Childhood Memories: Counterintuitive Playtime

Bro went back to college today, so for the first time, I’m the one at home while my brother is the one at school. It’s the perfect time to reminisce (while making a tiny bit of a point).

When Bro and I were little, we often shared our toys. They were either gender-specific or gender-neutral, rarely items intended for the opposite gender. But we used them in quite creative ways.

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I remember a Playskool plastic makeup kit that I used well through elementary school in spite of it being a little young for me. My best friend R and I used to go through this whole mad scientist thing with it. The mad scientist would convince the innocent girl to put on makeup, and either the lipstick or the nail polish turned the innocent girl into a zombie that would do the mad scientist’s will. The mad scientist would then tell the zombie to go downstairs into the pantry, where they would stay for a while, becoming a murderous fiend. The murderous fiend would then come out of the pantry, attack the mad scientist, and choke them against the front door until the mad scientist was dead. That was the end of the game. R and I would then switch positions and play again. My horror inclinations were already developing, as you can see.

I also had Barbie dolls. Some of them were mine and some of them were my mom’s old dolls. I did some of the typical things with them – I loved to brush and do their hair, put different clothes on them, have them drive in a Barbie Jeep. But I’d also create fantastic scenarios where a potion would turn a male doll female (after all, I didn’t have a Ken doll), and the Barbies would proceed to have sex (since they’re all Barbies, would that make it incest or masturbation instead?). At twenty one, thinking of Mini Me making my Barbies have sex is a little horrifying. But it’s amazing, I think, how much kids actually intuit about sex. And having girl-on-man-transformed-into-girl action back then is, in retrospect, kind of queer, and certainly a good story to tell in the future, but I don’t make anything of it as far as informing the present queerness goes. As I said, I only had female Barbies.

Bro got into dinosaurs at one point, and for Christmas or a birthday, he got this dinosaur thing modeled after Jurassic Park (which, for the record, he was way too young to see, and he hated scary movies back then). The dinosaurs were small, but he also got some big models separate from the set – a triceratops, an allosaur, and a pteranadon. We also had some old plastic dinosaurs from when I played with dinosaurs. Now, Bro may have played with them more, but I loved the big models. And I rescued the allosaur from being given away because I still quite like it. Bro also played with toy cars – he liked to line them up, then have races or just make them move. Some of the cars were mine, and some were his.

We also had a few gender-neutral things we shared. We had a Koosh ball with a hoop and a small Playskool basketball hoop. For both, the entire family would play HORSE. I remember how fun that was. And we had one of those forts that can look like castles or houses once assembled. It wasn’t as nice as some of the ones today that actually have structure – it was cloth and plastic tubes. But we loved it and shared it. There was also a kitchen that I guess was intended for me, but it was so colorful (and so not pink) that it was available for both of us. Same with the plastic tool sets. Both of us played with them. Later in our lives, both Bro and I would both love action figures – Bro did Transformers and I did Star Wars. We both did the whole Beanie Baby thing, I did the Troll thing. We also had a few Power Rangers (the old and better Power Rangers) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures.

However, the main toys in our household were books, and when it came to books, Bro and I shared many interests as well as had our own, and these interests defied gender. My parents introduced me to the Goosebumps series when I was in second grade, and I fell in love with them, scary as they were to a six- or seven-year-old child. Bro took a little longer (the whole family agrees he was a little wimp when it came to scary things… even he does now *hee*) to get into the Goosebumps books. He preferred Encyclopedia Brown joke books, and riddle books. I wasn’t as partial to the latter two, but I remember reading the Encyclopedia Brown books when Bro checked them out from the library. And Mom and Dad read to us, sometimes apart, but mostly together – they read to us from books usually beyond our age level, though not beyond our reading level (and I say that’s <i>why</i> our reading level was so high).

My parents were really very good about not forcing us into playing with gender-determined toys or reading gender-determined books to us. They listened to what we wanted and encouraged us to grow in our interests, whatever those interests were. They didn’t put us into little gendered boxes, and people who gave gifts to one of us generally understood that they gifted both of us, although sometimes the gift-giving was a little gendered. I just look back, and I’m glad that my parents raised us according to our individual personalities, not necessarily based on our sex.

X-posted to In Pursuit of Happiness,