The Story on Toys for Girls? They’re Mostly About Boys

WASHINGTON —  Imagine this scene: Four 7-year-old girls, their tender cheeks flushed with excitement, settle down after Christmas to play a new board game. Not Parcheesi, not Chutes and Ladders, but Sealed With a Kiss. The girls choose their playing pieces--a colored pawn and a 3-by-5-inch picture of a teenage boy, a “hunk.” One girl twirls the spinner to see how many places she will move her pawn around the board.

She lands on a picture of a girl and boy embracing. Great! “Spin an ‘X’ to give a kiss.” She gets an “X,” and stamps her hunk’s face with the “cool” Kiss Stamper, which leaves a lipsticked mouth. The first girl to get five kisses wins.

In a toy world dominated by males, both parents and manufacturers are interested in boosting female-oriented toys. One study found that 11 of the 15 most advertised toys in 1993 were aimed at boys, another that seven aisles of a Toys R Us were crammed with things for boys while five aisles of mostly dolls were for girls. The catch is, after doing what they describe as “extensive” research, toy companies say that to make stuff interesting to girls they have to focus on one element: boys.

There is the occasional reference to a career, or being smart, but the overriding theme of these and other girl games is that a girl should be pretty, plot how to get, keep or trade a boyfriend, go shopping, gossip, paint her toenails and her face, and kiss, kiss, kiss. And her primary colors are pink and purple.

Take Dream Phone (ages 9 and older), which comes with a battery-powered pink plastic telephone on which to dial the numbers of “cute guys” to get a clue about your “secret admirer.” Is it Dale? Jamal? They offer clues: “I know where he hangs out,” says the electronic voice. “He’s not at the snack shop.” The girl who correctly guesses which guy has a crush on her wins. You lose a turn if you draw the card that says, “Mom says hang up,” with a picture of a crabby-looking woman wearing a kerchief tied around her head.

“We design our games based on what [kids] say,” said Mark Morris, public relations manager for Milton Bradley. “The object of the game is trying to see who has a crush on you, but the game-play itself is one where you’re checking into all these details and places. It’s really a game of deductive logic.”

“Dream Phone . . . is phone sex with training wheels,” wrote columnist Naomi Klein in the Toronto Star.

Sealed With a Kiss (ages 7-11) is “a fantasy game that puts kissing in a fun, innocent light,” said Warren Industries spokeswoman Am Rodgers. “We found interpersonal relationships in the 7-to-11 age group are very important. The game lets them talk about interpersonal relationships in a positive environment.”

Milton Bradley also produces Electronic Mall Madness (ages 9 and older), a game about shopping that Morris says is really about strategy--”how to judiciously spend your money.”

“There is an electronic voice that periodically announces a sale at the toy store and a clearance at the camera store. You’re going around the mall to buy six items on your shopping list and get out of the mall. So you have to figure out how to do it.”

Another valuable life skill is ignored, however: You don’t have to fight for a parking space.

“We’re concerned that the pink and purple aisle has very traditional notions of what girls are about,” said Heather Johnston Nicholson, director of the National Resource Center of Girls Inc. in Indianapolis. “Real girls are active and adventuresome, but what’s in the pink and purple aisle is boring and patronizing. . . . We’re teaching girls at younger and younger ages that your most important job is to be attractive, to grab a male, to think of your life in terms of a relationship with one other person.”

This year Milton Bradley bought Girl Talk (ages 8 and older), which was previously produced by Western Publishing. This is a board game with a spinner that directs the players to do or say things for points.

“Spell--and pronounce backwards--the name of the boy you like.”

“Call the cutest guy in your class and tell him jokes. He has to laugh before you hang up.”

“Would you ever marry someone for money?”

“Has a really uncool guy ever had a crush on you? What did you do?”

A player who doesn’t want to answer or perform gets a “Zit Sticker,” a red dot she must stick on her face. The first player to get 25 points gets to read her Girl Talk Girl Cards, which each player gives to the girl she thinks matches the description on the card. They say things like “Bubbly personality,” “Loves to gossip” or “Wiggles when she walks.”

“Sadly, there is a market for these games,” said Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, author of “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women” (Talese/Doubleday, 1996) and founder of the women’s studies program at Emory University.

“We do know that little girls like clothes, like to appeal to men, and they have a different take on all that kind of thing than young men do. I’m afraid the market is a good barometer. But I don’t see why we assume [playing these games] poisons them. It doesn’t preclude them from doing well in school, or playing soccer, which they also do.”

Toy makers won’t release figures on the sales of individual games or toys, but most of the girlie board games have stood the test of a few years’ time. The best-selling games are still those that are gender-neutral, like Monopoly and Ouija, according to a Consumer Reports survey of 10- to 14-year-olds last year.

Fox-Genovese said boys as well as girls are losing out because few are actively encouraged to use their imaginations. “The real problem is not that they play at being more grown up than they are, but that they are imaginatively bankrupt.” But even she has a problem with games that feature kissing and dating being aimed at 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds.

Video games targeting girls are also linked to boy-chasing, and--to take a media leap--few kids’ movies offer much more. The current hit “Toy Story,” for example, gives girls very short shrift. Bo Peep is the female toy that comes to life, all batting eyelashes and sexy voice, and her only action is to smother the cowboy with kisses. The little girl in the film has a tea party with her dolls.