In which playmobil lets the team down

I have mentioned playmobil a lot on this blog and thought this might be the chance to say something a little more serious about it. I realise that this may seem something of a rant but I feel it is an important point.

I still enjoy playing and collecting children’s toys. I linger by the Lego in whsmith and buy playmobil from ebay when I am feeling down. However there is something that I have noticed in doing this. It's sexist. I'm not talking about Barbie vs. Action Man. That's been done. I am talking about the more subtle things. There seems to be a trend towards sexism rather than a movement away from it. For example, Lego basic bricks. When I was little I had a red box of bricks with a girl in dungarees playing with them on the side of the box. In my local shop they have 2 boxes. A pink one with a girl in pink playing with her pink bricks and a red one with a boy playing with the set. Why the need for 2 different ones? It seems that much of children's toys today seek to divide gender at a very early age. It is not just dolls for girls and cars for boys but sets of even Lego and playmobil which have the chance to be gender neutral seeks to divide children up.

This is a particular problem for me with playmobil. I go on the website (www.playmobil.com) every so often to see what new sets I have and this is what it looks like:

As you can see each series is represented by a face. There are 2 more rows than the ones you can see. However out of a total of 30 series' 3 of them are represented by an image of a girl. Not pirates, not spies, not exploring, not even the zoo. However there is one thing in all of this that makes me mad and it is this:

It made me mad enough that I wrote a letter explaining why which I would like to share today.

(I would also like to add before I begin that these toys are clearly labelled as 'Multi Set Boys' and 'Multi Set Girls' and can be viewed here and here)

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a long time collector of playmobil and I love the range of toys you create, picking up the catalogue year after year. However I have noted with sadness the sexism within Playmobil for some time now, particularly the fact that there are far more male figures overall than female ones, in almost every category other than the very traditional domesticated roles in the house. Within the modern house, for example, in all the rooms you have a woman cooking, cleaning or ironing -but a man sits in the office. He must be very smug with his lot in life I am sure with so many women to take care of him. This kind of set up reinforces sexist ideas that are no longer relevant in a 'modern house'.

I have put up with these issues for some time, however the latest 'boys' and 'girls' sets (product numbers 4438 and 4439, see ) have been the last straw.

I am particularly insulted, not just by the clear division of toys according to gender, but also by the nature of the different roles that you are offering to young children.

The boy is offered: knight, king, viking and archer whereas the girl is offered: bridesmaid, damsel, elf and princess. I would like to draw to your attention to the fact that the female roles are all passive and secondary ones. She is not even a bride or a queen. The elf could just as easily have been labelled 'sorceress' but you seem to have once again opted for a label that is unimaginative and more importantly, unempowering. The boy's figures are all clearly active roles, giving them weapons and positions of power. The girl is left to pretend her figure is looking in a mirror. I would ask what the difference is between a 'damsel' and a 'princess' in this conception of them? In an age when girls have Fiona the ogre as a role model and Disney have just released a film about Rapunzel who fights with a frying-pan, perhaps you could have handed one of them a sword.

As someone who has played with playmobil all my life I would point out that the sets I have consistently collected have been cowboys, pirates and knights. Furthermore I am not the only girl who has such interests, I have frequently seen little girls picking up the knight sets in toy shops. The gender division in your products is therefore outdated and unnecessary. Furthermore, the sexism seems to have been on the increase as when I was a child the fantasy series then was not buried in a wash of pink passive princesses. The sets had female figures who were witches and beautiful dark queens.

In conclusion therefore I hope that you could rethink the roles that you assign to each gender and remember that your toys are an important factor in forming a child's attitude to the world.

Respectfully Yours,

Ruth Coustick

In which I list the prettiest websites I procrastinate on

My list today is: Sites that I use just for the pictures.

It's partly a lie as I do read some stuff as well, but mostly the pictures then.

Here goes.

1. Cosplay.com

When I have spare time and no particular blogs to be reading I like to go on cosplay.com and search for books, films and anime that I love and just see if anything comes up. I once spent an hour going through all the characters in Super Smash Brothers. I love cosplay to bits. When done well it is breathtaking and beautiful. I have a few bits and pieces I have made myself and hope one day to go to a convention and swelter away all day like everyone else. If you go on the site I reccommend looking through photoshoots.

2. Bookshelf Porn
   

Anyone who knows me will know that I am obsessed with reading. I have read pretty much every children's book worth reading. That sounds boastful, but I have read over 250 on the 'Children's Books to Read Before You Grow Up' list if you want evidence and I've read more than that.

Anyhow, I am a bit prissy when it comes to books. I like them to be treated properly, kept in height order or some other logical system on a book case with the only ornaments near them ones that compliment the books. I feel kind of uncomfortable in a house where people have the Harry Potter books kept out of sequence. A site like this one makes me very happy. All of these people clearly care about books.

3. Off-beat Bride
   
   

I have been reading this site for a couple of years now and it is influencing my life in terrible ways. The website features unusual 'off-beat' weddings and wedding ideas. They are splendid and filled with happiness. The site always makes me smile because it is filled with photos of happy people in love and cool and quirky ideas and ways they show that love. On the other hand though it was recently pointed out to me that it may be making me judgemental. I have read all these horror stories of wedding planners refusing to help someone because they had blue hair or walked with a cane and have scorned that judgementalism, but I have begun to expect off-beat from other weddings or at least some little tradition rebellion somewhere. I'm glad that it has been pointed out because now I can obsess over traditional and unusual weddings and make sure I have no expectations either way!

Oh and the other reason I have been on this site. My very close friend got married recently. Her wedding was definately cool -she had a bouncy castle and not a kid in sight. Need I say more?

4. I ran out of time. Sorry guys! Got to go to work tomorrow... I mean save the world right.

In which there is a dress and discussion

Hello. It's me again. Keeping it random I am back to fashion today but dipping into academics.

I don't know if you read Vice magazine, which has both good and bad points, but one of the things I like about it is that they do fashion shoots that are people doing interesting things in cool clothes. They then talk about the clothes and the thing they are doing. For example, I have one on mushroom picking in pretty dresses. It says where the dresses are from and what kinds of mushrooms are eatable.

My pictures today are similar.

I am holding a book on cyborgs because it seems that I am getting something published! I have been trying to get my dissertation published all year and have been passed around my academics saying 'good, but not what we want right now.' Finaly someone said 'good, but not what we want right now. How about something else.' So in the end I am writing on the Wolves in the Walls and Mirrormask by favourite author Neil Gaiman. I won't go fully into my essay until it is done, not wanting to give anything away, but it is exciting.

Very exciting. In fact this is one of my life ambitions coming true, but I don't want to leap about too much in case when I submit the final thing they 'retain the right to deny publication' but for now I am doing (academic) reading again!

On the outfit. I love this dress to bits. I only had time for a few photos because the camera battery was dying so you can't get all the details. However it has a huge bow at the front and little ties at the side as well as the interesting collar.

The thing is, looking through these photos, I hesitated about putting them up here because I feel I look fat, even though the main reason I love the dress, before all the above details, is that I think it suits my figure. I'm having a bit of inner conflict at the moment with the fact that I have undeniably gained a fair bit of weight this year, meaning clothes I love are now uncomfortable and don't fit. This makes me embarrassed and annoyed. On the other hand, I have bigger boobs too, which is always nice even if I have to buy new bras. I'm trying to embrace the term 'curvy' but the difficulty is: I don't look like how I imagine myself. I think of myself as looking like I did when I was 16, which was rather stick like in figure. When a mirror springs out on me I am surprised by how I look and so don't really know how to deal with this change in appearance. The word 'curvy' seems to have a kind of power but I'm almost afraid to use if about myself as though I don't deserve it, that I'm not curvy enough to get the word, but then I'm not sure how to describe myself and my figure otherwise.

I don't know where I am going with this point, but as it is occassionally a fashion blog I thought it was worth mentioning. Mostly because I feel, I owe it to put up photos of myself where I look less than perfect because otherwise it seems like lying and conforming.

In which I list my favourite playmobil figures

I am blogging on a Wednesday again like I promised. At least I got that far. It turns out I really am a bad blogger. It's true that I have been very busy with one of my closest friends in the world disappearing and getting married (the other way round) and so had hen dos and plotting.

However making excuses is just boring so I may have to accept I am a little bit of a rubbish blogger. Im going to keep aiming to do every Wednesday and as often as possible at the weekend but saving the world has to be done at some time and I'm no longer making promises.

Anyway at the hen do we had to tell an interesting fact about ourselves and how we knew the lady in question. I decided to share my obsession with playmobil. If you have been reading this blog for a while you will notice that I am inconsistent with my topics and occassionally just post up pictures of playmobil. It interests me and I hope it interests some other people out there. Or you all think I'm mad.

So. Today's list is: my 5 favourite playmobil figures.

1. The Cowboy.

This was my first ever playmobil figure. I bought him at a museum in California and played with him for the rest of that holiday. I took him with me to uni and wherever he sits on a shelf is home. He is my Woody. He was always the best guy when I played: a highwayman but friends with the native americans and only robbing from mean people.

2. The Jester.

I really love jesters. I am scared of clowns but jesters are somehow cool. I also collect interesting jokers in packs of cards, so I had to have this figure. Then my sister bought me a gardener set for the chainsaw just so this could happen.

3. Alanna

I got this figure because she reminds me of Alanna from the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to become a knight. It is a fantastic children's series which I talk about a lot and have really influenced me. I re-read them often. Also this figure could be a girl (as I think it was meant to be a boy) and that is rare in playmobil. For all that I love the toy I have no illusions that it is actually fairly sexist and I have a blogpost planned on that topic.

4. Ninja.

I have tons of pirates so a ninja is just cool and necessary.

5. Necromancer

I have this wizard figure for a while but I gained the necromancer staff recently and I love it. He is currently on my chest of drawers raising an army of the undead. Plus the skull on the end of the staff comes off.

One more thing. I played some dungeons and dragons a while back in which we made all of our characters into playmobil figures and I thought it looked good enough that it was worth recording.

We did some serious damage, plus I was a were-tiger.