| Sep 28, 2002 Didn't the feminists insist all along that competition
is the bane of a peaceful society, a sinister plot of the patriarchy?
Imagine how surprised I was to find this on Wired News today:
Sally Ride
Toys With Engineering
(Making the Grade 2:00 a.m. PDT)
The first American woman in space has a new mission: Get more girls interested in science
and engineering. To that end, Sally Ride is sponsoring a toy design competition for
middle-schoolers. By Katie Dean.
A toy-design competition? Promoted by a feminist? How can
that be? Is it for real?
Going to the "team rules", it becomes clear that this is not a competition
between any and all kids, but it is one designed to give girls a very heavy advantage over
boys
"A team must
have between 3 and 6 members, at least half of them girls."
That means that it's quite all right to have teams with three, two, one or no members
who are boys, as long as at least between half to all of the
team members are girls.
It means that competitions between girls' and boys' teams or between all-boys teams
will be impossible, but that all-girls teams and teams with just one to three boys on them
will be allowed to compete, as long as no more than half of any
team is comprised of boys.
I suspect that the winner will be a team with boys on it, as such a team is more likely
to be technically creative and advantaged. An all-boys' team is obviously too much
competition; that must be why such teams are ruled out. It would be irresponsible of
any parent to let any child of his participate in the competition. It is as bad and
discriminatory as having Blacks ride in the back of the bus.
The footers of the toy-design-competition-pages at the site inform that:
TRANSFORMERS, TONKA, LITE BRITE, BARREL OF MONKEYS,
CANDY LAND, SPIROGRAPH, MONOPOLY, PLAY-DOH AND MR. POTATO HEAD ARE TRADEMARKS OF HASBRO
AND ARE USED WITH PERMISSION.
The web pages at the site are copyrighted by HASBRO.
HASBRO, SMITH COLLEGE, and Sally Ride Science Club are the sponsors of the ToyChallenge
Competition.
Follow the links identified through the icons for the three "sponsors" of the
toy-design competition and you get a first-hand impression of how the sexist promotion of
a gender agenda is made to work at the middle-school level.
It's all done with impunity. Now wonder the girls shown in a photo at one of the web pages
describing the competition stick out their tongues.
Who is interested in all those tech-toys anyway, girls or boys? It is time to
remind HASBRO and to write to them.
Walter
| 2002 09 28 Dear Hasbro,
Although our children are grown up now, they still have a need to buy toys for their
children, and so do we. My wife and I have thirteen grandchildren, and we always took and
still take great care in selecting the kind of toys our children and now our grandchildren
received for presents.
We became aware of the sexist and discriminatory ToyChallenge competition launched by
Sally Rider and sponsored by you. It is a competition that puts girls at an unfair
advantage over boys. In consequence we will exercise greater care than usual and make sure
that no toys produced and distributed by Hasbro will be bought by or for any of the
members of our extended family.
We will gladly resume our traditional buying habits as soon as you demonstrate that you
put an end to your sponsorship of Sally Rider's discriminatory scheme to advance girls
over boys.
Sincerely,
Walter H. and Ruth Schneider
P.O. Box 62
Bruderheim, Alberta, Canada, T0B 0S0 |
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