All Dolled Up
I was visiting New York toy shop FAO Schwarz the other day (they have That Giant Piano that Tom Hanks played on in the movie Big) and found myself wandering through the doll section. I know a lot of toy shops these days are becoming more gender neutral, but sadly this isn’t the case for FAO Schwarz. But that was OK. What kinda wasn’t OK were the ‘jobs’ that the dolls were listed as having.
When I was little I played with dolls a lot. Never baby dolls, always Barbie dolls. I wanted to be a fairy princess just like my Barbie, so I know just how influential dolls can be on young girls. I took a few photos of the dolls and their jobs just to compare them.
Above we have the start of the “collector dolls” which were really expensive ($30 ish) dolls which were meant to be given to girls as ornaments as opposed to play things. So Brook-Lynn (what a name) is an event planner. That’s a very fashionable job, I guess. After leaving Japan I was told that event planning would be one of the areas that I could go into after having been on the JET Programme. It sounds like a cool job.
It seems that New York (and, actually, London too) is all about women opening up blinkin’ quaint little cookie and cupcake shops. There’s a pop-up muffin shop pretty much on every corner here! I guess this is a nice one, as she would need to manage her own business to own a bakery.
Lastly we have Houston who is a personal shopper. Yawn. Because women love shopping, right? I wish there was just one non-bland job title in the collection.
Now let’s go onto the second series of dolls that caught my eye because they’re called Lottie (and I’m Charlotte, of course).
KAWAII karate?! Why does she have to be kawaii about it? Why can’t she be “super awesome kill-you-in-seconds” karate?!
Butterfly protector. Yawn.
You know what would have been awesome? Bee protector. Because bees are dying, and once they’re gone that’s not just honey we’ll have to do without, but lots of fruit and veg and plants that need bees in order to survive.
