Why boys (and girls) mustn’t be victims of PC zealots

ON Christmas Day, my young nephew showed a family gathering what had happened to the gift he had received in a Lego box last year.

Back then, the gift was in hundreds of pieces. Now, after many hours of endeavour, it was a monster tractor with multiple moving parts.

‘See, you can use these switches to move the crane arm,’ he said. The claw could be used to pick up pretend logs, just like a real tractor might do with real ones.

Around the kitchen table, family members let out approving noises, for putting this baby together had been a major undertaking. It had required patience, application and discipline – all qualities which, who knows, may be welcomed one day in a workplace.

Now it turns out our reaction to his efforts was quite the wrong one. It seems we should have told him that, while his diligence was to be congratulated, male-orientated playthings which reinforce gender stereotypes are wreaking havoc in society and should not be countenanced in a modern household.

We should have told him such toys were acceptable only if counterbalanced with equal numbers of female-orientated playthings.

Malign

But the best toys , we should have told him, were gender neutral ones which did not pollute impressionable young minds with sinister concepts such as ‘boyhood’ – or the equally malign ‘girlhood’.

In fact, the issue was such a serious one we should probably have delivered a similar lecture to his older brother, but he was in another room playing with his Xbox. Heaven only knows the profusion of gender stereotype reinforcements he finds on there.

My failure to warn my nephew about his dangerous toy was brought home to me in the days following Christmas after education ‘experts’ branded Lego sexist.

Researchers at the University of California’s School of Education accused the toy company of blatantly appealing to girls by selling Lego Friends kits which major on beauty and bubble baths and cake making.

Still more fiendishly, they appeal to boys with Lego City, which encourages players to be brave, heroic and ‘save the day’. And, as we have seen, they offer monster tractors which take days to construct.

But what Lego does not do is tell customers one kit is for girls and the other is for boys. Quite rightly, it lets parents – and possibly girls and boys – decide which kit is for them.

‘We aspire to make creative play experiences that all children – no matter cultural background, personal interest or, for that matter, gender – find interesting and exciting to engage in,’ says the company, not unreasonably.

I am sure it aspires to make money too and will have reams of data on the kinds of toys which sell well – those focusing on space or fire engines, for example, or those themed on beauty or fashion.

Yet it is Lego’s attention to those sales figures, its instinct to satisfy a demand in the market, which puts the company in the diversity doghouse. Is the suggestion that toy firms should simply axe product lines which may appeal to one gender more than the other?

Is the idea that all responsible retailers must join the crusade to outlaw all play but the gender neutral kind – as defined by educationalists hell-bent on reprogramming our children’s sense of who and what they are?

Of course, I was not the only uncle who failed to say the right thing this Christmas.

Racing driver Lewis Hamilton did it too, in an Instagram video in which he appeared to mock his nephew’s attire.

‘Boys don’t wear princess dresses,’ said an apparently scandalised Hamilton, prompting a predictable social media outcry and calls for him to be stripped of his MBE.

What the F1 driver had meant to say, it turned out when his PR people moved in to clear up the mess, was he loves that his nephew ‘feels free to express himself’.

Subversive

Well, I kind of like that my nephew feels free to express himself too – and if that means building a monster tractor from scratch over several evenings after finishing his homework, that is peachy with me.

I would hate to think that while Hamilton’s nephew was engaging in self-expression by wearing a princess dress, mine was engaging in something quite different, possibly subversive – namely, building something out of Lego.

Much as it may pain educationalists, I suppose my daughter is only expressing herself, too, when we go on our annual shopping outing to choose her Christmas presents. It is the same every year. Make-up counters, jewellery stores, a blur of women’s clothing departments in which she hones in on the togs which most please her with bewildering efficiency.

It is almost as if she knows exactly who she is and what kind of stuff she is looking for. In vain, I suggest she might fancy getting into train sets or model aeroplanes this year.

As I peruse the post-Christmas sales, I see men and women and boys and girls drawn like magnets to the gender-orientated items that interest them. The male of the species thronging some departments; the female multitudinous in others. It must be terribly disheartening for the diversity police.

But we are who we are, I’m afraid. It is simply the hand we were dealt. Some day, perhaps, our lifestyle choices will be respected.