STEVE SAILER: Are Feminists Stuck in “Groundhog Day” or “Memento?”

These articles about how little boys on average really want to play with baby dolls as much as little girls and little girls want to play with toy guns as much as little boys didn’t seem all that persuasive to me when I was 14.

But when I read them over 40 years ago, they were at least fairly novel. And a massive social experiment was then going on in which true-believing young parents were trying to impose feminist theories of childrearing on their newborns.

The results of this massive 1970s experiment came in long, long ago: Gender-neutral childrearing turned out to be highly ineffectual because it was immensely unpopular with its subjects. Little boys and little girls whined and nagged and threw temper tantrums until their feminist parents broke down and gave them the incredibly sexist toys they insisted upon.

In fact, the opposite happened of what feminists predicted in 1969. As society got richer and more choices became available, little kids’ toy and media choices diverged even more along lines of sex.