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I'm not sure how much of that is the result of "Western monoculture". Girls throughout the world reliably prefer dolls to robots.


That's interesting because the difference between dolls and robots is one of the skin/themes placed on humanoid shapes (albeit, robots can take on other shapes and still be robots). In the common case, they both have the same, painted on non-interactive expression. Robotic dolls and doll robots -- what exactly is the choice here.

With my son, we have a lot of animal themed toys that come out of the box without an associated gender. This hasn't kept us from adopting gender specific names for them though (Mr. Monkey, Sophie, Boss Hog, Leeroy Jenkins, Charlotte).




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