Toys will be Toys?

Sorry for the quiet, these past few days. I've been in DC having my world totally rocked at the AYA, ONE Women & Girls Summit and will be writing more about it soon. (As well as 787987 other things I have yet to write about, like, say, Hawaii, which still feels like a dream... that we had... over a month ago...)

Anyway, lots to share and I wish I felt more comfortable with video blogging because I'm having one of those moments when I'm so full of piss and vinegar and thoughts and insanity and I just want to talk to every single person I know and don't know and I want to sit in rooms full of women and braid each other's soul hair. (I was fortunate enough to join my mother, today, at her writing group along with Archer and Fable and it was AMAZING. So much lady power! WELCOME TO THE NEW ESTROGENERATION!)

Anyway, as I'm a few days behind, I'd like to focus (for the moment) on a news story from last week that is now moot (Breaking Bad meth-selling action figures sold in Toys R Us stores) but still worth talking about, I think:

I don’t think I will ever walk down a toy aisle in a big box store and not feel angry. Because, in Archer’s words, “Why isn’t there an aisle for … everyone?"

Hal sent me this article earlier this week about a mom who started a petition to get "Breaking Bad" action figures out of her local Toys "R" Us and it got to me to thinking about toy aisles in general and why all of us aren't unanimously pissed off.

And then I read this piece in Variety about parents being desensitized when it comes to sex and violence in films. I feel like parents hold the media responsible for sexually explicit content MUCH FASTER than they do violence.

The toys have since been pulled off the shelves. And then, Aaron Paul issued a statement and while I agree with half of it (violent video games being sold in toy stores, for example) the comparison to Barbie is insane. Glamorizing drug use and violence is not even on the same map as dolls with tiny waists that boast ball gowns. Those are two very different conversations and I resent, very much, the dismissiveness in which Paul made his statement without so much as RECOGNIZING what he's defending. Meth selling dolls at Toys R Us? Come on, dude.

I mean, can you even imagine what a toy store would look like if, as Archer said, there was a toy aisle for everyone? Toy aisles for infants are for everyone. No guns! No transforming bombs! No drug dealing dolls! What a concept, right?

And this isn’t just a toy travesty. Violence is so pervasive in our culture that we don’t even recognize it any more. It doesn’t even register.

“The rise of violence and gun violence in PG-13 movies means that lots of kids are able to go into movie theaters and see explicit violence,” said Dan Romer, associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the study’s lead author. “We wanted to find out why parents didn’t show more concern. Why was this happening without pushback?”

Good question.

If the more we see, the less we care, shouldn’t we, as a community, be questioning our complacency? Or at the very least, having a real conversation about why we don’t?

The only thing that shocks me about school shootings, anymore, is that they don't happen more often. And I say that after watching a little boy in a ski mask, pretend to shoot up the entire playground at our local park this Saturday, while parents stood idly by. 

Why? Because boys will be boys and toys will be toys and none of it is real?  Until it is, though, right? Because sometimes it is real. Sometimes our brains get mixed up. Humans are easy to influence. Especially young humans.

Glamorizing drug dealing dolls and saturating PG13 movies with violence HAVE TO BE part of the problem. And I applaud any person, mother or otherwise, who recognizes that and takes public action. 

More, here. 

GGC