Girls' toys and boys' toys

This is about the great leap backwards in gender relations over the last decade. (And if you got here expecting pr0n because you put "girls' toys" into a search engine, you might as well leave now.)
In the first ten years of the 21st century, the Western world's social model of femaleness expresses values cthat would fit in the 1950s.
Enumerating the evidence would take too long for this blog, which is a pity because there is no shortage of it. I am just going to extrapolate from a few random examples.
Most blatantly and ubiquitously, media female role models are footballers ' "wives and girlfriends," reality tv stars, models and heiresses. The interest they hold for other women lies in their relationships and their appearance. (Their own interests are supposed to be in shopping and "partying.") Said appearance is valued almost entirely in terms of weight. Whole publications consist of little but discussions of who is too fat or too thin. To stay in the public eye a celebrity has only to gain and lose two or three pounds.
Go to a toy shop. (Yes, it's Christmas, obviously) Even go to a toy shop that's USP is providing educational, non-gender-based, non-voiolent toys. (Yes, you can already hear the echoes of the late 19790s and early 1980s.) And guess what? The shops are an eye-burning riot of pink where the "girls' toys."
Even musical instruments come in two forms: get a pink toy synth with flower patterns for a girl; get the identical item in blue, without the flowers, for a boy.
The most depressing part is that if they didn't have a bright pink version of most of these things, no one would even buy them for girls. Otherwise, girls' toys revolve around childcare, housework and beauty. The only fantasy items targeted at girls are princesses. Fairy tale princesses didn't usually do much but be admired and marry the prince. The dragon-slaying and prince-rescuing count of fairy tale princesses is pretty minimal.
The domestic stuff might be fair enough, given that most infants don't see much except childcare and housework. But the vivid pinkness makes it pretty clear that little boys aren't supposed to have an interest in dolls or kitchens or baby buggies.
So the lads are being given a message: Pay no attention to the world you know - the domestic sphere - and engage with an outside fantasy world of knights and spaceships. At the same time, the girls are being told that the domestic sphere is theirs. Outside adventures aren't for them.
Now, this sits very oddly with the fact that almost all women have to work. In the 1950s, there was a reason why Betty Freidan's " female mystique" represented the social values. Men needed their jobs back when they came back from World War II. Depleted national populations needed rebuilding. To some extent, women left the workforce and bred.
However, in the 1950s, families were much bigger than those of the 21st century. Housework needed a fair level of physical and mental effort and skill. Now, housework and meal preparation don't need much effort, although our standards of comfort and cleanliness are much higher. Women rarely have more than one or two children.
They have less time to spend in caring for them, however, as most women now work when their children are small. If work was in itself enough to equalise relations between men and women, equality would be already here . Indeed, income distribution and promotion opportunityies and so on are much more fairly distributed (in the Western world, at least.)
Which makes the intensification of stereotyping even less explicable. Why train little boys and girls for a life they won't live?
(I was going to discuss the reasons and who might benefit. That's another lesson.....)