IHSS- Toys

 

My favorite toy, and probably one of the only ones I owned as a kid was a Jellycat. Jellycat is a popular brand of stuffed animals because of its soft, high quality, and diverse toy range. I bought my first Jellycat in 2012 and it was a bunny and ever since then I have kept buying them. My favorite Jellycat that I owned was my blue elephant named Tyler. I bought him in 2016 because he was the only blue stuffed animal in the store (my favorite color at the time). This toy company has many different animals ranging from tigers, lions, bunnies, and horses, and each toy comes in every color you can imagine. They are very diverse, especially with their advertising. There is never one fundamental color or anything advertising towards certain sex, and their diversity of choices is one of the reasons I that really liked them. My first through Jellycats were a small gray bunny, a medium brown and white bunny, and a large grey bunny. I chose the bunnies because the way they advertised them in the store appealed more to my sex. The toys were separated in different columns having the tigers and lions in one area in the bunnies and horses in another, and along with this, they were also separated by colors like blue and pink. My eye first caught the pink bunnies so that's how I found them, whereas my brother saw the green frogs and he went over there.  Even though there was a large diversity with the advertisement of the toy and the toy types, stores they are sold at still separated by colors appealing to the stereotyped sex. In lower elementary a lot of the kids at Post Oak had Jellycats, so that was how I was first introduced to them. I wouldn't say I was pressured into buying them but if they weren't so popular in my school I definitely wouldn't have found it. My mom was hesitant to buy them because they are very expensive toys, but after talking to her now about it, she said she felt some pressure because I would say everyone had them. These toys have lasted a long time and I still have them today which I admittedly do sleep with at night, but when I was little I would play more games with them, and would ‘force’ my mother to play with me as well.  The way stores advertise them shows bias between sexes, but how it is advertised on the company's website seems much more gender-fluid.