Bohemia Bunny

You never leave your toys behind.

December 17th, 2007 by lynnylchan under Comments and Leisure

Why is it that we have “big boys toys” but not “big girls toys”?

That’s because little boys grow up and so do their toys. Look at what boys play with - trucks, planes, pretend drills and hammers, and guns. Then they become adults, and graduate to the real-world version. That’s why you have grown men in SUVs, flying their Cessnas and hunting with their rifles. And it’s all still play!

Now what do little girls play with? Baby dolls that eat, drink, and poop; pretend houses with pretend kitchens; and fashion dolls that have more extensive wardrobes than I do. When they grow into women, the babies are real, the poop is real, the house gets messy, and they dress themselves instead of plastic dolls with impossible proportions. This isn’t play. This is life.

That’s why there are big boys toys, because little boys play with mini versions of daddy’s recreational stuff. Playtime for little girls, on the other hand, is pretty much a training session in domesticity.

Perhaps instead of banning toy guns for our sons, we should ban play kitchens and masak-masak sets for our daughters. Resist overt gender-typing socialization!

On an unrelated note, when you graduate to adulthood, you still take a lot of your childhood along. It just comes in a different packaging. Case in point: comics, cartoons, video games.

The kiddie adventure comics lead to graphic novels in adulthood. Of course, I started out reading Marvel comics, so I didn’t really do the whole kid-level thing, but instead of a simple good-vs-evil storyline in the regular superhero oeuvre, you have the anti-heroism of Morpheus and the gray boundaries of hero morality in Watchmen.

The innocent anime of Doraemon and Slam Dunk yield to more thought-provoking series such as Ghost in the Shell. Now there’s one show that is geared totally towards the adult audience. Not only because of its single overarching storyline, but also because of the philosophical questions that it raises along the way, in particular those pertaining to machine AI. Those tachikomas - cute, but darn if they don’t make you question reality.

The only thing that changes in video games as you get older is that stuff like car-jacking and seeing nude women aren’t amazingly cool and deliciously forbidden. Nothing you ain’t seen, or maybe even done, before. Video games aren’t really the best medium to explore philosophical uncertainties - playing as Socrates and constructing arguments to vanquish your intellectual foes just doesn’t seem to translate well to consoles.

It’s nice to know that your childhood diversions grow up along with you.