Toytown

Toys. A child’s first entry point into the world of their parents, and, subsequently, the world of class, gender, ideology, and race. Pretty heavy, I know. But as tools of social formation (and manipulation), there’s really nothing innocent about them.

Toys represent accepted ideas of how children should play and what they should be playing with. Your initial experience with a toy will almost always be a gendered one, boys here and girls there; a subtle nudge in the direction of stereotype and lingering attitudes about the world.

My brother never played with my Barbies or Polly Pockets. I, on the other hand, would sometimes join him on his fictional trysts into the world of high espionage and monster-hunting. Aside from Betty Spaghetti, I collected stuffed and tiny plastic figures of Brontosauruses. I was allowed to fiddle with the Lego pieces and Gundam figures and Zoids from time to time, but my brother wouldn’t even touch my Barbie’s Ken.

How’s that for a first dose of the double standard? Your sense of identity handed on a silver platter.

But aside from identity, toys also manifest value. Their marketing, presentation, and undeniable place in the chain of supply and demand reflect this fact; while their purchase reinforces the underlying structures of inequality. Every child plays with toys, sure, but it’s always a question of who has the bigger, better and newer ones. Toys teach children how to desire, which means that in the end, they’ll never truly be satisfied anyway. Otherwise, well, it wouldn’t be desire.

Identity is fluid, as this Barbie-Ken shows. 

Innocuous plastic things. They’re one of the first to expose children the world over to the feeling; not to mention serving as a child’s initiation into consumerist culture and the commodity fetish.

I remember a time when I went crazy over this mermaid doll. It was supposed to be able to change its hair color from red to purple to blue depending on the temperature of the water you dipped it in. I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but I know that the moment I saw it in this toy store in Greenhills, it had to be mine. I yearned for it and dropped hints to my mom and made excuses to stop by her boutique in Greenhills after class and behaved and whined and cajoled.

I got the mermaid, eventually. And completely forgot about it after about a week of trying to get its hair color to change.

Thus, as any trip to the toy store will show, children are no strangers to the art of conditioning. Through toys they learn how to manipulate and obey; how to act and think according to the mold.

Indeed, it is behind the seemingly neutral, pleasant, and innocent façade that toys are thought of as being only for children. Toy Story 3 tells us that sooner or later (specifically once we hit high school), we’ll have to definitively leave our Woodys and Buzz Lightyears and Mr. Potato Heads behind.

Our own local version of the gendered experience that toys provide. The famed barrel man of Baguio. Photo by Reuel Mark Delez  

But who are we kidding? In the end, all we ever do is replace them — bigger, better, newer.

Because, when you come right down to it, toys are violent. A microcosm of the adult world, as Roland Barthes has said. And what better way to illustrate this than the toys of warfare, neo-colonial expansion, the sex industry, and politicking, among others?

In this day and age, perhaps anything and everything can be viewed as a toy — even us.