Anything you can do...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 May

In some places, like The Barbican, they have those stylized figures that tell you where you need to be - if you are lucky, and manage to decipher the trail of almost Belisha-like beacons that bear them.

In other places, foreign languages, other figures (faces in Café Rouge, as I recall), and sometimes still 'Ladies' and 'Gentlemen'. For no very obvious reason, elsewhere it is the claim that the toilet itself is 'male' or 'female'.

All very well in itself, but this labelling of segregated facilities (plus there are disabled* ones, which tend not to differentiate as to which sex may use them) makes one wonder whether labelling a toy as for boys means very much - after all, we will surely all have experience of desperation at a huge queue having women entering 'the male toilet', and no one is yet baulking at clothes being in sections for 'ladies' fashions' or 'gents' clothing'.

What gain, then, in not telling a three-year-old girl that she should simply ignore societal notions, if she wants to play with something whose marketing targets it at boys ? Will she not already have learnt to face this world of inequality, where the make-up and perfume department of Boots and of department stores makes it abundantly clear that these products are for her sex ? - can a boy justly infer that, although there are now products that are called male perfumes, essentially his choice is limited to a tiny range of 'aftershaves' ?

Some would have us believe that not labelling, say, a bead art set as 'for girls' would not only have the boys who don't already ignore such tosh (and play with what they want) flocking to do likewise, and they would then go on to do the jobs thought of as feminine, and vice versa : Read the debate on the blog of someone claiming to be Sam Candour, and see what you think...


End-notes

* 'Disabled parking', to me, always sounds like somewhere that would be a parking space, but it has been shut off, i.e. the adjective seems to denote the status of the parking itself (versus 'enabled').


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