This is incredibly frustrating and makes me very grateful for my parents not being too sensitive to this gender division in kids toys.
A large part of my youth I played with lego and by that I mean the supposed toys meant only for boys. Honestly, I've never seen a difference. It was simply bricks of primary and secundary colors with which you could build. We never had any other gender specific things to do with it. So when I see commercials like shown in the vid it seriously boggles my mind. There was never a problem, what are they trying to do? As a kid, I never saw the point of having a girly character do girly stuff that never involved anything exciting. Neither did I understand why boys are always firemen, police characters and adventurers doing all the cool stuff.
Beside Lego, I did have my Barbie phase, of which I'm not ashamed. It wasn't something that was forced onto me as a girl, but was something I liked and wanted. What I want to say though, is that I actually created stories with these dolls and it wasn't my only interested to simply dress it up and comb the hair, like the makers seem to think.
So instead of mainly focusing on Boys and Girls seperately, these men and women who come up with this, excuse my language, bullshit, need to take a look at the very popular game 'The sims' in all it's variations. As far as I know, it's not assigned to a specific gender and allows the player to create either one person of whatever gender, a couple or an entire family with which he/she can create a whole world and have a career. Now, of course, it still has some limitations since the options for hair and clothing one can give to a female or male of any age can be quite specific and less creative, but even that is changing with each version that comes out.
So if gender-neutral stuff can be so popular, why is this division still happening? Kids don't care, trust me. They only care because we tell them they're not supposed to do what the other gender does. It's thrown at them through the media and through parenting. However, history shows that a girl or a boy raised without these ideas can make some surprising choices in life, which should be encourage more. If your little boy picks a 'girly' thing, let it be. If he picks a very 'boyish' thing, that's fine to. Instead of enforcing stereotypes, a parent should encourage the individual opinions and desires of a child (without spoiling, of course), and the toy industry should help them in this.
(Oh, and I recommend checking out more video's of FeministFrequency. It's very interesting and well done.)
