Why don't men mind being stereotyped as big boys who like toys, asks Fionola Meredith
Most women hate being stereotyped. After all, it should be fairly obvious by now that the majority don't automatically weep at the end of romantic movies, have a bed full of fluffy stuffed toys, or resort to giggling coquettishly and batting their eyelashes at the nearest man in order to get what they want. And it's been quite unequivocally established that their intellectual capacities run to more than fashion and recipes.
But it seems that men have no such fears about the negative power of the stereotype. Next weekend, they will be flocking in their droves to Toys4BigBoys (T4BB), the biggest lad-fest in town, at the RDS in Dublin. Now in its fifth year, the incredibly popular T4BB attracts more than 25,000 visitors eager to immerse themselves in a riot of masculine fun.
It's clearly aimed at affluent young men in their 20s and 30s. All their favourites will be there - off-road karting, penalty shoot-outs, military displays, Scalextric, paint-ball and fast cars. Then there's the gadgets -they can twiddle with any number of shiny, expensive toys. Oh, and fellas - don't worry about your woman trailing along behind you whining. Just park her in the "ladies pamper zone" so you can spend even more time going saucer-eyed over the latest 12-cylinder beauties.
Don't men mind revealing themselves as hulking great lads, overgrown 12-year-olds who like nothing better than to fool around with tanks, cars and soldiers? Isn't it all a bit undignified? It's hard to imagine women re-embracing their pre-teen selves, sitting down to play with their Princess Parlour make-up kit or miniature tea-set.
Of course, not all young men are tempted to join the hordes of unashamed lads making their way to T4BB. Robert Ferguson, a 33-year-old arts administrator, suspects the gap between fantasy and reality there may be quite big.
"I can't help thinking that it all looks a bit pathetic. It probably allows some nerdy bank clerk from Mullingar to imagine that he's James Bond for the day, and that he's going to be seduced by some hot babe in leather, who also just happens to be a Playstation addict and has her satellite telly permanently on the football."
With Wags safely corralled in the pampering zone while their men gawk at the motors, Ferguson also believes T4BB shores up the usual old gender divisions: "I think it encourages men to return to that 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' view of relations between the sexes. On the website, the event is described as 'an Aladdin's cave of gadgets just waiting to be penetrated'. I think that says it all really."
"It just seems so ultra-laddish," agrees 23-year-old law graduate Bernard Keenan. "The activities themselves - all the gadgets and machinery - sound quite enjoyable, but the thing that worries me is this emphasis on 'the ultimate male lifestyle experience'. It's like men's magazines: they present themselves as your friend, telling you what you need to be a man. They sell you something, make you feel really good about yourself, then they take the money."
Yet T4BB is surprisingly up-front about the rampantly consumerist nature of the show, admitting that it presents "lots of things that [ men] really want, even if [ they] don't really need them". Perhaps T4BB is just one part of a wider public fascination with the pleasures of youth. The phenomenon of kidulthood has already been widely documented, with grown-ups in their 30s and 40s (and 50s, in the case of the British chancellor, Gordon Brown) unashamedly downloading the Arctic Monkeys on to their i-Pods, or tapping away on their Nintendo DS consoles.
In his book Big Babies: Or Isn't It About Time We All Grew Up?, Michael Bywater argues that "we are throwing away two and a half millennia of western civilisation, bit by bit, as our culture becomes more and more infantile". Seduced by catchy slogans and instant gratification, Bywater thinks we are addicted to perpetual infantility, and a belief that it is "never too late": "Never too late to make the big killing, to score the goal, to find the perfect shoes, to acquire the perfect six-pack; never too late to take the perfect vacation, drive the perfect car." According to Bywater, this childishness is all part of an attempt to divert ourselves from the harsh fact of our own mortality.
We might all be zooming towards oblivion, but according to the Toys4Big Boys philosophy, you might as well do it in a Ferrari.
Toys 4 Big Boys is at the RDS, Dublin, on Nov 10-12. See www.toys4bigboys.ie