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Poo rules!
For some seemingly inexplicable reason, No. 2 is No. 1 with Japanese kids.
By Brennan Conaway
[12/13/99]

He ain't heavy
He's my dry cleaner's cousin's son.
By Lisa Zeidner
[12/10/99]

She loves me, she loves me not
In an exhaustive -- and exhausting -- book on motherhood, anthropologist Sara Blaffer Hrdy breaks some big news: There is no such thing as maternal instinct.
By Susan Caba
[12/09/99]

Sophie's choice
A Canadian court will decide whether Sophie Brassard must give her children a drug cocktail or lose them to a foster home.
By Alyson Mead
[12/08/99]

The fainter
I tried acupuncture, strumming my veins and "Shocking Brain Surgery." But nothing could prepare me for witnessing my son's birth.
By Aaron Shure
[12/07/99]

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Even when commercial manufacturers make a pitch to consumers who are concerned about gender bias, they fall short, promoting a system of parallel, not integrated, play. In the mid-'90s, for example, LEGO, whose infinitely creative plastic building toys seem naturally unisex, ventured a girl-specific line called Belville. Dubbed "a great place for girls to go on vacation," Belville included a campsite, a secret island, a beach set and scant possibilities for building -- which would explain its commercial failure.

Also Today Poo rules! For some seemingly inexplicable reason, No. 2 is No. 1 with Japanese kids. By Brennan Conaway

"Our research shows that by age 5, most girls move toward more traditional toys and they see LEGOs as their brothers' toys," LEGO spokeswoman AnneMarie Mathews told me after Belville went belly up. "Girls and mothers told us what they wanted, which was role-playing opportunities and the pastel colors. Belville was popular, but it was discontinued because it couldn't compete with the other products in our line."

What about integrated systems in which male and female figures coexist on a pirate ship or on the moon, in the wild West or undersea? Why do those places -- marketed to boys -- have to be populated only by boys and men?

Even "Sesame Street" is a largely male address. Although many human females live there, only about a quarter of the Muppets are girls, and less than a quarter of the Muppets sold as dolls are female.

Every parent knows, of course, that no one is forced to shop according to type. On one level, girls have even greater play opportunities than boys: They are freer -- and more often encouraged -- to cross-play than boys.

"Girls' changing societal roles have enlarged what is acceptable for them to play with," says JoAnne Oppenheim, who with her mother, Stephanie, publishes the annual "Oppenheim Toy Portfolio: The Best Toys, Books, Videos and Software for Kids" (which now includes top-rated "gender-free products"). "In our culture -- and I do think it's cultural -- we can accept the idea that girls will be tomboys and outgrow it, but if we buy boys sissyish gifts, they might not outgrow it."

Psychologists who've studied cross-play frame this idea a bit differently: "Many cultures, including our own, assign greater status to the male sex role ... and boys face stronger pressures than girls to adhere to sex-appropriate codes of conduct," writes D.R. Shaffer in "Social and Personality Development." "The major task for young girls is to learn how not to be babies, whereas young boys must learn how not to be girls."

Nowhere is the androcracy of boys' toys more evident than in "Toy Story 2," where just two out of Andy's 16 toys (not including his 200 toy soldiers) are female.

In the first "Toy Story," the female toys don't even rate dialogue, except for the seductress Bo Peep, who propositions Woody after he finds her sheep. They speak in "Toy Story 2" ("It's so nice to have a big strong spud in the house," says Mrs. Potatohead), but not for long: The women -- Mrs. Potatohead and Bo Peep -- stay home while the men go out to rescue Woody.

Even Hamm, a piggy bank packing $6 in change, is better suited for adventure than a woman. And as spunky as cowgirl Jessie is, she still wimps out on the airplane ("What do we do now?" she wails), lets Woody save her in the end and becomes Buzz's object of desire back at the homestead. (But then, with its stay-at-home mom and all-white cast, "Toy Story 2" is more about boomer nostalgia than '90s kids -- another story altogether.)

If toy companies have largely ignored girls' desire to cross-play, however, software designers have cashed in on it.

Mattel's Fashion Designer Barbie CD-ROM is commonly touted as the electronic Prometheus that, in 1996, proved that girls weren't genetically indisposed to computers. The game, which allows players to design clothes on-screen and print them out, outsold popular boy-dominated titles (including Doom and Quake) in its first two months on the market.

But it wasn't the first game for girls. In 1994, Her Interactive released the much-reviled McKenzie & Co., a role-playing game with video clips in which the primary goal was to get a date for the prom.

The idea behind both games was to get girls wired by giving them "what they want" -- a phrase software companies, like toy manufacturers, use over and over to justify their products. Her Interactive had surveyed 2,000 girls before designing McKenzie & Co. Laura Groppe, founder of Girl Games Inc., crashed slumber parties and sat in on Girl Scout meetings before launching her 1996 title Let's Talk About Me, a melange of fashion, horoscopes, interviews with successful women and candid body talk.

Girlware flooded the market in 1997 -- dubbed the "Year for Girls" in computer games -- and the boom continues. In their new book, "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat," authors Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins track the trend, tracing it to "an unusual and highly unstable alliance between feminist activists (who want to change the 'gendering' of digital technology) and industry leaders (who want to create a girls' market for their games)." It is not clear, they say, "whether it's possible to fully reconcile the political goal with the economic one."

These warring impulses have spawned a schizoid genre: girl games that seek to seduce -- through subjects like fashion and friendship -- and educate -- via information about health and women's history. Consequently, the new software functions more like instructional teen magazines than games per se. These products aren't much fun, and action is rarely part of the mix.

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