We can’t even have the dinosaurs, then. Yup. Apparently, despite the fact that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are all female and that it’s an important plot point, all the dinosaur toys from the film are male. Let me ask you all a question. Be honest. Do you really think a little boy is going to read the packaging, see the word ‘she’ and decide he doesn’t want it?
When I saw this piece by Rob Bricken over at io9 this morning, I asked my fellow writers if they would take the story. I’m honestly sick of writing about this. My air conditioning is out here in LA and I have the heat rage. I didn’t want to overreact. They were all working on something else, so here goes nothing.
In the description for the dinosaur toys (like the one for Blue above), the dinosaurs are referred to as ‘he.’ In the movie, they’re all female. Jeez, remember the line, ‘Clever girl.’? Even the review on The Guardian made a stupid comment about how the film passes the Bechdel Test because the dinosaurs are female. He said, “There’s an almost Gaia-ist conception of how dinosaurs might solve their own crises and in a (partial) nod to contemporary views, we get a heroine who can take out dinosaurs with a stun gun and also run very fast away from them in heels. All these dinosaurs are female, which incidentally puts Jurassic World in the clear as far as the Bechdel test is concerned.” (Click here to find out what the Bechdel Test is to understand why that’s so idiotic.)
Look, I know it doesn’t seem like a big thing. It’s a pronoun. The thing is, it’s symptomatic of the toy industry’s continued insistence that girls and boys all fall into the same categories and won’t play with toys that don’t match their gender or traditional gender roles. Hasbro, just knock it off already. Just stop. I’m really tired of posting stuff like this.
[io9, The Geekiary via Gamma Squad]