{"id":9304,"date":"2014-04-21T12:31:07","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T17:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=9304"},"modified":"2014-04-21T12:31:07","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T17:31:07","slug":"mcdonalds-finally-does-away-with-girl-and-boy-toy-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2014\/04\/21\/mcdonalds-finally-does-away-with-girl-and-boy-toy-question\/","title":{"rendered":"McDonald’s finally does away with “girl” and “boy” toy question"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> started to rant about this on Facebook, but the ensuing conversation in my kitchen inspired me to bring it back to the blog.<\/p>\n

Waaaaaaaaay back in 2006, I ranted my displeasure at being offered the choice between a “boy” toy and a “girl” toy happy meal at McDonald’s. I’d asked for a Polly Pockets toy and a Hummer toy, and the cashier repeated back to me “one girl happy meal and one boy happy meal”. At the time, I was at the counter with my two boys standing there at my elbow watching me order. Infuriated, I pointedly re-ordered my meals with toys by type, not gender. In the intervening eight years, I have ordered more than a few happy meals, and each time I have been careful to correct the order taker, who invariably specifies boy or girl toy instead of the actual type of toy on offer.<\/p>\n

Apparently I wasn’t the only person rankled by this distinction. In a Slate.com article<\/a>, high school junior Antonia Ayres-Brown tells the story of how she took her complaint about the boy\/girl gender discrimination all the way to the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities and not one but two CEOs of McDonald’s. The current CEO finally listened (although her complaint to the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities was dismissed as “absurd”) and Antonia received a letter back from McDonald’s with the following promise<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It is McDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intention and goal that each customer who desires a Happy Meal toy be provided the toy of his or her choice, without any classification of the toy as a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcboy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgirl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 toy and without any reference to the customer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gender. We have recently reexamined our internal guidelines, communications and practices and are making improvements to better ensure that our toys are distributed consistent with our policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s about bloody damn time, McDonald’s. But let’s go that final step down the road to righteousness, shall we? Why not simply offer one kind of happy meal toy at a time, and offer it to everyone? Some girls like Skylanders, some boys like Polly Pockets. Wendy’s and Harvey’s have been offering a single “flavour” of kid meal toys for years and there has been no anarchy, no fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, no rivers and seas boiling, no dogs and cats living together. I’m pretty sure they bypassed the mass hysteria, too, although the blogger hysteria is clearly still on the table.<\/p>\n

You might ask why I think this is important. As I said, it’s the conversation in my very own kitchen that got me all worked up again. In seeing the reference to Antonia’s victory on Facebook, I mentioned it aloud to Beloved. My 12 year old mentioned that there have been “girl” toys through the years that he had liked, and I asked him if he would ever hesitate to order a happy meal with a toy he liked if it was labelled as a girl toy. “Not really,” he replied with a shrug, but that didn’t particularly surprise me. He’s not terribly concerned with rules and norms and what other people think on the best of days.<\/p>\n

It was the six year old’s reaction that made me sad. “Would you order a happy meal with a girl toy if you thought the toy was really cool?” I asked him. <\/p>\n

“No,” he replied with a tinge of regretful sigh. “I can’t play with toys that are for girls.”<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started to rant about this on Facebook, but the ensuing conversation in my kitchen inspired me to bring it back to the blog. Waaaaaaaaay back in 2006, I ranted my displeasure at being offered the choice between a “boy” toy and a “girl” toy happy meal at McDonald’s. I’d asked for a Polly Pockets … Continue reading “McDonald’s finally does away with “girl” and “boy” toy question”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-the-universe-and-everything","category-mothering-without-a-licence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9304"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9308,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304\/revisions\/9308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}