Your Friday Awesome

We already new that Sweden was awesome, besides giving their citizens things like healthcare and parental leave, they have given the world Ikea. It turns out their sixth graders are just as with it as their parents.

The sixth graders reported Toys 'R Us to a self-regulatory agency within the International Chamber of Commerce because its 2008 catalog featured “outdated gender roles...boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive."

These are pages from the current ad for the area where I live:


Yep. Pretty much.

Evidently, the action was the culmination of what can only be assumed to be a pretty awesome lesson plan:

The group’s teacher explained to the local Smålandsposten newspaper that filing the complaint was the culmination of more than two years of “long-term work” by the students on gender roles.

Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication.

“Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this,” he told the newspaper.

“When I see that only girls play with certain things then, as a guy, I don’t want it.”

Classmate Moa Averin emphasized the importance of children being able to be who they want even if “guys want to be princesses sometimes”.

Right you are Moa.