How do you feel about making Mr. Potato Head gender neutral?
Asked by
chyna (
51600
)
March 1st, 2021
from iPhone
It’s silly, you don’t care, you agree? What do you really think?
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58 Answers
It kind of makes me laugh for some reason. But honestly, I don’t care.
But there is a Mrs Potato head. What do we do about her?
Will you be able to make the potato any gender now? There will be eyes and lips that look male or female all in one play set? That would seem ok to me. What exactly is the plan?
Seems incredibly unnecessary though.
Does that mean the company only has to produce the one potato head? No more Mr. and Mrs.? What now, buy the pieces separately from the head?
I’m pretty ‘neutral’ on this. 8^/
I’m outraged that Hasbro has decided to reboot their player in the pieces-of-plastic-that-fit -into-other-pieces-of-plastic market. If it weren’t for the plastic penis, Mr Potato Head would be just be yet another piece of junk guaranteed to sit in landfills for eons. Now we’re going to have gender-neutral corporate crap? What if a boy wants to bring this into the men’s room? All toys should be cis-gendered and biologically accurate.
This smacks of pc-cancel-culture infiltrating our corporate boardrooms that should just focus on selling environmentally horrible unused toys that are made by China. I bet each gender-neutral potato freak comes with a dose of Covid-19.
Cancel culture. (/sarcasm)
Male potatoes around the world will feel devalued and their masculinity diminished.
It’s a marketing ploy by Hasbro to get their merchandise noticed and it is working.
@Dutchess_III I believe there will be no more Mr. or Mrs. It will just be called “Potato Head” and have all the different pieces. (which will probably cost more)
@flutherother This. Marketing ploy. And we’re talking about it, so it’s working.
Great marketing. Here we are talking about it. Clever them.
My reaction is adequately summed up thusly
Like Winny the poo being given a female gender. Ackward, but ok with it.
Seems to me the honorific “Mister” is essential to the entire concept of the franchise. It’s the idea that any head as hideously shaped as a potato is conferred dignity through the addition of shiny plastic outcroppings. As Dutch says, there’s also a Mrs. Potato head. I guess the sure sign that there is no more stigma regarding the transgender community is when that community insists on inclusion in what is in fact a classic from the catalog of freaks.
What about us eggplants? Who’s going to include us?
@RedDeerGuy1 Winny the Poo? Is he browner and stinkier than Whinny the Pooh?
@Yellowdog Now I think you’re talking about a horse! His name is Winnie the Pooh!
Well, you can always use Mr. Potato Head parts and substitute uh, you know what for the body,
I honestly don’t care, since I’m not a preschooler.
the whole “thing” about “gender neutral” is plain and simple horse sh*t. There are 2 genders.
Male and female.
@si3tech
Aww, does the 5 year-old’s toy offend you?
I didn’t know they had genitals.
@si3tech – how long should the penis on the male potato be? Should it be erect or flaccid? Scrotum? What about the labia on the female?
This seems really important to you, so I suspect you have some answers.
Does this mean he’ll never sing “I only have eyes for you” to me any more?
I have no idea yet how I feel about this. I don’t care much about anything else these days. Now that trump is not in the WH. lol
….alas… he was such a sweet potato….
To be honest, I rolled my eyes when I first saw this. The name Mr. Potato Head was pretty much a marketing decision, because the name rolls off the tongue extremely well. But overall I’m pretty indifferent on the decision.
What’s funny about this to me is that kids have bene mixing and matching the parts from both Mr and Mrs Potato Head for years. When my kids were toddlers, the potato looked like something that would make Ru Paul blush.
And I never wanted to get any potato head…..
How does a potato, real or otherwise, become gender neutral? What must they lack or possess to be gender neutral? If a plastic potato had a hole there to stick something, wouldn’t that indicate the plastic potato was female??
And I thought all of them were APAB.
On second thought, whatever.
Funny…the only differences are eyelashes and red lips for the missus….
@Dutchess_III That’s why I don’t get why it is a big deal. I think kids that young just like putting the pieces in and making a face, it doesn’t even really matter what face probably. I was a girl and still played with the Mr. Potato Head. I don’t even think they had a Mrs. when I was very young.
The irony is that the Potato Head family have always been gender fluid. Now right wingers are up in arms because they’re taking “Mr./Mrs.” off the box. So I guess, Mr. Potato Head can be a cross-dresser all he wants as long as you still call him “Mr.”.
————————————————————————————————————————-
*He says, “call me, Mr. Potato, if there’s anything I can do”
I say, ‘that’s Mrs. Potato to you”*
(lyrics co-opted from Ani Difranco, In or Out)
“All this flap over a toy that can store its eyeballs in its butt.”
@Darth_Algar I don’t think @si3tech was ‘offended by a toy’. The people who are offended by a toy are the ones who want to make the change—from a Mr. and Mrs. potato head to a Mrs potato Head and a transgender potato head.
Children think very concretely in terms of male and female. They are free to experiment with these roles, but when it comes to the basic facts of reality—of ‘the science’—there is male and female.
The Potato Head phenomenon should be binary in terms of male or female. And I see nothing wrong with a gender neutral one with parts for a male or female Potato Head figure. But to ban ‘Mr’ Potato Head and leave only female and gender neutral is a little off kilter,
Its funny how people can be ‘offended by a toy’ that is male, but has no problem with doing business with China where people spend their lives in prison camps because of their religion or ethnicity—or that children are confined in sweatshops making those toys they will never get to enjoy themselves,
@Yellowdog
Nobody is offended by a Mr. Potato Head. Essentially what we have here is a company adjusting its marketing for one product. Marketing, that’s all it is.
And no, they’re not getting rid of Mr. while keeping Mrs. They’re dropping both from the packaging and simply packaging it as ‘Potato Head’ now.
Does anyone besides me remember when Mr Potatoe head was just face parts we punched into real potatoes? Ruined the potatoes.
You could just put a dick on the potato and call it Potato/head and be done with it.
But a gender neutral potato head you can make into anything you want, male or female or mixed, actually sounds like a good idea
To have two separate sexes sounds like a marketing ploy to make more money anyhow, You know—like Barbie and Ken —- a Mr and Mrs potato head is a bit superfluous.
Thanks for clearing this up for me @Darth_Algar
Maybe they can come up with a ‘Mr. Hanky’ where you can put the face parts in a turd.
@Dutchess_III yes! I remember doing that! We used all parts on one potato so it was a mish mash of lips, mustache, eyes etc.
It’s a dumb and silly issue to argue in the first place. The entire purpose of the concept is to assign a SPECIFIC gender to about as gender neutral an object as can be imagined.
First they came for Mr. Potato head, but I said nothing, because I am not a potato.
There is no evidence of that. Can you document it?
Reminder note to self: Never, never click on a link that loli posts!
If a potato can “dress up”, why can’t it wield a shotgun?
I could care less. With Trump Worshipping fan boys still talking insurrection, worries of getting the whole nation inoculated against Covid, our moron Governor in Texas talking about lifting masking requirements, which will only perpetuate the Covid issues, and all the other crap going on in the nation, I could frankly care less about a fucking plastic toy. Sorry, but Mr. / Mrs. / He/She Potato head doesn’t rate real high on my list of priorities. Guess I’m Odd Man Out here.
@Nomore_lockout You’re not odd person out. It’s a marketing decision for the toy to be more inclusive. No big deal at all.
@janbb With all of the talk about it over the last few days, here and elsewhere, you’d think the fate of the universe hinges on it. ; )
Better this than the orange one.
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