Potato Head: Now gender-nonconforming
Mr. Potato Head has come out as “nonbinary,” said Amanda Arnold in TheCut.com. Hasbro—the maker of the 70-year-old toy vegetable—said last week it was dropping the gender from the official name and would refer to him simply as “Potato Head.” A Hasbro executive explained that “culture has evolved,” adding that the “Mr. and Mrs.” setup was “limiting” for “both gender identity and family structure.” In other words, Hasbro wants to sell Potato Heads to kids with two mommies or two daddies. Conservatives threw “a fit” in response to the news that “a little plastic potato would no longer be known as a man,” with one bemoaning the loss “of an apparently important male figure” and another contending that it was “time for Republican states to secede.” On Fox News and its business channel, it was a huge story, said Alexis Benveniste in CNN.com. Mr. Potato Head was mentioned no fewer than 35 times by Fox hosts and a parade of experts who denounced Hasbro for what they saw as a “left-wing attack on traditional families.”
We conservatives “are freaking out about Mr. Potato Head not because of some sentimental and overblown attachment to the child’s toy,” said Kylee Zempel in TheFederalist .com. Rather, it’s an unmistakable symbol of how the Left won’t stop until they “erase sex and gender distinctions” from everything. Just last week, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, which would ostensibly prohibit discrimination but would in practice eradicate “legal sex distinctions as we know them,” with trans kids competing against girls and showering in their locker rooms. If progressives have their way, “they’ll ‘Potato Head’ all of America.”
A plastic, googly-eyed potato was hardly a paragon of masculinity, said EJ Dickson in RollingStone.com. So why are white conservative men so upset? They’re frantic that they are losing their majority status and power, and yearn for a bygone day when men were men, women were women, and everyone—even toys— knew their place. In nature, potatoes actually are gender-nonconforming, said Alex Knapp in Forbes.com. Each plant possesses both male and female flowers, as well as the ability to reproduce asexually. So Hasbro is just making its toy more true to nature. “Like its earthy ancestor, Potato Head has interchangeable parts.”