Show of hands: who had an Easy-Bake Oven growing up?
Let’s face it, an Easy-Bake Oven was like the first step down the long, fulfilling road of homosexuality. The moment you cooked a bland, tasteless, single-serving brownie using nothing but a lightbulb and some pink plastic is the moment you took destiny into your own hands.
Well, good news for a new generation of kids: the first line of unisex Easy-Bake Ovens are coming, featuring non-gender-specific colours and ad campaigns showing that both boys and girls can enjoy fake baking!
According to news reports, McKenna Pope, a 13-year-old New Jersey girl, “got more than 40,000 signatures on her online petition at Change.org and the support of celebrity chefs including Bobby Flay.” She wanted to get a gift for her little brother, 4-year-old Gavyin Boscio, but could only find purple and pink ones. Although these nifty Easy-Bake Ovens don’t seem as feminine as the ones of yesteryear, McKenna wanted one that she thought would be appropriate for her lil bro.
AdvertisementHasbro invited McKenna and her family to its Rhode Island headquarters and executives showed off a prototype of their newest Easy-Bake: one that’s black, silver and blue. [Source]
On one hand, I think the larger problem is the idea that girls can only do things A, B and C, while boys can do things X, Y and Z, so I think the better long-term solution here is to just let kids play with whatever they want (within reason) and tell anyone who doesn’t like it to fuck off. On the other hand, this comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sums up exactly why the world needs gender-neutral toys: