The rare opposite sex in children's media and toys

 

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!”

The moral problem in Shimmer and Shine

 

Nickelodeon’s cartoon series Shimmer and Shine starts with a simple and amusing premise: a young girl, Leah, has a magical genie bottle that grants her three wishes a day. However, the genies bound within, Shimmer and Shine, while friendly and helpful, are also children themselves (genies in training, to be more precise) and aren’t particularly versed in the functioning of the human world on top of that. Thus, they often misunderstand what Leah wishes for, leading to all sorts of funny situations. While they generally do seem to speak English fluently (which is never explained through any genie magic or anything of the sort, as far as I remember), they simply don’t know what a “cupcake” or a “treehouse” are, let alone being familiar with such a wild food name as “pigs in a blanket”. Even if you haven’t seen the show, you can imagine the resulting humour. Also, they tend to interpret everything Leah says starting with “I wish”, as trivial as it may be, as a wish to be fulfilled, not because of any ill will or magical laws at work, but just because, at least at first, they don’t know any better.

Nope, definitely not what Leah had in mind.

The entire first season, excluding the final double episode that serves as a prequel, explaining how Leah got her genie bottle (more about it in a minute), follows an identical pattern. Leah is doing something that she can’t quite accomplish on her own (for whatever reason), and makes a wish. Shimmer and Shine arrive to fulfil her wishes, but misinterpret them, causing results that are at the very least wrong and funny, and sometimes troublesome in themselves – from filling the entire kitchen with popcorn, to creating an actual dragon in Leah’s backyard. Through trial and error, the girls spend all three wishes without managing to accomplish what Leah initially wished for, and must use their wits and work together to finally achieve the desired result. Obviously, the creators’ idea was to encourage young viewers to keep learning from their mistakes and trying again instead of giving up, as underlined by the song that is invariably played midway through every episode:

When we make a big mistake

Don't fret, let's celebrate

'Cause we'll get another try

We'll do better next time.

As an added element, Leah’s best friend and next-door neighbour, Zac, keeps popping in for one reason or another, and he is not allowed to know Leah has genies and makes wishes with them: as we find out later, if Leah told anyone, Shimmer and Shine could no longer grant her wishes. Thus, we again have various amusing situations where Leah attempts to hide Shimmer and Shine or the results of their magic, or provide a reasonable explanation of something utterly surreal in plain sight. To be fair, Zac is very helpful with that himself: whatever unusual thing he sees, he immediately comes up with a convoluted explanation for it, concluding it with his famous line: “It happens; it happens a lot!”

Naturally, as fun and funny as the pattern may be, it grows old after a while, and a single season of it was enough. From the second season on, a big change was made: Leah and Zac (who finally learns of the existence of genies and is later also connected to one himself) are granted entry into the genie world of Zahramay Falls, loosely based on the mythology of the Arabian Nights. All the subsequent episodes take place there, with greater variety of plot lines. The human children explore the exotic, magical land, which provides the potential not only for episodes with casual humour, but also for more exciting adventure and conflict with various antagonists, from good but misguided creatures creating a risk of some sort, over the schemes of the malicious but still right about redeemable sorceress Zeta, to the plans of more serious villains that appear later on. (From the second season on, the show also switched from 2D to 3D, with mixed reactions from the viewers.) This also allows for the wishing magic – which is far from the only magic in the world of Zahramay, but is revealed to be the most powerful – to be used for actually meaningful causes, such as curing a disease or thwarting a villain’s dangerous plan.

My problem, however, is precisely with the first season – though it can be extended to the subsequent ones implicitly. All the wishes Leah makes in the first season are fairly trivial: she wishes for a simple convenience, a fun thing for herself or her friend, or, at best, for a solution to a problem (but, again, usually not a terrible and major problem) that she herself has accidentally caused. Her wishes are never selfish or bratty: she doesn’t wish for something that belongs to someone else, let alone for “all the toys in the world”, but even when they are meant to benefit someone else (usually Zac), it is on the level of a little kind gesture or gift, and nothing that would majorly change their life. The same goes for things she wishes for herself: the closest to a long-term wish she’s had was wishing to dance like the Swan Queen after she had seen The Swan Lake – but even there, she didn’t wish for a permanent boost to her talent or skill, but merely a single experience of a perfect ballet dance. While it could be argued that Leah helps all the children in the world in the Christmas episode, when she works with Shimmer and Shine to help Santa deliver his gifts after they accidentally teleport him to a random tropical island, that still falls into the realm of fixing a problem she herself created, not one that someone else had to begin with.

Now, you may say, but she has three wishes a day, not three total, like many fairytale and popular culture characters do (by the way, the original Aladdin also wasn’t limited to three wishes, that’s Disney you’re thinking of), so why wouldn’t she spend some on simple enjoyments, since she has an almost unlimited amount of them? And that does make some sense, although three per day is still technically limited, unless she wishes for (and can be granted) immortality. But I don’t mind that she occasionally wishes for something simple and fun: what I find issue with is that she wishes for nothing else for as long as she is in the human world, despite the fact that she has near-unlimited wishes.

Now, to be fair, Leah doesn’t have any serious problems in life. We see that she lives in a modern, spacious suburban house with her parents, although they never appear on screen (a frequent case in modern children’s media). She is obviously well-off, has a loving family, none of her close ones are suffering from a serious medical condition, and so on. It is fair to assume that she has never been a target of anything worse than another child’s naughty behaviour until she came to Zahramay. She, thus, doesn’t have any immediate motivation to wish for something beyond “oh, wouldn’t X be nice”.

But Leah is also not a toddler, unaware of the wider world. While the show doesn’t explicitly state her age, she is generally assumed to be around ten years old. (In any case, both she and Zac are old enough to be allowed to regularly go outside on their own.) A ten-year-old should know enough about the world – from her parents, from school, from books and movies, at the very least – to know that misfortune, evil and danger exist in the world. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone full Fox Mulder and wished for “world peace” (though I’d be really curious to know what Shimmer and Shine would make of that), but I find it hard to believe that a kind and intelligent child, granted such a resource as three wishes every day, wouldn’t at least attempt to make the world a better place if not for everyone, at least for someone else.

The problem is by no means helped by the aforementioned prequel episode that concludes the first season, My Secret Genies (also known as The First Wish). It shows us how Leah seemingly randomly won her genie bottle at a carnival … but also explains that she was, in fact, granted access to genie magic because of how good she was, and that only humans who are good and kind-hearted, as well as “one of a kind” are given their personal genies. (Speaking of that, how didn’t Santa then have a genie bottle until Shimmer and Shine gave one to him? But maybe better not to dwell on that one too much. Or maybe it’s just usually a human, and he doesn’t qualify. :)) Again, while I see how this could have been meant to motivate children watching the show to be good, the point is subverted by Leah’s behaviour throughout the show. While she is obviously good in the sense that she never abuses her gift by wishing for something that would harm someone else, it is hard to escape the feeling that she is wasting a very precious resource that she could do good with. And we were explicitly told that this is not because she is a spoiled, self-centred child who doesn’t think of others. She’s supposed to be pure of heart!

Now, of course, you could say – but this is a show for small children! It would hardly be viable for Leah to make it her goal to fix everything that’s wrong with the world and thus for the show to descend into the dark subjects of actual evils and perils present in the 21^st century. True, and I’m not denying it. However, it would have been nice to see Leah behaving in an actually altruistic way at least on a small scale. She could have, for example, wished for an ill or injured friend or relative to get better. It wouldn’t have to be something life-threatening: as long as it was worse than a common cold or scraped knee, that would have shown her as a force of doing good. She could have had a poor classmate and wished for them to win the lottery, or otherwise improve their material standing. She could have witnessed someone being bullied, and wished for the bullying to stop. She could have wished for repairs on an aging neighbour’s run-down house, or fixing a small, local pollution problem. Even something as simple as seeing a small child in the park crying over a broken or lost toy and her wishing for the toy to be mended or found would make a difference. (But not Zac! There is an episode where Zac loses his toy dinosaur, but that is, again, helping her best friend and the only other prominent human character in the show. I’d want to see her helping others, not because they are important to her, but because it is important to help someone in need.) There are many subjects that could have been perfectly child-appropriate, yet where viewers would see Leah actively trying – in her own, childlike way – to make the world a better place.

Perhaps the show’s creators realised this problem and that’s why they decided to move the show entirely to Zahramay Falls, away from the morally more slippery ground. (Though the question implicitly remains in the background: since Leah and Zac didn’t literally move to Zahramay, but merely visit it often – and presumably in secret – what do they do with their wishes at home? Do they use them at all, and how?) Or maybe not – maybe the creators just wanted to play with more fantasy themes and elements. And that is perfectly fine – and any cartoon focusing on a culture different than the widely dominant North-Western one is a good thing in my books! But still – the show could have been so much more, while still keeping its humour and remaining appropriate for a very young audience. If cartoons such as Care Bears can tackle problems children face in the real world, so could have Shimmer and Shine. I am by no means saying that this makes the entire series bad, or that you shouldn’t watch it yourself, or let your child watch it. There are many fun and positive elements in it that make it worth the watch.

But still… if you are a parent, do ask your children what they would do if they had Leah’s genie necklace. What would they spend their wishes on? Do they think there are good things Leah could have done with her wishes that the cartoon doesn’t show? I have the feeling many little ones would get wonderful ideas that the fictional Leah and Zac were never allowed to have.

 

A stray thought for the end: it is true that Leah trying to seriously change the world into a better place is a plot more serious than Nickelodeon’s main target audience requires. But Shimmer and Shine is still fairly popular, despite having ended in 2020, and the children who were in kindergarten or primary school when it first began airing back in 2015 are teens now. Can you imagine a sequel featuring a much older – teen or young adult – Leah, Zac and the genies (of course, with Nahal as a fully grown white tiger :)) trying to make a serious change in the real world, while still keeping the genies’ existence a secret? Magical powers used in secrecy against real-world threats would have quite the superhero vibe – while still having the fresh take of Leah and Zac not having any superpowers of their own, but rather being dependent on the magic of their genie friends. This all could still be combined with excursions into Zahramay, except the dangers and intrigues there, too, could be shown in more serious tones. I can imagine anything ranging from Miraculous, over Winx, to Marvel or DC in seriousness, and wherever on that scale they’d make it – I’d watch it, and I know my child would, too! How about you?