Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.
They are expanding the brand, not removing the Mr and Mrs Potato Head toys or characters. As such they are renaming the brand "Potato Head" for the umbrella of products. The new product is to overcome limitations "... when it comes to both gender identity and family structure.” link
Might have something to do with the parents that had the money that paid for the toys.
You jest, but this will happen. We'll all laugh at the morons that keep screaming at them until they gain enough of a mob to stand outside the Hasboro HQ everyday threatening employees and damaging property until Hasboro finally re-submits to their ideology.
It's worth noting for the record that conservatives aren't the ones who kicked off the Great Potato Gender Debate of 2021.
"Yes. Here's this foot in your ###. You seem awfully worked up about it, don't you?"moleculo said:
Must. Be. Binary.moleculo said:
I think what conservatives (at least myself) are "getting worked up over" is the idea that purity of just being a child is becoming a political issue. As I said earlier, my kids played with potato head dolls and never 1x did the idea of any-sex marriage while sticking silly noses on them come up. We just made up funny combinations of eyes and lips for a bit and went on to the next toy.moleculo said:
Bingo. And it's been that way since the '70s. Herewith the story of Baby X. Trying to raise Baby X in a gender-neutral world was difficult, but thanks to a cutesy children's author and Ms. Magazine's fortuitousness, we did it! Anyway, stuff like this was the beginning of the politicization of "just" being a child. There is no "just" being a child to the left. It is always interfere, interfere, interfere.
What level of energy? Until yesterday I didn’t even know anything about this at all. I can assure you this hasn’t been some pressing issue in liberal circles. Hasbro decided to make a change and then of course that was used to rile up the usual suspects on the right. I don’t even know who the “offended liberals” are in this story.
The weird thing is that if you're the type of person who's inclined to interrogate children's toys for ideological purity (i.e. infected with brain worms), Mr. Potato Head is arguably friendly to your cause already. Pretty much every single kid who's ever played with these mixes and matches parts to create their own little Potato Identity that doesn't necessarily correspond to traditional gender roles. But religious fundamentalists are not well-known for seeing the big picture or letting "good" be good enough.
Presumably somebody somewhere was. It didn't become a story until HASBRO announced their intentions and reasons. That's what started it, not the conservative backlash that came after. Until the pressure to change from somewhere, there was not going to be a change. It may have been internal, but there was somebody somewhere that said something to drive this.
The ones who get so knicker-twisted about anything resembling a traditional depiction of sex or, heaven even more forbid, gender "roles" that a toy company sees a cynical avenue to sell more product by claiming that a genderless experience with a toy that has obvious sex differences is now its intent. Now, everybody can buy the Potato Heads with psychological and moral authority and purity! It's okay folks, we've got over 100 million potatoes served. We're out in front of the whole gender thing on this one.
There's a well-known iron rule of media coverage that explains this.
Yeah, I think Hasbro pulled off a cynical thing here. Thought about it last night. What better way to get gender-identity conscious parents to buy your product than to market an already mutable toy as further mutable, while at the same time allowing for traditionalists to have their Mrs. Potato Head/Mr. Potato Head.
Exactly, I was going to write something similar in my post. Our potato head bucket was a mix of all eyes, ears, hats and whatever. My kids would mix male and female parts all the time, and then do it all over again. Never once did I feel the responsibility to have a discussion with them over the ideas of what they built is right or wrong...just build it and have fun.
again, my kids always saw them as toys. Why are we accepting adults forcing the idea of "pressured gender norms" on babies?
No mr and mrs are still on some boxes. And this is just making the brand generic
Ask Baby X and Ms. Magazine. Seriously, though, because babies show mentally chosen sex differences and preferences by age two, that burden began to fall to parents and object makers to keep their children as gender neutral as possible so as not to imprint our own gendered expectations on them. If you don't think I'm serious that this is a big movement among second and even some third wave radical feminists, just check out the literature. Or call my ex-girlfriend who explained these to me in nauseating detail.
So despite the fact that we're actually unaware of any pressure campaign here and haven't identified anyone that says they were "offended," we'll just assume that there was one so that we can criticize "liberals."
I don't think you read his whole post.
To act like there was no one anywhere saying or doing anything to facilitate this change is intellectually dishonest. You are smarter than that, so don't play dumb here.
Actually there may not be outrage. It could be some brilliant marketer who pitched it to the right people at Hasbro who want to be on the cutting edge of this hot new market.
I didn't say that. But it seems very different to me if someone in Hasbro product development was like "hey, I have a good idea" as opposed to a bunch of angry liberals boycotting Hasbro until they changed it. Based on the information we have, this seems more like the former.
My line of argument is that the gender of the potato head line of toys is not anywhere near a foot up your ###. Apologise if I wasn't clear.
I don't think that's really how the argument is going. I, personally, was less focused on the trans element than the radical feminist notion that we can have gender-neutral toys by abolishing the usually abided-by deterministic aspect of what sex differentiation means within said toys by eliminating the sex differentiation itself. That seemed to me to be more the impetus driving this. I used one trans example, but it shouldn't have colored the whole argument. My beef was more with the '70s than the '20s, and I think this is a culmination of those '70s attitudes mixed with the attitudes of the '20s toward biological sex leading to this decision. It isn't solely a "trans/anti-trans" issue. And I don't particularly like the word "anti-trans," especially when it comes to issues with minors. I think reasonable people can disagree about pre-pubescent issues within that argument without the blanket terms "transphobia" or "anti-trans" being ascribed to them.
I'm pretty conservative but I don't think I know a single anti-trans person.
