Preteen Wants Easy Bake Ovens To Target Boys, Too
A 13-year-old has gotten more than 24,000 signatures on her petition to get Hasbro to market Easy Bake Ovens to boys, after sharing a story about her 4-year-old brother Gavyn who just wanted a dinosaur and Easy Bake Oven for Christmas.
"I don't know how and why they only put girls in the commercial," Gavyn says in an adorable video.
His sister, McKenna Pope, went to Change.org to start a petition, asking Hasbro to quit gender stereotyping and sell their ovens to both genders.
"I thought as a society we have far moved past that, but we continue to force the stereotype that men don't cook, they work," Pope said.
In her argument on Change.org, Pope notes that the toy her brother loves only comes in gender-specific hues of purple and pink.
"I have always been adamantly against anything that promotes specific roles in society for men and women, and having grown up with toys produced by the Hasbro corporation, it truly saddens me that such a successful business would resort to conforming to society's views on what boys do and what girls do," she writes. Word.
The colors, she writes in a letter to Hasbro, "make it seem as though cooking is 'girly', which it is not by any means." She wants the corporation to stop enforcing gender stereotypes by making boys feel like it's "wrong" to want to be a chef, showing that "cooking and baking is for everyone, not a specific group of people." But of course, let's not forget that the professional culinary world is still male-dominated; as The Cut writes, when boys cook, "There's a bunch of special French words for it. And you get lots of James Beard Awards." Can't everyone just cook and bake, professionally or non-professionally, all while singing Nicki Minaj?