Creatable World

This one is gonna be very short on the pictures and long on the words.  I even considered putting it on my regular - political soap box - blog.  But as it applies to dolls, I felt it fits better here.

In case any of my readers have been in a cave the last few days:  Mattel has released a line of "gender inclusive" dolls.  Most of the doll community has taken it as Mattel clearly intended.  A few of us, and an awful lot of people outside the doll community, seem to have missed something.  This post is for that group.

1. These dolls are not being marketed as LGBT.  "Gender inclusive" simply means they can be used in play as either sex.  The dolls are the size of Skipper,  Barbie's pubescent sister.  Granted, I have not seen these dolls in a state of undress, but the body mold appears to be clearly a child.  Without genitals, there are no markers of biological sex, and we all know that even the adult dolls have no genitals.   

Get your hands on a doll and ignore anything below the shoulders.  What you are looking at is "gender coding".  This is what marks a child doll as male or female.  Possibly the most common customization done on child dolls is the cutting of hair and removal of make up - turning a girl doll into a boy.  The Creatable World dolls just save us the trouble.

2. The entire point of these dolls is an acknowledgement that traditional gender roles have been dying since the days of Rosie the Riveter.  Today's children are seeing women on the battlefield and men in the kitchen.  Today's children's parents grew up seeing that.  Only the grandparent generation remembers when Wonder Woman was the only super heroine and we were born in the Woodstock era.  Long-haired boys everywhere!

3. As a doll player - I am not so delusional as to call myself a collector -  the important thing to me is the potential of the toy.  The big selling point for me is the articulation.  These adorable children have working joints!  When you consider that they come with several mix-and-match fashions and accessories, the price point isn't bad.

They can be boys or they can be girls whose mothers haven't caved to Big Cosmetics. They can be non binary, if the player so chooses.  And I'm okay with that.  Because it's all about the potential. Oh, yeah, and DEATH TO GENDER ROLES.