By Heather Sadlemire

You won’t walk through Target and see toy aisles labeled for boys or for girls. Celebrities are naming their daughters traditional male names, like James and Max. Gender stereotypes and marketing are considered rather passé. But, for whatever reason, there is one place where this is still prevalent and, frankly, it’s really starting to piss me off.

McDonald’s.

I’ll start off by acknowledging that trying to ride your high horse through the McDonald’s drive-thru isn’t very easy to do. So, maybe this is why nobody else is talking about it. It’s a shameful thing to be feeding your children such garbage. Buy local. Cook organic. Blah blah. I know the drill, but I threw away that play book once I had to pick up a kid at daycare, feed her, clean up that mess and get her clean(ish) before I passed out from exhaustion.

So if you’re a very special parent, raising very special, grass-fed snowflakes, you can go ahead and just stop reading now, because I’m not about to defend my decision to hit up a drive-thru every now and again (and again. And again.)

I don’t have a beef with McDonald’s when it comes to their, well, beef. But my issue is the infamous line we hear whenever we order a Happy Meal: “Is that toy for a girl or a boy?”

What?

This one struck a particular nerve with me over the weekend. We were in line long enough for me to see that the toy this week was a Justice League action figure. Cool. My kid is way into Barbies, Little People, action figures – basically, anything she can use to tell a story. At least it’s not going to be another animatronic cat that I’ll toss when she’s sleeping because it talks when nobody is touching it and it may or may not be possessed by some sort of demon penalizing me for not giving her home grown spaghetti squash for dinner.

Even my husband, who sometimes rolls his eyes at my “Girl power!” temperament, paused. “Excuse me? Just a Happy Meal, please.”

The attendant was annoyed and my husband became frazzled when she asked him again if he wanted a girl toy or a boy toy. From past experiences, I knew he was quickly debating how feminist I was going to get over this and what his answer should be. Because we were quickly encroaching on nap time, I leaned over, huffed the word “girl” through the window and he pulled forward.

I’m sorry, but is there a reason why my daughter can’t get a Batman in her Happy Meal or why your son can’t have a Wonder Woman? Can someone please explain this to me? Has McDonald’s experienced such an outcry for stereotypical gender toys that they don’t dare group all these heroes together, just grab one out of the damn bin and shove it into that infamous cardboard box? What if a boy already has two Batmans because being a parent is freaking hard and time consuming and sometimes you just hit McDonald’s up twice in one week? Sure, you can ask for a “girl” toy, but what is that teaching little boys?

I don’t know. Maybe I should focus my energies on growing vegetables from a compost in our backyard. Or maybe I’ll just start going to Wendy’s. They never pull this crap. Plus, they’re always talking about their salads. Salads are healthy, right?

*********

About the Author

Heather is a marketing director and NY native (of the Upstate variety) who has to cover the last few pages of a good book with her hands so that she doesn’t skim ahead and ruin the ending. In between scouring the clearance racks at Target and stalking Mindy Kaling’s Twitter feed, she performs Disney numbers for her daughter (a toddler who can’t object) and husband (who knew what he was getting into when he put a ring on it.) Follow her on Twitter. https://twitter.com/HeatherLWheeler