type: link link: http://gawker.com/5963362/ title: 'Up is Down and Girls are Boys: Swedish Toy Ad Flips the Script on Christmas' date: 2012-11-26 slug: swedish-toy-ad
I have a lot of links, I'm sorry.
Sweden's been going down an interesting track with the whole gender-neutrality thing, recently, and I suppose I can't complain, though some of the things they've been doing have been a little silly. The preschool that has abolished gender is a little strange, given that the children likely go home to a family that uses gendered pronouns. It kinda begs a study of whether or not the kids treat 'hen' as slang at school, then, sorta like the whole 'yo' thing that came up a while back.
Here's an interesting comment:
Lets ignore the fact that boys will never want to play with babies and dollhouses. Lets ignore the fact that boys are different from girls.
There's a lot bound up in that comment, really. A lot that's been discussed ad nauseum before, though, so I'll not go into it other than to suggest that perhaps that might actually be the point that Sweden's kinda trying to make, here.