My son has a Nerf arsenal stashed in his room. His Nerf guns have no resemblance to the Nerf guns of my youth, which were palm-sized plastic objects loaded with foam "bullets" that bounced harmlessly off whatever they hit. Today's Nerf guns look like bazookas, with complicated rapid-fire mechanisms designed to launch bullets that sting when they hit human flesh.
The Nerf-crazed boys I know can spend hours discussing the relative merits of this or that weapon, or analysing strategies for ambush. On the one hand, it pleases me that they create their own games and establish the rules of play. They stop ambling around moaning that they're bored or agitating for more screen time. But at the same time, it disturbs me that they are playing at war with weapons that seem far too real.
Recently, however, while shopping for birthday presents, I came across something even more disturbing: Nerf guns in pink and lavender packaging, with the word "Rebelle" written along the side of the package.
Rebelle? Congratulations, Nerf. You've broken with gender and spelling conventions at the same time.
Rebelle, unfortunately, is not an isolated case, but yet another instance in what I think of as "product pinkification." Take, for example, the "Lego Friends" kits that launched a few years ago: each set contained a small curvaceous doll and the pieces to build uncomplicated boxy structures: a cafe, an animal hospital, and (of course) a beauty shop. Like Rebelle, the Lego sets come in pastel packages labelled with soft script. Nothing seems exempt from this heavy pink-handed marketing strategy. Even Dell computers tried to pinkify. In 2009, it unveiled the "Della" website to sell its (pastel-coloured) laptops to women. Included on the site, which has since been shut down, were calorie-counting apps and recipes.
Do sales numbers really bear out the theory that women will buy anything as long as it's pink? And as consumers, do we really want to perpetuate this idea? A clothing store clerk once told me that she enjoyed watching the struggle that occurred between little boys and their parents, when the little boys – too young to understand things like "gender conventions" – wanted the sparkly items in the shop: spangly skirts, sequinned shoes, brightly coloured trousers. "Those are for girls," the parents would tell their little boys. And the little boys, almost always offered the only reasonable response: "why?"
It may be that marketing Rebelle to girls doesn't necessarily damage the girls' awareness of their place in the world; women have had to negotiate their position in a male-dominated world for millennia. But what does the Rebelle teach little boys? My son concedes that the mechanics of the Rebelle are "pretty good", but he wouldn't be caught dead carrying a pastel pistol. The package suggests to him that girls can't use boys' stuff, and that girls need special equipment to play the same games. The packaging further segregates the sexes, so that boys and girls now live in a world where the rainbow is gender-coded into boys' colours and girls' colours – and nary should the two mix.
Am I being too cynical? Should I see the Rebelle as an indication that boys and girls can now play the same games? Should this violet-hued violent instrument actually symbolise a move towards increased gender equality? I imagine that's what the Nerf marketing department might want me to think.
I suppose some people might look at the Rebelle and say, "it's just a toy, no big deal". But given the violence pervasive in the world, and particularly the gun-related violence in the United States, which steadfastly refuses to enact meaningful gun-control legislation, do we really want to see girl-guns as a positive symbol of anything? Do we really want to shrug away the idea of guns-as-toys?
In our household, unfortunately, it's too late for me to forbid Nerf guns. One slipped in as a birthday gift a few years back, and now my son would no more relinquish his arsenal than he would wear sequinned sneakers. His friends feel the same way, I'm afraid. There's no chance of moving towards unilateral Nerf disarmament or beating those guns into plastic ploughshares.
Maybe, though, we could require boys to use the same lavender weapons that the girls use: let's Rebelle against colour-coded gender conventions. After all, if these guns are good enough for girls, shouldn't they be good enough for boys?
Deborah Lindsay Williams (mannahattamamma.com) is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi