Boys vs Girls - The Gender Wars

Dear Blog

It's been brought to my attention, in rather a harsh way I might add, that what is severely wrong with this country (New Zealand) is that girls are persuaded to love all things pink and fairy related, while boys are persuaded to love all things blue and dinosaur related.  I ask you dear blog world where is this written?

Without getting caught up in the whole mess of what is or isn't wrong with this country, I'd like to address the apparent issue (and this is one expressed opinion by one person), that the media are stereotyping our children into their genders, persuading girls down the pink road and boys down the blue road?  

Interesting issue I hear you say, but what does this really have to do with The Crafti Bug?  Well, apparently here at The Crafti Bug we are enabling this gender stereotyping by categorising our crafts into boys and girls rather than age related.  Now I rapidly pointed out to this person that our crafts are in fact categorised in girls, boys and age related groups, simply for the ease of our shoppers. 

But this got me to thinking, how could this possibly be considered a serious issue causing chaos in our country?  Are our children in fact being persuaded to like certain things?  Surely there are other serious things going on that are more worthy of our time.

Isn't this in our general make-up?  Already embedded into our subconscious?  Girls generally gravitate to pink and boys generally gravitate to blue, but nothing as far as I can tell stops our girls from venturing into the blue side or vice versa.

We have a pigeon pair in our Crafti household, and I can assure you that from no persuasion from us whatsoever, our daughter loves sitting down playing with trains with her brother, and our son will have no hesitation playing happy families or tea parties with the dolls and soft toys with his sister...

Honestly I was astounded that this was even raised as a contentious issue, but it was, and now I'm very interested to know if this is in fact a popular consensus?... are our media and large corporate conglomerates brainwashing our children into being a girlie girl and a rough and tumble boy?  I don't really expect an answer, just putting it into the blog world. 

On a personal note, our website will continue to be categorised into Boys and Girls along with the age appropriate groups, simply to make it easier for Nanna and Poppa, Mum and Dad, Aunts and Uncles, and all who seek our crafty goodies to find what they are looking for regardless of who it is for. 

So dear Blog thanks for listening and until next time... keep on crafting.