Prompt #2: Tory Adkisson

Probably the earliest memory I have of understanding that being a boy and being a girl were different centers around my desire for an Easy-Bake Oven. For those of you may not have had this growing up, the Easy-Bake Oven is a working toy oven made by Hasbro (the people who also make Transformers, another "media object" of my youth that taught me a lot about gender roles even though, as robots, the Autobots and Deceptacons didn't have genders!) By working toy oven, I mean it would bake small things, but in my eyes it was magical, it was the gateway I needed to begin making something before I knew how to draw, which became my next (and longer enduring) passion. Compared to the old models, the current Easy-Bake Oven is very sleek and stylish:

Compare the above to the one I had as a boy:

As you can see, the old model has a variety of pinks and purples on the basic white of the oven's body. The current model has pink too, but it's a much darker pink, making me wonder if it isn't a strategy on the part of the Hasbro folks to make the oven more gender-appropriate. As a boy, the colors didn't bother me at all--my favorite color was (and still is) purple. If anything, the color made it more attractive. I was much closer to my mother than I was with my father, and that manifested itself in a desire to be like her. I had long hair, which often braided, and even drank little sips of coffee in the morning like she did. Learning how to bake seemed like the next logical step, and the Easy-Bake Oven provided a relatively safe alternative to working with the actual oven, something my mother would've never allowed.

I was probably no older than four or five when I got my Easy-Bake Oven. As I recall my mother didn't have any problems with my wanting/having it. My mother's a character in her own right--a former biker chick who ran with the Hell's Angels up and down the California 1 (or Pacific Coast Highway) but also quite Jewish, and therefore, protective of me. As a non-traditional woman in her own right, she never had problems with my less than boyish behavior. My father, however, was furious when he found out I got the toy. He'd already tried and failed to push me into sports of various kinds: baseball, football, street hockey, and none of it took. I was a quiet, sensitive boy who liked to read and pet his cats and, even though my father himself was not very masculine, he had a complex about my masculinity. His arguments with my mother about the toy lead to him calling me a "sissy," which, at that point, was the first I ever heard that word used. That word would later be applied so frequently to me (by him, by other kids at school. even by a few teachers) I would start to think of it as a synonym to my name.

It's obvious to me now that the Easy-Bake Oven is a girl's toy, one meant to reinforce a girl's notion of her role as a domestic entity, as "the one who cooks." Though our culture not, as a whole, is not as stuck in these stereotypes as we used to be, the gender-coding of children's toys persists. It's funny, especially considering that the cooking profession is notoriously male-centric, that the desire to bake would make a boy seem so girly, never mind my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe's, or Creepy Crawlers. I'm glad my mom let me have the toy though because, despite all the grief and dysfunction the toy, and my obvious gender non-conformity caused me as a boy, I can now bake a pretty delicious cake.