I really do not get popular American culture sometimes...

[edenfalling]

Tonight I did a preliminary triage of the two enormous file folders of my life documents from 1985. I threw out a few things right away (cards, some of the more repetitive drawings), marked a few things to definitely save, and separated all the weekly daycare reports to return to my mom, but most of the art is still waiting for me to do a more thorough sorting.

However, there's one thing that snagged my attention and which I cannot figure out: namely, the two cards pictured above. The gimmick is that they each have four legs arranged like spokes on a wheel -- as illustrated by the apparently three-legged doll on the left -- and you can spin them to make the card 'walk'. But what is the point of them? You can't actually expect a three-year-old kid to have the manual dexterity to spin the legs without simultaneously squashing or tearing the card, and they're not very useful for any other kind of play, so...???

In summary, I am baffled.

(Also, these cards are a prime example of why, as soon as I was old enough to express an opinion and be taken seriously, I insisted for years that I LOATHED pink. I didn't actually hate pink, but if I hadn't taken that exaggerated stand, every present I ever received (okay, every present I ever received from anyone except my parents, who were very good about not pushing that bullshit) would have been pink. Because fucking gender roles.)

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

Comments

[heliopausa]

Maybe an adult could make the dolls walk for the three-year-old? Or I can easily imagine a slightly older child instructively showing an audience (parental, sibling, neighbour's child) how it's done.
But then again, the purpose of the card was never to amuse a child; the purpose of the card was to convince an adult to pay for it. :(

[edenfalling]

Yeah, these are pretty clearly aimed at an adult's 'oh, how cute!' response rather than a child's 'wow, cool!' response. :(

[marmota_b]

The one thing that makes me go "Yeah, definitely aimed at adult buyers" is the writing.
What child of an age that would be amused by such a thing would care for having a line of text printed on the doll?! It breaks the suspension of disbelief. It mars the doll as a doll.
Or, well, maybe that's just me for whom all dolls and stuffed animals were people. But I don't think it's just me.

Your thoughts mostly make me think "Thank God most of my family is too practical-minded for nonsense like this and gender roles!"
I mean, sure, there was some stuff. But no overwhelming desire to wrap me in pink (which I don't mind but don't feel any particular attraction to, either), or force dolls onto me when I preferred teddy bears and other stuffed animals. Or, possibly even more importantly than pink in Czech culture, no family desire to have my ears pierced while I'm still too small to protest. That was, as I recall, the thing that puzzled the most people about child me in relation to gender roles: "Why don't you have earrings?" My parents never forced me to have them and from all I've heard, they're more trouble than they're worth, with ear infections and stuff, that's why; sadly, child me did not have that answer ready. And of course it was other girls who asked. You're different, why are you different? Because I am, what's the big deal? Child me could not express that, either, but thankfully at least knew to stick to her guns.
But I've even heard of someone puzzling over a baby in a pram - I can't remember if it was over one of us or someone else later - "How can one tell she's a girl when she doesn't have earrings?" UGH, what, no thanks.

[edenfalling]

You're right; the writing is particularly inexplicable if the cards are meant to be used as dolls.

That is fascinating to me because earrings are one of the aspects of Western femininity that I DO wholeheartedly perform -- though I think I'd wear them even if they were considered performative masculinity, because I just really like the look and feel of dangling metal and stones beside my face. (Earrings are good fidget toys!) I wanted to get my ears pierced as far back as I can remember, but my mother wanted me to be older before she'd give permission, so we compromised and said I could get them pierced when I was twelve. The funny thing was, the closer I got to my twelfth birthday, the higher she tried to move the target age: thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one... at which point I said, "You know that once I'm eighteen I won't need your permission anyway, because I'll be a legal adult. And you promised." So, twelve. The piercing was my birthday present, and then most of my friends bought me earrings.

Some Americans will pierce baby girls' ears, but it's not a majority habit and in some locations will get your and your child funny looks. A majority of girls will have their ears pierced by high school, though.

[marmota_b]

See, I said it was a culture thing!
It might be different nowadays, though. I was, after all, born still during communism, and conforming was rather big then and it still lingered in the 90s, especially in a small town. These days, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal. (One hopes.)
I used to use my braids as fidget toys. :D And I don't have a thing against earrings as such - my sister has her ears pierced now, and it makes for great easy gifts for one thing! - it was, I think, on the side of our parents above all the aspect of "about you without you" that piercing itty bitty girls' ears has to it that made them avoid it. I'm extremely grateful to them for that part of their parenting, because I've been, since early age, the sort of person who was quite definite in her likes and dislikes... For me, it was the aspect of conforming I didn't like - I didn't do much teenaged rebelling because I'd already done my full share of societal rebelling before I even reached puberty just by virtue of being me... And then probably very much the fact that my best friend since age 3 did have her ears pierced and was rather ambiguous about it; she e.g. disliked the fact that you have to keep wearing your earrings or it grows in (or-whatever-you-call-it-in-English).
I think I considered it also around the age of ten or so, and quickly dismissed it for reasons of more trouble than it's worth for me, as something that wasn't me. Then again when I got a pair of lovely earrings from American friends (who I feel to this day may have mixed up parting gifts to me and another Czech girl) - the sister of mine who has her ears pierced now had a plan that she'd have them pierced if she accidentally got three pairs of earrings, and for a while I adopted that policy, too. Then she loosened her rules and had her ears pierced, while I eventually concluded, again, more trouble than it's worth for me, it's not me.
So that's the story of me and earrings. :D I still have that American pair. They're little silver sailboats, and I love them, but somehow not enough to go and have my ears pierced for them.
My other sister would probably go and put it all down to Socionics. We had a conversation about it yesterday that included the wearing of jewellery. People like me apparently prefer wearing only a few pieces that have a meaning for them, and that's covered by the ring I got for my baptism from my grandma and the little heirloom chalice pendant I got from mom... (And I've just realised that's the two sides of my family - parental grandma. So.)

[edenfalling]

I also like earrings because they are the jewelry I can most consistently wear. I like to wear one ring on each hand, but they get unbearable in the summer because my fingers swell in hot and humid weather. Necklaces tend to irritate my neck, and have to be carefully chosen to work with a specific shirt's neckline. Earrings are much simpler in comparison! (And I am pretty good at avoiding infections. I just make sure to wipe my earlobes and my earrings with isopropyl alcohol every morning as I put the earrings in.) I have actually hit the stage where I feel weirdly undressed if I leave my apartment without earrings, though obviously not as much so as if I left without wearing a shirt.

I actually have relatively few pieces of jewelry that I wear regularly -- two pairs of earrings probably cover 80-90% of my year between them, ditto two rings and two necklaces -- but I keep a bunch of other pieces around because they go perfectly with a specific outfit, or they're gifts I don't feel comfortable passing on, or they carry memories from my childhood.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

I feel you on the pink. I couldn't bring myself to wear the colour until my mid-twenties. Too much hot-pink branding shoved at me when I was a kid.

[edenfalling]

I had one bubblegum pink turtleneck in elementary school, which I wore with bright yellow leggings and called my Starburst outfit, but aside from that I didn't wear pink until I was about eighteen and had very firmly established that I didn't do most traditional types of American performative femininity, so getting me anything geared toward that would be a wasted effort.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

I, as a teenager... had a lot of baggy pants. Not even supposed-to-be-fashionable baggy pants, just the awful kind. Ai.

[edenfalling]

I had some weird relationships with clothes as a teen. When I was a little kid, I refused to wear jeans because they felt terrible, so I was always in leggings until about... 7th grade? At which point I suddenly realized their skintight nature could seem sexual (which I found revolting), and since I'd coincidentally discovered a comfortable jeans brand, within two weeks I switched to wearing nothing but jeans until I was twenty. (That is also the point when I quit wearing shorts.) I also wore all my shirts a minimum of two sizes too big from 6th grade through my junior year of high school, mostly because a boy made a crude comment about my boobs when I was eleven and as previously stated, I found the idea of anyone seeing me through a sexual lens utterly revolting.

There's this weird and abrupt shift from seeing girls as people (frilly, fluffy people, but still) to seeing girls as bodies that happens when they hit puberty, and that both freaked me the fuck out and infuriated me because I was still human and I wanted to be treated as a human rather than an object. I fought that cultural lens in a bunch of ways: baggy clothes, refusal to learn makeup rituals, refusal to wear a bra until I was fourteen, chopping my hair off, getting even more in-your-face about beating boys in math and science classes, etc.

After a while I concluded that I was still letting societal gender roles define me (just in reverse) and started trying to figure out what I actually wanted as well as what I emphatically didn't want. I still don't perform a lot of femininity, and what I do perform is fairly low-key and/or situational, but I haven't felt like I'm at war with my gender for nearly fifteen years now. :)

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

Come to think on it, part of it was being seen sexually for me (I never really thought about that before), partly that puberty was not kind to my body-shape and simply finding something that fitted was difficult, and partly, well, I really didn't get on with 'popular' kids and didn't see much point in aping their clothing choices.

There was also maybe two-three years at university where I went barefoot all year round. (I used to keep socks in my bag for indoors, in winter). Not a single chillblain!

[edenfalling]

Wow, you have tough feet! If I tried that, I'd probably get frostbite in September.

I am told that off-the-rack clothes almost never fit anyone perfectly, and the reason celebrities look good is because they get all their stuff tailored. Apparently the trick is to find something that fits the widest part of your body and then get the other areas taken in until they fit too.

The problem, of course, is that this requires either a bunch of money to throw at a tailor, or a bunch of time plus decent sewing skills to do it yourself. *sigh*

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

Did. Did have tough feet. It's been a while since then, though the hard-core cred I remember fondly.

I've gotten a lot more at peace with wearing girly clothes since then - swirly skirts are fun