A comparison between this year's Toys R Us catalogues in Sweden and Denmark, where Top Toy is also the franchisee, showed that a boy wielding a toy machine gun in the Danish edition had been replaced by a girl in Sweden.
Elsewhere, a girl was Photoshopped out of the "Hello Kitty" page, a girl holding a baby doll was replaced by a boy, and, in sister chain BR's catalogue, a young girl's pink T-shirt was turned light blue.
In Sweden you aren't supposed to make distinctions between what boys and girls might choose for toys. Equality there means boys playing with dolls as much as girls.
Why? As I've pointed out many times, under the principles of liberalism predetermined qualities like our sex aren't supposed to matter. Therefore it is thought progressive if sex distinctions are erased. So the Swedes are being good liberals in wanting the toy catalogues photoshopped.
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| Swedish Nerf girl |
And we could add on something else by way of explanation. Left liberals often argue that sex distinctions exist because the dominant group (men) created them as a means of establishing a privilege over an oppressed group (women). Therefore, the masculine way is the privileged one that women should try to get a piece of. Equality, in other words, means getting women to have more of the good stuff (the masculine way), whilst getting men to share some of the bad stuff (the feminine things).
If that's what you believe, then you'll like the idea of young boys being encouraged to play with dolls, whilst young girls fire Nerf guns. It will seem like a levelling out, in which the masculine good stuff is shared out more equally between men and women.
The traditionalist response? I don't think we're going to panic if a girl has a go playing with a Nerf gun. But in general we would see it as a positive thing for a boy to develop along masculine lines and a girl along feminine lines. If a boy adopts a masculine identity he will want to embody the masculine to the fullest and best degree - that will be his path of self-development. And this will help him to bear the burdens of a masculine role in his adult life, to win the respect of his male peer group and to attract the interest of a future wife. Hopefully, too, it will help to connect the identity of a man to a larger, meaningful good that is found within the masculine virtues.
And the same goes for a girl who adopts a feminine identity.
A lot of men and women do still follow a traditionalist path, although discussion of it is more muted than it once was. That has been a loss to Western culture.
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