A group of feminists, some dressed as princesses and maids, briefly occupied a Paris toy shop Saturday to protest the gender stereotypes fuelled by toys in the run-up to Christmas.

Slamming the prevalence on store shelves of pink-clad dolls for girls and swords for boys the protesters urged shoppers to opt for gender-neutral gifts.

"The conditioning starts with toys," said Roselyne Segalen of the group Chiennes de Garde (Watch Dogs).

"Gendered toys such as science kits for little boys and tea sets and makeup for girls are shockingly regressive," she said.

On the same subject:

Toys are more gendered now than they were 50 years ago - Boing Boing

Before Reagan's FCC deregulated kids' TV and allowed toy-makers to produce 22-minute commercials disguised as cartoons, there had been major strides in de-gendering toys, grouping them by interest, rather than by constraining who was "supposed" to play with them.

Elizabeth Sweet, a postdoc at UC Davis, rounds up the research on how toys are marketed and presented as being exclusively for one gender or another (the Disney Store website only has "For boys" and "For girls" sections, with no toys presented as unisex at all). She traces the regressive trend to excluding children from toys based on gender to the deregulation of the 1980s.

It's an interesting codicil to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, which argues that most progressive, humane, and humanitarian rules arose in the post-war period, when the capital of the world's wealthiest had been eroded by two great wars, depriving the rich establishment of the power to exclusively rule government.