'Three Dolls or Four Dolls’: Misogyny, Racism and the Lies We Tell Our Children
PUBLISHED 5/13/2025 in Ms. Magazine by Jodi Bondi Norgaard
Trump’s attack on girls’ toys isn’t just misguided—it’s part of a broader pattern of misogyny and racism that teaches children to accept inequality from the start.
The media is casting Donald Trump as this year’s Scrooge after he doubled down on the need for high tariffs and fewer dolls in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC News’ Meet the Press last week. “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls,” he said. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.”
Clearly, this was an attempt to deflect from economic hardship (and buying dolls are the least of parents’ concerns when the price of essentials like car seats and strollers are soaring). Because, let’s be clear, girls didn’t create tariffs or supply chain crises. Yet, Trump finds it easier to belittle girls than to acknowledge the failures of male-dominated policymaking.
More problematic for me was that his statements were laden with gendered assumptions, trivialized children’s play, and perpetuated a centuries-old impulse to control what girls—and women—are allowed to want.
This is more than political rhetoric, it’s programming. And it starts early. It starts as soon as you hand a child a toy, which might be a doll. Toys are more than child’s play. Toys—and media and books, too—shape how children see themselves and others. Telling girls or boys what they’re “allowed” to play with, doesn’t just limit their imagination; it limits the opportunities they believe are available to them.
And in this instance, claiming that girls’ needs are negotiable and that women and girls themselves are the problem, not the inequality they face, is a message that reaches everyone—boys and men, too
I know this because I’ve lived it. I spent years in the toy industry, developing a line of sports dolls that encouraged girls to dream big, be active, and value their abilities over their appearance. I saw firsthand how powerful toys could be when they reflect the strength and diversity of real girls. But I also saw how quickly those efforts were minimized or ignored by an industry, and a culture, that didn’t see girls’ interests as serious.
By age 6, girls start to believe that specific activities are “not for them,” simply because they think they’re not smart enough, research shows. That’s not an accident. It’s the result of thousands of messages, from toy aisles to TV shows to presidential podiums, telling girls to stay small, quiet and grateful for whatever they’re given.
The message isn’t just gendered—it’s racialized too.
Recently, a video went viral of a woman who called a young Black boy the N-word. The backlash was immediate, but what followed was even more shocking: The woman received more than $675,000 in online donations. Let that sink in. A grown woman verbally attacks a child, and instead of condemnation, she’s rewarded with nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
While some donors claimed it was to help her escape “cancel culture,” the truth is more disturbing: There’s a segment of society that sees racism not with shame, but as a supposed right disguised as free speech. This is programming too, the kind that teaches children that cruelty can pay, and some lives aren’t as important. When adults model this behavior, it becomes normalized. Children grow up absorbing it and perpetuating it.
While Trump’s comment and the racist donations might seem like separate headlines, they share the same foundation: a society built on blaming women and marginalized communities for the consequences of male-dominated decision-making. Trade wars, broken economies, gender gaps and racial disparities aren’t caused by children, they’re caused by power. And who holds that power? Men like Trump.
This pattern isn’t new, but these narratives allow systemic inequalities to persist while distracting from the real source of the problem.
And such problems start early. The toys children play with, the shows they watch, and the language used to describe them all help shape the adults they become and the biases they carry. We need to demand better representation in media and toys, because children deserve the freedom to dream, play and be seen, so that they stand a better chance of becoming adults who are compassionate and capable of building a more just and equitable world.
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