DIANA writes:

The newest viral video is yet another example of Hunger Games America. That is my new little personal invention: Hunger Games America, or HGA. Some have BRA, I have HGA. It’s the America where butt-kickin’ babes rule and sensitive boys let them do the heavy lifting.

It makes my head want to explode. The U.S. invented the notion of popular culture, and the complete degradation of popular culture in the U.S. says something deep. I’m not saying the old days were sheer genius – but Hollywood films did reflect something real, albeit in a funhouse manner. Today’s popular culture has jumped the shark – a whole school of sharks.

So here’s the video, and a Times article on it.

When I see stuff like this, I become enraged, and all I can do is write to The Thinking Housewife!

I don’t have a daughter, I don’t have children. But I was a little girl once, and I have eyes in my head and a semi-functioning brain. Also, several of the guys in my family were engineers. This is insanity.

A gender atypical minority will never be the norm. I happen to know a few female engineers. They are, in a word, unusual. I also know some male ballet dancers. 80% of them are homosexual. The few who aren’t were pushed by their parents, were born into show families.

Trying to get girls to be engineers is like trying to turn boys in ballet dancers. The analogy is perfect: both are brutally tough professions requiring tremendous personal sacrifice, suited to the unique traits of the other gender. A girl will give up a lot to be a ballerina – there’s just something about that strange world of moonlit groves, tulle and sequins and makeup. All of this makes a normal man go, “yuck.” Conversely, there’s just something about spending 48 hours on a project, fueled on cigarettes and caffeine, to make something RUN or FLY, that makes a certain kind of dude happy, happy, happy.

And it’s been tried in the old Soviet Union. They tried to turn girls into engineers and many did become engineers formally, but they weren’t good at it, and the vast majority left the field as soon as they could. Being an engineer is not just intellectually demanding, it is highly aggressive in a way that the theoretical sciences aren’t.

My brother, a math whiz, tried to become an engineer but found the course nerve-wracking. It had zero to do with intellect. A surprisingly large number of math whizzes are sensitive souls. His personality simply did not suit the rough and tumble of engineering. He went into a cognate field that allowed him to think and play, and flourished.

Regarding ballet, in the old U.S.S.R. a boy with a promising body type was given a full scholarship in a state academy. That is how their great dancers were produced: by compulsion. Now that that is gone, ballet has reverted to its natural state of women and (mostly) homosexual men, although the culture is such that more normal men take it up there than here. The vast majority of boys have zero interest in something that requires them to wear makeup and tights, while destroying their knees.

By the way, regarding the Times piece linked above, most of the time the comments section to a news item is worthless, but in this case, the comments are worth reading. Believe it or not some commenters make sense (scroll to TT in Europe); the feminist comments are characterized by the usual illogic and personal instability.

— Comments —

Buck writes:

Often, all one has to do is to read closely what liberals write. Their denials and attempts to defy any natural order are betrayed by their own words. The New York Times blog entry by Claire Miller qoutes Ms. Debbie Sterling, the founder and chief executive of GoldieBlox: “It’s O.K. to be a princess,” she said. “We just think girls can build their own castles too.”

So an ad is created to make that point. It depicts “three girls (who) are bored watching princesses in pink on TV. So they grab a tool kit, goggles and hard hats and set to work building a machine that sends pink teacups and baby dolls flying through the house, using umbrellas, ladders and, of course, GoldieBlox toys.”

Further down Claire Miller matter-of-factly adds this: “Brett Doar, an artist who specializes in making machines, created the Rube Goldberg machine.”

Here’s a video of young MISTER Doar walking us through his creation.

Rita Jane writes:

My family has been in the toy business for two decades, and we make a distinction between the two kinds of toys:

1. Toys parents buy for their children.

2. Toys children pick for themselves.

If you go into any high-end independent toy store, you’ll see the first kind of toys. They’re made of wood, or educational, or gender neutral, or have muted colors, and they definitely never require batteries, light up, or make noises. These are the toys parents buy to reflect their values and worldview. They aren’t all bad; traditional wooden train sets, beautifully made dolls with ornate outfits and educational science kids are “toys parents buy for their children.” But sometimes these toys end up neglected, shoved under the bed in favor of the decidedly not gender neutral plastic-crap-of-the-moment toy.

Then there are the toys that children pick for themselves. It’s best to look to Toys-R-Us and McDonald’s Happy Meals to get a feel for these. They’re plastic and loud and tacky and have cartoon characters on them and are never politically correct, because it turns out that, when given the option, 19 girls out of 20 want the sparkly princess dress with extra pink and rhinestones and the boys want the monster truck with a loud engine.

This is definitely the first kind of toy. Very few girls are going to pick this for themselves; their mothers will buy it for them. That’s why all the marketing is geared to parents. Toy marketing to little girls looks more like this.

Jewel writes:

I have a problem with this video, besides the ugly cuteness. Little girls. LOVE. PINK! They aren’t interested at age three in being anything but a pretend princess. Or mommy. Or something else corresponding to the reality of happy little three-year-old girls. Little girls don’t talk about math and science in the abstract ways of subject matter. Not at this age. THAT is for the high school girl crowd. My youngest child loved pink and purple and dolls and Winnie the Pooh. She also LOVES science. But not as a four-year-old. As a four-year-old, she loved storybooks with talking horsies and toys that went on adventures.

The girls in this video are agitprop tools being used by nasty, venomous feminists who hate all things girlish, like princesses.

The fact is, that because of affirmative action and Title IX rules, girls outnumber boys in colleges. They get the rules bent for them in other ways. Why, because they’re dumb girls and can’t be expected to do things on their own without the parasites of feminism telling them this.

So I hate this video. Enjoy the hate. Self-esteem is for saps and suckers.

Jill Farris writes:

The obnoxious attitude which comes through the chanted song of this commercial is pure in-your-face angry adult feminism. Little girls don’t have that innate competitive “I’ll show you” compulsion. Little boys do, however!

I am the mother of four girls and four boys. My boys are all amazing cooks and several of my girls are mechanically inclined but none of them had (or have) the kind of “I’ll show you” snotty attitude promoted in that commercial.

And, was it just me or did the camera focus on the baby dangerously spinning in its car seat for an inordinate amount of time?

Yuck.

Diana writes:

Kudos to Buck for noticing that the Brett who crafted the Rube Goldberg device in the GoldieBlox video was male. (As was Goldberg, what an embarrassment.) I also looked up the website of the ad agency that produced the video: five of the six directors of the Academy are male, going from names. (Hover mouse over directors.)

This website is interesting: it has all the cool upper class muted blandness that Rita Jane refers to. Pushing girls into STEM subjects is entirely an upper class white obsession.

As Rita Jane observes, “19 girls out of 20 want the sparkly princess dress with extra pink and rhinestones…”

This brings up a subject I have been meaning to write to you about: the ever-mutating extremism of little girls’ dress.

In my neighborhood, where I would bet my rent money that 90% of parents voted for Obama and believe lock stock and barrel in feminism, every little girl goes out bedecked like a Disney Princess. Not nearly every little girl. Every little girl.

It is a theatrical display of tutus, pink Ugg-boots, lavender jackets covered with rhinestones, etc. I’ve seen little tots traipsing around in mock evening dresses, and others wearing t-shirts saying “Daddy’s Little Princess,” over pink leggings.

I grew up in the late ’50s-early ’60s – feminist hell, in other words. We wore pink or pastel dresses on special occasions and oh did we love them! But otherwise, our clothing was very muted, compared to today’s gaudy girlishness. For play, we wore jeans and corduroys – adapted from boys’ clothes. I guess the army boots feminists never grew out of their baby corduroys…..

Back in 1960, a normal girl’s dress was much closer to the upper class ideal of tastefulness, while nowadays our oh-so free “riot grrrls” run wild with the princess stuff.

The reason for this is obvious to readers of Thinking Housewife, but it mystifies modern liberals. The latter-day emphasis on self-expression has backfired against army-boots feminism, because most little girls are ragingly feminine from birth.

And they have terrible taste! You have to spend a lifetime being shamed by upper class females and their gay cohorts to tamp that down. There’s a tiara-wearing princess in every normal human female.

Reality has a way of constantly befuddling liberals. Luckily for them, the publishing industrial complex is in their hands, so they write books like this, reaping fat advances.

Now, you could write a much better book analyzing the Disney Princessification of American girlhood (which I agree is not a completely healthy phenomenon), but no publishing house would pay an advance for it.

Laura writes:

Girls always love princesses, but the aggressively pink mentality is not an expression of femininity as much as an expression of machismo. It’s girl power to the max.

Karen C. writes:

Let me start by saying I hated the Goldiblox commercial. It was manipulative and degrading to women and girls who have interests that are not exclusively STEM related. That being said, I see no problem with girls playing with building toys and, in fact, think it’s a wonderful mental exercise for them. I’m a full time mother, and I use problem solving and building skills frequently in my vocation. From assembling furniture and toys, to helping my girls build a “castle” out of blankets, building and problem solving are wonderful skills that can be applied to a woman’s life. To say women are uninterested in science and math is a gross overgeneralization. That they have no place in those fields as a profession, that’s a different story. I believe my place is at home with my children, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying reading Nation Geographic with my son, who shares my interest in archeology and history.

My little girls have more than their share of pink and princess in their lives. They love pushing strollers with baby dolls in them and playing “mommy and baby.” But they also play with construction toys and blocks and I think it’s naive to think girls can’t enjoy that too. My two favorite toy sets as a kid were my My Little Pony and my Robotix construction set. The fact that I liked “boy” toys does not make me hard or masculine, it was an extension of my love of puzzles and problem solving. To the person who wrote that kids only like flashing loud toys and not the wooden educational toys parents prefer, I say that is a result of our dumbing down television culture, not the true nature of children who love open-ended play. The problem with Goldiblox is not that it’s a building toy for girls, but the attitude and expectations behind it. I would not buy it because I abhor its propaganda. And that’s a shame because I think my kids would probably have fun with it.

Laura writes:

To say women are uninterested in science and math is a gross overgeneralization.

Of course. Perhaps you were not suggesting it, but no one here has said girls are totally uninterested in science and math or that they should not be encouraged to be interested in these subjects.

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