It will likely come as no surprise to you that popular children's media and toys are very, very segregated along sex and gender lines. The more something is created out of commercial motivation, and not artistic inspiration, the more prominent the issue. Your average children's novel might aim primarily at a male or female audience, and thus have (mostly or solely) boys or girls as the main heroes, but the rest of the world within it will nevertheless be populated by people of both sexes in a statistically credible mix. However, if you visit the toy store, it will be good if you can find one Ken for every twenty Barbies in there, and you won't find many more (if not fewer) female soldiers and officers among the military-themed action figures.
You can see them. Top right, all in the same black suit. Just as diverse as the girls.
Of course, toy companies do that because they believe this is more likely to sell and bring them profit. Not only do they assume girls will prefer to play with the themes of fashion and home, while boys will favour action and adventure – they also assume that girls will want to dress up only or almost only female dolls, while the boys’ action heroes will be almost exclusively male. Now, personally I disagree with this: I always liked both types of games, and I was always annoyed by the lack of diversity available. Getting a good selection of Kens for my Barbies was always a very difficult mission, and my G.I. Joes had Happy Meal Barbies and Disney princesses of the same scale as both romantic interests and combat allies. I’ve known other children who complained of the same (including my own now), not to mention adult toy collectors. But let’s say those are all exceptions, that the average child does prefer more toys of their own sex (though I think this is dominantly market-induced even when it is the case), and that the companies made correct calculations. As annoying as it may be for me personally, this is the lesser problem.
The greater problem is the media. The main culprits are cartoons, and cartoon shows more than feature films, though there are video games, books and comics (mostly parts of big franchises also focused on selling merchandise) that have the same problems. Again, I am not talking just about who the main characters, the heroes are – but all the characters in the medium overall, primary, secondary and background characters all together.
Take My Little Pony as an example: in the first and second generation, female characters vastly outnumbered the male ones, to the point that most ‘baby’ ponies had known mothers, but not fathers. The third generation, aiming at a target audience of younger girls, did away with boys completely, without a single male pony even being mentioned, let alone showing up. (Even non-pony male characters were extremely scarce in G3: there were only Spike the dragon and, mostly off-screen, Santa Claus.) On the other hand, My Little Pony Tales (the “G1.5” show) and the later G4 and G5 introduced normal amounts of male relatives, friends, colleagues and simply random male ponies in the street. The main cast of both Tales and Friendship is Magic remains all-female: we are undoubtedly following a story about girls (or mares, if you prefer), but they inhabit a world normally populated by ponies of both sexes.
I know, boys. I’m confused, too.
We see similar things on the male side of the aisle. The only action woman in the old Action Man cartoon was Natalie, and the supporting cast wasn’t exactly swimming in women, either. And I’m really regretting not having bought Natalie’s toy back in the day while she was new in stores, because she fetches quite a price on the second-hand market now. How wouldn’t she? She’s the only female toy! The same goes for male G1 ponies, and so on.
On the other hand, the team behind He-Man may have understood that there were plenty of girls who would like some sword and sorcery action as well, but instead of fully integrating the protagonist’s sister into the main storyline (where her role is secondary at best), they gave She-Ra a separate spin-off, which had the same issue (maybe even more so), just reversed: female heroine, female allies, female villain, with an occasional man here and there.
Don’t even get me started on the heels. :)
What’s the problem with such settings? They don’t feel natural. They don’t feel like living worlds – places where, beyond our heroes running to save the world every week, some people (or whatever creatures) live, work, fall in love, raise families and grow old. Whether or not we have issues with a dominantly male or female main cast (some people find it fine, some are militantly in favour of at least relative gender equality in this respect), we can, at the very least, understand that sometimes the story is such that focusing on characters of a single sex makes sense. Perhaps the story is set in the army or in a maternity ward, or in a sex-segregated school. Perhaps it’s not that extreme, but a tightly-knit group of boys or girls is simply in the focus. But if everyone or almost everyone else is of that same sex, it will feel fake. Like a play set in a sex-segregated school, where simply not enough girls were willing to play male parts, and we’re left wondering why almost nobody has a father, brother or boyfriend.
To be fair, modern media is improving in that respect. Mixed-sex casts are getting more frequent, and when the main cast is diverse, the background usually follows. However, offenders still exist. My latest pet peeve are the Enchantimals, where the male Enchantimal characters can be counted on the fingers (it’s slightly better with their besties, i.e. animals – but even those are mostly female), and even most of those were issued as toy-only. You can’t help but gaze at the lovely Enchantimal villages and towns and wonder where have all the good men gone… And that in a universe that has no hostility and no actual villains, just misunderstandings or accidents, so they can’t just all be off fighting in a war somewhere. It almost feels like the producers said “let’s not bother designing a character if we’re not going to sell a toy of them” – returning us to the toy problem – but that can’t be all. Even the existing male toy characters are underused in the show. Could they really believe that girls would watch less if they showed a boy on screen more often than once every leap-year?
Take a good look. You won’t see too much of him!
To circle back to the toy issue, there are examples of the opposite – shows that do feature characters of the opposite sex, even in important roles, but sadly pass them over when it comes to toys and other merchandise. For example, Shimmer and Shine, while it does have some writing problems, does feature male characters on every level of its female-focused cast: we have Zac and Kaz, who are very prominent secondary (borderline primary) characters, interesting episodic male characters (such as the lightning genie Shaya), as well as a number of background characters – e.g. ordinary boys in the playgrounds on Earth, genie vendors in Zahramay Falls etc. But the main toy line reflects the usual stereotypes. While Zac and Kaz do appear among the (fairly simple and cheap) plastic minifigures, the line of larger, dressable dolls that accompanied the show consisted of female characters only. That means that tertiary female genies who only appeared in one or two episodes got dolls - but not Zac, who was there prominently for half the show. Surely, my daughter can't be the only little fan disappointed by this? To be fair, I found her a bootleg plastic Zac. He has many flaws - he's of different proportions, his limbs don't move, all his clothes are moulded and his colours are a bit off - but at least he's roughly of the same height as the female dolls and has Zac's recognisable features. Not a perfect alternative, but it works. Only… if bootleg manufacturers are making one of the 5-6 main characters of your show instead of you… don't you think you're doing something wrong?
Well, Zac would at least know what to say to that: “It happens. It happens a lot!”
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