From: pepke@ds1.scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke)
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.feminism
Subject: Re: Mattel and math avoidance in girls
Date: 13 Oct 92 03:10:57 GMT
Reply-To: pepke@ds1.scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke)
Followup-To: alt.feminism
Organization: Florida State University, but I don't speak for them

Please note followup.

In article <1992Oct13.010558.13885@news.Hawaii.Edu> mwasson@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Michael Wasson) writes:
> Miriam Nadel writes:
>>Actually, I think dolls, including Barbie, are generally good toys.  Yes, one
>>way to play with them is to have a group of girls together dressing them up,
>>but it is also possible to do what I did just as often as a child which is
>>to use the dolls as actors in your stories.
>
>Hmmm. This is an interesting comment.  Dolls made for boys are called
>"action figures" -- but on the other hand, even if you accept Barbie(tm)
>into the realm of action figures, there's still a terrible discrepancy
>between the boys & the girls.
 ....
>the toy industry. And *yet*, IMHO it's good for kids to have imaginary,
>powerful characters to identify with. Boys get this aplenty. Girls don't.

I'm with Miriam on this one.  The toys themselves are far less important 
than the way children play with them, which, of course, has more to do with
their imagination than with what the toys are supposed to represent.  If your
child needs to identify with the character from the doll, then something
fundamentally wrong is happening.

By far my favorite doll as a child was one I found for free in the out-chute 
of a 5c capsule machine.  It was a small plastic bulldog with a human stance
in a pink-and-clear capsule.  I decided that this was Space Dog in his personal
transport shuttle.  I made it a little uniform out of a couple of strips of 
aluminum foil and some St. Elmo's Glue.  The bigger 25c capsules made great
2-passenger transports with some control panels and acceleration couches cut
out of paper, and egg cartons made great starships.  It's really too bad that
people seem to have decided that children's fantasies have to come out of a
box rather than out of their imagination.

At SIGGRAPH a couple of years ago, there was a panel on Virtual Reality.  It
was an entertaining event, with Timothy Leary rattling on and Myron Krueger
shouldering Bob Jacobson off the podium.  They also had some little "art" 
shorts of mock-ups of virtual reality with people doing various things.
First there was a BAD section, with somebody in a virtual airplane shooting
down other planes, finally pushing the button to drop The Bomb, at which he
appreciatively chortled "hyulk hyulk hyulk" ('cause everybody knows all we
Southerners are just a bunch of morons anyway).  Then there was a GOOD section
with little bits like a dieting woman eating a wafer-thin wafer while seeing
lemon meringue pie going into her face.  The one that got me was a couple of
little girls wearing the eyephones pretending to do surgery on their rag doll,
all the while seeing images from a real operation.  I thought, what a horrible
thing to slip in and obviate a child's beautiful, natural imagination with 
images prepared by some idiot adult.  I mean, real operations are certainly
fascinating, but the purpose of play is to get the child's imagination working.

-EMP
Newsgroups: soc.women