PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Four-year-old Gavyn Boscio
loves to cook and asked for an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. But when his big
sister went to buy one, she discovered to her disappointment that it comes only
in girly pink and purple, with girls - and only girls - on the box and in the
commercials.
So the eighth-grader from Garfield, N.J.,
started an online petition asking Pawtucket, R.I.-based Hasbro to make the toy
ovens in gender-neutral colors and feature boys on the package.
By Friday, 13-year-old McKenna
Pope's petition had garnered more than 30,000 signatures in a little more than
a week.
And celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who
owned an Easy-Bake Oven as a boy, is among those weighing in on her side.
In a video McKenna made to accompany
her petition on Change.org, Gavyn whips up a batch of cookies and tells his
sister he wants a dinosaur and an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. When she asks
him why there are no boys in the commercial for Easy-Bake Ovens, he explains:
"Because only girls play with it."
"Obviously, the way they're
marketing this product is influencing what he thinks and the way that he
acts," McKenna said in an interview. She said her little brother would
probably be OK playing with a purple-and-pink oven by himself but would be too
embarrassed to use it in front of his friends.
A spokesman for Hasbro did not
return calls for comment.
In a letter McKenna received on
Monday, a Hasbro representative told her the company has featured boys on the
packaging over the years and said a brother and sister were finalists for the
Easy-Bake "Baker of the Year" award in 2009. Hasbro also pointed to
Flay as an example of a chef who traced his career to an early experience with
the Easy-Bake.
McKenna found the response
disappointing.
"All they really told me is
that boys play with their products. I already know boys do play with your
products, so why are you only marketing them to girls?" she said. "I
don't want them to make a boys' Easy-Bake Oven and girls' Easy-Bake Oven. I
want them to make an Easy-Bake Oven for kids."
The debate over whether toy
companies are reinforcing gender stereotypes - pinks and princesses for girls,
guns and gross things for boys - seems to flare every year, particularly at
Christmas, and has involved such things as Legos, toy microscopes and Barbie
dolls. Now, it has extended to another one of the most beloved baby boomer
toys, introduced in the 1960s.
Flay, 47, said he asked for an
Easy-Bake for Christmas when he was about 5. He remembers it as a "putrid
green" and recalls baking cakes with his mother from mixes. (The Easy-Bake Oven back then used a light
bulb as a heating element; now it operates more like a real oven.) At the time,
he said, the stereotype was that only women cooked, but a lot has changed since
then.
"I cannot tell you how many
young boys are my fans. And they want to grow up, and they want to cook,"
the Food Network star said.
Jim Silver, a toy expert and
editor-in-chief of Timetoplaymag.com, played with an Easy-Bake himself when as
a kid and said boys still play with it, just as girls play with Hot Wheels
cars. He said Hasbro is simply marketing to the audience most likely to buy the
oven and there's nothing wrong with that.
About seven years ago, Hasbro had a
cooking product aimed at boys, the Queasy Bake Cookerator, which included
recipes for gross-sounding treats such as Dip n' Drool Dog Bones and Mud n'
Crud Cake. "Sales failed miserably," Silver said.
Flay said he is not surprised it
failed because Hasbro was trying to appeal to boys in a stereotypical way.
Instead, he urged the toymaker to think about widening the market for the
Easy-Bake.
"Why not actually create something
that everybody knows the name, but also it comes in different colors so that
boys, girls, doesn't matter, they can pick what color they want and it will
make them a little more comfortable to buy it?" he said.
In the meantime, he said, Gavyn's
family should buy him an Easy-Bake Oven anyway.
"Absolutely. If that's what he
wants, why not get it for him? I mean, who cares what color it is?" he
said.
(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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