Blue's Clues

Okay, I have a bone to pick with almost every kids’ show on TV, but Blue’s Clues? Is awesome. Really. I hate to editoralize (well, no I don’t), but if you want to talk about positive, safe messages for kids, particularly about gender roles, then you want to talk about Blue and her posse of personified household objects.

Blue’s Clues doesn’t tout any political messages or feature any particularly strong female characters. Instead, it is quietly revolutionizing the way we teach children to use pronouns.

For starters, Blue is a girl, despite the fact that she is blue, a traditionally masculine color. She is also completely androgynous; she is missing the elongated eyelashes or ruby lips that ordinarily signify female cartoon animals to kids. Why is that a big deal? Well, traditionally, children and adults assign male sex to any animals or objects that are not gender-coded. (When a friend gets a new dog, do you ask, "What's his name?" or "What's her name?" Or, similarly, when you're assigning a title to a child's toy, do you say, "Here's Mr. Bear," or "Here's Mrs. Bear"?) I’m as guilty of using the masculine as anyone else, but we’ve been trained from a very early age to view masculine as normative and dominant. Pollit’s whole point, after all, was that we saw far more male cartoon characters than female, and since most of our favorite characters were animals, we assign maleness to animals in the real world as well.  

So for Blue’s Clues to assign femininity to an androgynous, blue puppy goes a long way toward breaking children—and adults—of our gender-coding habits. But what’s even better about Blue’s Clues is that the entire cast of inanimate-turned-animate objects are split equally along gender lines. Tickety, Blue’s alarm clock, is female. Mailbox is male (hee), Side Table Drawer is female, and Slippery Soap is male.

So, in addition to not being a Smurfette Principle offender, Blue's Clues is also subverting what we traditionally teach children about gender-coding, which goes a long way toward conveying the message that girls are just as valued as boys, in my opinion.