Boys Can Play With Dolls Too: Mattel Crushes Stereotypes By Launching Gender-Neutral Dolls
Monday, September 30, 2019 IST
From my first to my 10th birthday, one gift remained common every year - a gorgeous barbie doll waiting to be a part of my every growing collection of dolls. On the other hand, my brother was always gifted cars, helicopters and fancy spy gadgets. He was never gifted a doll ever, because boys don't play with dolls, right? Wrong. And this is what Mattel - a leading american multinational toy manufacturing company - is trying to change by releasing a set of gender-neutral dolls.
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The doll can be a boy, a girl, neither or both, and Mattel, which calls this the world’s first gender-neutral doll, is hoping to change the narrative of dolls belonging to girls and cars belonging to guys.
What's more intriguing is how the gender neutral dolls carry carefully crafted features that are meant to resonate with people, irrespective of gender - the lips are not artificially full, the eyelashes not extravagantly long and fluttery, the jaw not too wide. There are no Barbie-like breasts or broad, Ken-like shoulders.
Mattel launched these gender-neutral dolls today (September 25) and these will make one of the best gifts for little children. This move to create gender-neutral dolls for children is bound to create a reckoning of stereotypes that have long persisted. Men can wear pink, they can cry and they can also play with dolls. These things don't make them any less manly. On the other hand, girls can wear any colour they please, not get married, not have a pink room and play with cars if they please.
This move also guarantees that an entire generation of children will grow up considering gender neutrality as something that is normal. That's how we will give rise to a society that doesn't differentiate between men and women.
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