid can’t
be any fun.” In other words, children learn very early to see toys not
just as another thing to have, but as something to use in achieving social
goals, chief among which was relations with other kids.
That they understand
and accept this is one of the reasons why some of the best research on
children’s culture, especially children’s desires and fantasies in relation
to their play, has been done by the people who manufacture and market children’s
toys. Unencumbered by a social conscience of any kind, toy makers are propelled
by the most uncomplicated of motivations—the need to sell—and are frankly
and openly committed to producing whatever toy will do just that. In other
words, their very lack of designs for a child’s moral and intellectual
growth has allowed them in some ways to become more closely attuned to
what children actually want. This is one reason Fisher-Price started
its own nursery school in order to have a readily available test group
to study. Calling it “a pragmatic research effort,” the company claimed
to “try to relate what we’re doing to children, how they act, how they
develop. Their likes and dislikes. We want to know what parents think,
of course, but our real concern is for children. We’re out to create
toys that are fun for children” (qtd. in Kline 185). This does not mean
their motives are innocent or that they do not have substantial say in
shaping children’s interests. Children may have preferences, but
they do not make these preferences into cultural symbols on their own.
For example, while it is well known that many girls have a thing for horses,
girls themselves probably never imagined the possibility of linking their
love of horses with their interest in hair, as did the makers of “My Little
Pony” which comes with its own vanity and mirror, combs and barrettes for
arranging Tipsy Tulip’s pink mane.
While it is true
that toy makers do not just cater to the already existent or freely articulated
desires of children, but instead help shape both those desires and the
goods that will ostensibly satisfy them, this critique ignores several
points which together limit somewhat its force: First, the argument
that children’s culture exists primarily in the realm of consumption, and
even then consumption from a limited range of choices children themselves
neither determine nor control, describes not just the condition of children
in an adult world, but the condition of everyone in an advanced, post-industrial,
and increasingly global capitalist economy. Whether we like it or
not, most people in a country like the United States have limited if any
say in the “culture” that is produced for them other than choosing to watch
one movie over another. This is not to say there are no artists anymore,
only that what used to be known as folk culture has largely disappeared
for many people in the wake of mass culture and the mass production and
reproduction of commodities and images. Rather than sitting around
fretting about this or feeling guilty or deriding ourselves and each other
for the fact that most of us do not make and distribute our own movies
or because our children, in spite of our best wishes and efforts, seem
always to prefer the most schlocky, mass produced junk they can find, it
might be more profitable for us to actually look at what people are doing
with the mass culture available to them rather than deciding beforehand
what their relation to it is.
Second, in spite
of the omnipresence of mass culture, there is now and never has been any
sure correlation between what the culture industry produces and what people
will choose to consume. If there were, then music producers would
not toss in the trash 9/10s of the CDs recorded in any given year and which
never go anywhere because they fail to capture anyone’s interest.
Likewise there is no such thing as an all-powerful toy industry over-determining
our children and their future with the toys foisted on them year after
year. Even a cursory glance at the bargain bins at Toys-R-Us will
make this evident as will the annual amazement of film and toy makers at
the toys children actually choose to make popular. The industry is
rife with examples: a character line called the “Inhumanoids” was a flop
in spite of its extensive promotion because the toys actually scared kids.
None of its creators expected or ever really understood why the “Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles” took off with kids, though they were quick to recognize
the Turtles’ popularity and capitalize on it. Similarly, the makers of
the animated film Toy Story were caught off guard when in addition
to Talking Woody and Buzz Lightyear, the cowboy and astronaut toys that
had been the object of all the producer’s promotional efforts and tie-ins
with fast-food restaurants and toy stores, children perversely demanded
the film’s mutant toys as well. For those of you unfamiliar with
Toy
Story, wanting the mutant toys—these are toys that have been disassembled
and rebuilt by the nasty boy next door, e.g. he puts a baby doll’s head
on the body of a spider—is akin to actually preferring the misfit toys
from the end of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to the “normal” toys
that save them.
This last example
should highlight the difficulties of sustaining at least one of our typical
complaints about children’s popular culture or at least repeating it so
easily: the guilt about kids watching too much television, recently
compounded by the recommendation to pediatricians to investigate and encourage
parents to monitor the amount of television their children watch.
Yet, recommendations like these draw on a set of assumptions about television
watching, many of which have long been disputed if not outright rejected
by scholars in communications and certainly in cultural studies:
TV is bad; it is bad because 1) what is shown on TV is dumb, violent,
sexist or some combination of the above and because 2) watching TV is essentially
a passive, non-imaginative activity. You can hear again in this last
complaint the same idealized image of childhood as a time of activity and
development. In fact, “passive” might be about the worst thing one
can say about a child today as opposed to earlier historical periods when
docility in children was actually considered a virtue. Unfortunately,
we simply cannot assume with any consistent accuracy that the design of
a toy or the content of a television show determines for kids how it can
be played with or how it must be watched. Children are able at a
very young age to recognize genres, and they watch TV in different ways,
sometimes paying close attention, sometimes while playing with something
else. Television certainly encodes dominant ideology, and it also
carries oppositional meanings, but the presence of either tells us nothing
about how children will read or use them. This is why research on
children’s television that stops at content analysis—how many acts of violence,
how many girls per boy—will never tell us the whole story about what children
are doing with TV or how “active” or “passive” they are as watchers of
it.
The popularity
of character dolls like the Power Rangers for boys is partly a result of
the way these toys and TV are mutually reinforcing. One reason
why it is difficult to intervene in how children play with these dolls
is because they come not just with a name and identity, but with an elaborate
history and sense of purpose, a whole cosmology of allies and enemies,
that may seem to us arbitrary and weird or obvious and dumb, but which
nevertheless has a kind of internal consistency that children not only
know, but respect. Often, they know this “backstory” from watching cartoons
composed of the same characters, but even when they do not get it from
TV, they get it from their friends, because it is widely understood by
these kids that to play with one of the power rangers is to play with him
within the parameters already established by the show or by the toys already
available. This is why kids don’t really mix and match dolls from different
product lines and why suggestions from mom or the teacher that the dolls
act out alternative scenarios fall flat, are met with looks of confusion,
or are endured for her benefit then dropped when she’s gone. Kids will
just say, “but this guy always fights with that guy.”
A toy’s backstory
also contributes to the self-segregation by gender which is almost universally
reported in studies of children at play and reinforced in school by the
teacher’s mantra, “boys and girls,” as though this were the only or at
least the definitive way of categorizing human beings. Imagine,
for example, asking students to form lines of quiet people and loud people.
It is a chicken and egg problem really: the toys are obviously highly gendered,
almost comically so, yet it is too easy just to attribute all of this to
toy makers who, after all, just want to make money, not engage in social
engineering. For example, Hasbro, which makes a lot of the character
toys, claimed they tried at first to design a character toy that would
appeal to both boys and girls and would actually cross the usual age groupings.
But they had to give up because nothing worked. Their intention,
of course, was not to come up with a gender-adverse doll, but to save themselves
the considerable expense it takes now to design these product lines precisely
because you cannot count on their success without marketing them in their
own TV shows if not a movie as well. The result of this experiment,
though, was greater market segmentation by gender. The toys were
heavily marketed to girls or boys with the result that only girls or boys
know the whole narrative that surrounds the toy and are thus able to play
with it in the way kids want to play with them. This is, I suspect,
why boys are more likely to play with the female dolls that come with their
action figures than they are to play with Ken. Indeed, those toy
commercials in which boys and girls appear together, or which include adults,
are for toys which do not have an accompanying backstory. Even when
they do play with each other’s toys, boys and girls play with them in very
different ways: GI Joe is put down for a nap with a bottle.
Of course, what
people don’t like about these toys is the fact that play with them seems
overly prescribed by a television show, thus thwarting all opportunities
for imagination and originality. But kids’ play is always a combination
of imitation and imagination; it may also be that imitation requires more
in the way of imagination than we realize or admit. I suspect the
real complaint here is that television has replaced other sources of cultural
narratives that become the basis for their imitative and imaginative play.
This may be a bad thing, though I am not entirely sure of that, but it
is not a new thing and it is, again, not exclusive to children. Now
for the nostalgia moment: I can remember as a kid very entertaining and
what I certainly thought were imaginative games of acting out entire episodes
of The Mod Squad. Actually, we used TV all the time as a source book
for play. In fact, I did it earlier when I tried to explain one mass
culture offering for kids, Toy Story, in terms of another, Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But before anyone cuts in and says, “yeah,
but The Mod Squad was about these cool kids (who just happened to
work for the man) and Power Rangers are really politically offensive,”
let me say that when we weren’t playing The Mod Squad we were playing
something like Lost in Space or Mannix or, in the spirit
of really true confessions, Here Come the Brides. While we
usually based our play on an episode of a show we had recently seen, we
never hesitated to amend and adapt it to current contingencies: altering
the plot, adding or deleting characters according to who was available
to play. In fact, I think the only thing we did not fiddle with was
gender, but I am not willing to pin that on TV, at least not exclusively.
Television, in other words, gets put to many different kinds of uses by
kids, most obviously as the basis for their interaction with other kids.
Like toys, it is less important for what it is than for what it can be
made to do in a social realm. The suspicion that children’s minds
are being colonized by Barney downplays the extent to which children do
not simply recapitulate what they have seen and heard on TV, but revamp
and reinterpret it in the context of their play.
The biggest criticism
one can make about television is that it makes children want more toys
while at the same time presenting them with images of uniformly perfect
families, that is families made equal at the level of consumption.
In other words, it does what everything else in our culture does, including
toy stores, by presenting children with a wealth of goods while obscuring
the unequal social relations required to produce and consume them.
This includes gender relations. In “Gender as Commodity,” Susan Willis
points out that when children encounter gendered toys or when they discover
entire areas of the toy store already gendered for boys or girls, they
see gender as something inhering in the toy itself rather than as something
that has resulted from a series of decisions made by actual human people,
all of them adults, at every stage of the toy’s design, production, marketing,
and distribution. To them, toys just appear on the boys’ shelves
or in the Barbie aisles, and, thus, seem naturally to belong in one place
or the other. As Willis notes, one can see a similar confusion resulting
from hidden social relations in the way kids think of ATM machines as cash
dispensers with little or no conception of the financial exchanges taking
place somewhere else (24-25). We might think also on this point of the
frequency with which the word “magic” appears on toy packaging, especially
on girls’ toys where it refers to the magic of disappearing labor.
Barthes might be intrigued to discover forty years later that little girls
have available to them Newborn Diaper Surprise capable of eliminating dirty
diapers since, unlike real babies, when this doll drinks, “the color magically
appears in her diaper without the diaper mess! The Diaper Surprise
Center makes it easy to dispose of soiled diapers. Magically, a clear
one is right at your finger tips!” Yet alongside this modern convenience
is Amazing Amy, which enjoyed a brief vogue in 1998, a life-sized toddler
so relentless in her demands on her young owner that some parents felt
compelled to lock her in the basement out of earshot so their daughters
could sleep through the night.
Now, it is true
that children who are watching television are not outside playing tag,
but this is the point at which we have to seriously consider the degree
to which nostalgia is skewing our understanding of what kids are actually
doing now. In the last year, I have been clipping newspaper and popular
magazine articles on kids and toys, and to date there are only two kinds
of stories published on this topic: there is the story about how kids do
not like regular toys any more, but only want the high-tech stuff, especially
video games, but also anything that can be rigged up to a computer. Then
there is the other story about how kids soon cast aside their high tech
stuff and return to the old standbys, what are referred to in the toy business
as “classic toys,” sort of like “classic rock”: Etch-a-Sketch, Legos,
Lincoln logs, Spirograph, Play Doh, and the venerable Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead.
Whether or not it is more imaginative to stick a foot in Mr. Potatohead’s
ear than it is to turn a person into a robot or an airplane as the transformers
do is not entirely clear to me, though I take seriously the point that
change in the transformer toys is already inscribed in the toy itself and
thus limited by the toy’s mechanics—what it can and cannot become—rather
than by the child’s imagination (Willis 36).
But I am skeptical
of the claim, made by the president of the company that produces the Radio
Flyer and one I suspect is shared on some level by people who wish their
kids would play with classic toys rather than the high tech ones, that
these toys endure because they have “intrinsic value.” They do not
have intrinsic value; what they have is the value parents and grandparents
remember them having and which is now seen by them rather in the same way
gender in toys is seen by children: i.e., as intrinsic to the object itself,
rather than as a function of the object’s use. This is what is known
in Marxist theory as a commodity fetish, best evidenced in children’s culture
in the string of highly profitable collectibles such as Beanie Babies,
Furbies, and now Pokémon cards and characters. But the notion
that children would be better off playing with a Ouija board or Slinky
instead of Transformers or whatever, no matter how much fun we had with
those toys as kids or how important they might have been to the way we
negotiated social relations with our peer groups, does not mean that the
toy would have that function for children today even if they enjoy playing
with it too. It also forgets that “classic” toys were probably once
considered faddish, mass culture junk in their own time, in the same way
that “classic rock” used to be just top-40.
Let’s face it:
part of what motivates adults to purchase certain kinds of toys or to encourage
their kids to play in certain ways or to watch certain shows, is the fear
that we will be somehow implicated in their consumption and because, frankly,
we don’t like what they like. What happens, though, is that this
very simple idea gets complicated when it meets up with our belief in children’s
innocence and their need to be protected, and with parental guilt, particularly
guilt in relation to “overseeing children’s psychological and moral growth,”
all of which makes it hard for people to see what they are actually doing
when, for example, a class of first grade-girls is encouraged to make fun
of Barbie for their skit in the school show, as happened to the daughter
of a friend. I do not for a minute believe that that skit would have
ever been done on their own by the girls who actually play with Barbie,
the 3 to 6 year olds. So, I am wondering at what point it became
O.K. to openly mock the taste of other people. If we are not used
to talking about this issue in these terms, then that may be because we
have fallen victim to a familiar confusion of categories—specifically taste,
morality, and class—that results in assigning moral values to what are
essentially differences in taste or judgment about aesthetic merit between
working-, middle- and upper-class people.
Consider, in
this light, “Olympic Skater Barbie and Ken,” two dolls I have displayed
in various public discussions of toys, always to the amusement of colleagues
and students. But what exactly is so wrong with “Olympic Skater Barbie
and Ken” that we feel compelled and entitled to laugh at them? Perhaps
the initial reaction is to their appearance: the turquoise costumes
with rhinestone trim and Barbie’s gloriously big hair. Maybe the
problem is that on some aesthetic registers figure skating falls somewhere
between bad camp and an even worse kind of showy patriotism, a sort of
kitsch ballet, neither art nor sport. Should this bother us when
it is an activity publicly dominated by women and gay men? Consider
also “Power and Beauty, with Fist Pounding Action,” male and female character
dolls based on people who appear on World Championship Wrestling’s Monday
Nitro. Like other action figures, they come already embedded in their
own cultural milieu, with their own plots, costumes, and assortment of
colorful friends. In this case, they just happen to be the people
from professional wrestling, as seen on TV. What’s the problem with
them? What particular danger do they pose? Is it that kids
will start throwing each against walls or begin attempting wrestling holds?
They do that already. Or is it that they will come home one day looking
like looking like Jesse Ventura in his early days? I am not saying
this fear is not real, though I do think it underestimates kids’ appreciation
for camp and the carnivalesque. One of the little discomforts of
living in the present moment is the realization that while postmodernism
has effectively broken down and rearranged the distinctions between high
and low culture, so that, for example, wrestling’s audience does not correspond
in any clear way to any one socio-economic class, but also that political
economy has made it more and more likely that the same will happen to some
of us: that is, that some people in the middle-class or their children
will get caught up in the downwardly mobile trend of economic opportunity
and end up working class, if not actually white trash, which has become
an aesthetic and economic category.
Anyone who needs
an object lesson in the reproduction of dominant sensibility and taste
should head out to the mall the next time there is a display of children’s
art arranged by grade— kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and on
up. What you can see in this arrangement is the point at which formal
art training begins because it is the point at which the quality of the
art declines. It is quite stark actually when, by the third grade or so,
the almost native sense of color and composition children exhibit in the
earlier grades gives way to dull and predictable compositions and clich?d
subjects sometimes reproduced almost exactly from one child to the next
as the definition of good or bad art becomes how close one can get to reproducing
a standard model.
We all know that
children’s stuff is class-marked in all the ways adult stuff is.
We’ve been to the Baby Gap. We’ve seen the Eddy Bauer car seats with
their tasteful hunter green and tan plaid reversible cushions. Anyone
can go into Toys-R-Us and find in the aisles of the girls’ section devoted
to household appliances competing versions of stove and microwave sets,
one called “Victorian Kitchen” retailing for $100 and another called mundanely
if also tellingly “Family Kitchen” and selling for half that. But
none of this quite gets at what I am getting at here, which has more to
do with how our criticism of children’s culture, for example by scrutinizing
it for its potentially damaging effects on a child’s mental or moral health,
actually preserves cultural hierarchies and the cultural capital of the
people benefiting from them by dismissing children’s popular culture in
favor of more acceptable middle- and high-brow versions. This is,
finally, as far as I can tell, what really distinguishes Addy from Peruvian
Barbie. To be frank, I find it strange that no one ever seems
to think that repeatedly telling or intimating to kids, particularly girls,
that their toys are stupid, or boring, or somehow just wrong, might actually
do as much harm as we think the toys do. Has it not occurred to anyone
that our criticism of Barbie or My Little Pony or Strawberry Shortcake
not only reproduces the criticism girls already hear all the time about
their toys from boys, but repeats it in exactly the same terms—Girls’ toys
are dumb because they are so girly. We thus risk compounding rather
than correcting the poor sense of self-worth ostensibly propelling girls
toward hyper-feminine toys in the first place (Seiter 145-171).
Maybe we should
go with John Locke. He thought kids should have as many toys as they
want, as long as they make them all themselves. This would probably
calm many people’s nerves, though we might have to brace ourselves for
what kids come up with. One of the great things about the animated
show South Park is how, though not designed for children, it manages
to capture a certain quality of children’s culture so exactly and irreverently.
I am thinking of its combination of gallows humor and lunchroom and bathroom
jokes, as in the case of the kid who dies every week or the talking turd
phenomenon which, even more than the weekly-expiring child, has raised
the eyebrows of would-be critics. It is somewhat refreshing actually to
see the ways kids resist their own idealization and cultural appropriation
by seeming to revel in their own kind of gross-out aesthetic. This is probably
more the case with boys, but not exclusively. Think of all the candy
or kids’ foods that come in weird, non-food colors or that do strange things
in your mouth—bubbling or crackling—or that turn your mouth different colors.
Or candy that comes in the shape of things adults don’t eat and would actually
find repulsive, worms and bugs. Or food that you can’t eat or toys
you can’t play with without getting dirty. Remember candy cigarettes?
I assume they’ve died a natural death because of the fear that they glamorized
smoking, but never forget that we did with candy cigarettes what no adult
ever does with a real cigarette—we ate them.
One of the many
things Toni Morrison gets right in her novel The Bluest Eye is just
this fascination by kids with grossness, particularly grossness in relation
to their own bodies. Readers of the novel will remember Claudia’s
fascination with her body’s capacity to produce a whole range of obnoxious
or revolting smells, sounds, and substances. This is one of Morrison’s
ways of calling attention to how growing up for Claudia, and for other
little girls and boys too, is in great measure a process of changing one’s
relation to one’s own body. And so, over the course of the novel,
we watch with a combination of horror and inevitability as Claudia learns
to see herself as dirty and in need of the baths she hated so much as a
child. Perhaps remembering this story and children’s fascination
with the revolting more generally can give us a different way to think
about those video games in which blood and guts seem always to be spurting
out of someone’s side or people’s heads and various other body parts are
dismembered and flying through the air.
While I do not
want to open up whole new avenues for the flow of parental guilt, I believe
we need to think through more completely what we are doing when we resist
children’s culture if only because doing so might suggest a different way
of conceptualizing how we relate to them and their stuff. At the
very least, we cannot redirect children’s energies to toys we find more
palatable if we do not understand what has attracted them to the toys they
already have or want and which seem to satisfy some need otherwise not
satisfied in their lives, for example, a need for community in addition
to or as an alternative to the ones they now enjoy: family and school.
If I could add a corollary to this it would be that adults need to understand
what our investments in children’s popular culture might say about our
own social needs as well as about how we have learned to satisfy them.
If there is utopian potential in what many see as the degraded character
of much of children’s toys today, it is in the uses to which children put
them, which are, finally, more creative than we may have been willing to
admit and more resistant that we might want to imagine. The world
of children’s play may look, as Barthes suggested, like a microcosm of
the world of work they will soon encounter, but it is not a world they
are required to reproduce nor one to which we have a simple or direct relationship.
Notes
Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972
Berk, Sarah Fenstermaker. The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households. New York: Plenum , 1985.
Calvery, Karin. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1983.
Cowan, Schwartz Ruth. More Work for Mother. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
DeMause, Lloyd, ed. The History of Childhood. London: Souvenir P, 1976.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Formanek-Brunnel, Miriam. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
Giroux, Henry A. “Stealing Innocence: The Politics of Child Beauty Pageants.” In Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: NYU Press, 1998. 265-282.
Hochschild, Arlie. The Second Shift. New York: Avon, 1989.
James, Alice. Childhood Conceptions. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.
Jenkins, Henry. “Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths” in Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: NYU Press, 1998. 1-37.
Kincaid, James R. “Producing Erotic Children.” In Diana Fuss, ed. Human, All Too Human. New York: Routledge, 1996. 203-219.
Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. London: Verso, 1993.
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. 1693.
Martin, Karin A. “Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools.” American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 494-511.
Pollack, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993.
Walkerdine, Valerie. Daddy’s Little Girl. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
---. “Popular Culture and the Eroticization of Little Girls.” In James Curran, David Morley, and Valerie Walkerdine, eds. Cultural Studies and Communication. London: Arnold, 1996.
Willis, Susan. “Gender as Commodity.” A Primer for Daily Life. NY: Routledge, 1991.
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