Sure, paper dolls were manufactured and marketed – to the parents who held the purse strings – as tools for teaching little girls obedience and conformity. (Well, until the ’70s – more on that later.) Yet, as Benjamin Frisch and Willa Paskin point out, “the conformity represented by paper dolls was easy to subvert, because it was so easy to ignore. The virtue of simple toys is that it’s simple to use them any way you please.” And that’s exactly what gay men did. (article and podcast)