Anyone who thinks that the girl market is a mystery or that girls are not interested in toys should visit an American Girl store where girls from 2-20 pay big bucks for dolls and accesories. I don't get it since I never liked dolls, but my daughter and her friends love them. On a recent Saturday the store was so crowded you couldn't move and there were people lined up to the door. She did extra chores to save for Josephina's pet goat. Go figure.

I just took a quick look at the girlfitti products online and my first thought, ugh who did they hire to design this stuff, it is so ugly. In fact a lot of girl's toys are really aesthetically unpleasing. Lots of lazily made graphics of butterflies and hearts, ugly color combinations, and painfully hideous fonts. Maybe the toy industry needs better designers. Case in point: Hello Kitty. A lot of women, and girls alike love Hello Kitty. And one of the reasons why is because Hello Kitty is fantastically designed. The colors pallate is very pleasing to the eye, not horrible clashes of neon pink and purple. I am in my mid 20s and I still occassionally will buy a Hello Kitty pen or trinket.

Is there some reason girls can't play with "boy" toys? Or for that matter, gender-neutral toys? My daughters (10 and 7) both love LEGOs, and, contrary to the "classic" Freudian psychological studies, build towers as well as houses. My 10-year-old builds robots and Pokemon, too!

I'm in my 20's. My sister and I played with Barbies growing up. But we also had a He-Man set-up AND Star Wars toys (the Millenium Falcon, Jabba the Hutt, etc). Pretty much anything was encourage by Mom, except for the more realistic war-making toys ( ie GI Joe). I never understood why girls couldn't be encouraged to play with boys' toys...

I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that boys are still interesting in playing with toys longer then girls generally are, and if "boys toys" aren't available, they'll make do with what they've got. I wasn't allowed any toy guns or otherwise "violent" toys, so sticks became guns and swords, and if that wasn't available, my friends and I would manipulate my sister's Barbie dolls into various sexual positions and strategically hide ourselves so we could see my sister freak out when she saw them.

As much as Broadsheet reader may not like it, I think a lot of this boils down to inate differences between the sexes. Maybe it's because girls "mature quicker," as I was told whenever the girl next door lost interest in having mudclod fights or throwing cherry tomotoes at passing cars.

We don't have to make it pink for girls to like it, you know. If a hovering helicopter looks cool, let her play with it! We all know that a lot of the time kids display some degree of gender-specific preferences, but that doesn't mean all the time. I have three young daughters, and though they certainly enjoy their fair share of pink stuff, they've always had Legos and Tonkas and remote control cars too. I figure that as long as they're given this kind of variety in the toys available to them, their choices will be based more on their actual interests than on some sort of (intentional or otherwise) parental steering. If we don't tell them only boys do this and only girls play with that, maybe they'll just be themselves. And by the way, let's not forget that these principles can apply to our sons as well!

Girls are under more pressure to grow up quickly than boys are. They're being sent the message early on that their looks, clothes, bodies, and sex appeal are their most important assets. And if you manage to shield your little girl from it at home, she'll pick it up quickly enough once she hits school. Girls clothes, girls toys, and girls media reinforce this message. (Look at the Bratz franchise: dolls, games, cartoon, clothing all pushing little girls to act like overly sexualized teens.)

Boys, on the other hand, are expected to have a protracted childhood followed by a protracted adolescence. There simply aren't the same kind of expectations placed on them. They aren't being pushed into becoming sexualized beings until they are in their teens, when their hormones are popping and they're ready for it. What boys face instead is early exposure to violence.

Girls' play tends to center around the relations between the toys (guided by the same person or other playmates). The vehicle for girls play can be anything. So if everyone "just has to have a barbie," then a barbie will be the likely vehicle. But it doesn't have to be. This puts a burden on toy sellers (and I agree with "It" that no imagination goes into many products targeted at girls).

Boys, while also able to use toys abstractly, tend to place more interest on the object of play (GI Joe's motives are far less critical than the fact that the switch on the side allows him to karate chop).

Everything is a toy to a young boy.

You probably are trolling, but I do have to say that my brother and I used to play with EVERYTHING--including (especially including) the refrigerator box, which we wold crawl into and then slide down the stairs. We'd also stick our legs and butts into a pillowcase (sitting on top of the pillow) and have races sliding down the stairs.

We spent a lot of time outside, playing with all the other kids in the neighborhood. But we didn't play with "toys". We'd play hide and seek, or make "houses" under the pine trees, or climb around in overgrown bushes.

So I'd say that everything was a toy to US. Boys and girls alike.

And when we played with toys, it would be legos, or building bricks of other sorts, or plastic Breyer horses, OR baby dolls.

As much as Broadsheet reader may not like it, I think a lot of this boils down to inate differences between the sexes. Maybe it's because girls "mature quicker," as I was told whenever the girl next door lost interest in having mudclod fights or throwing cherry tomotoes at passing cars.

See above--I can generalize from my experiences just like you can from yours!

Maybe girl's toys are not doing so well because (as one poster said) they're REALLY tacky looking. Or maybe the girls are playing with boy's toys. Maybe some marketing genius should try to find out what girls really ARE playing with, as opposed to making a pink something-or-other, slapping some hearts and butterflies and ballerinas on it, and then wondering why it doesn't sell.