I don't think a mom buying one for her daughter, just once, is a big deal.

Most of the outrage was centered around grounding a girl for a month for being curious about masturbation.

If someone grounded a boy for googling things related to masturbation would he be grounded? No way lol. And if he were people would be outraged as well, and the parent would most likely be heavily religious.

Consider that many women posted there about how they had hurt themselves trying to masturbate using the wrong tools. Boys have hands and are allowed to masturbate -- speaking, you know, as a girl lol, hands don't work well at all and girls absolutely will use tools not designed for it to try to get the job done or out of curiosity. With that in mind... I don't think it's unreasonable. Though 12 is pretty young, it is a normal age for girls to be curious about... you know.

But, though it is not real apparently, grounding a child for a MONTH for using the internet and being curious about masturbation is crazy fucked up. Perhaps people just got caught up in that and really aggressively opposed it to the point of going a little too far. But people give some compelling arguments for how they hurt themselves by using the wrong objects as children... TMI but I did this also (got hurt) and I never really thought about how it's kinda messed up that we expect boys to be able to do whatever but girls have to wait until they're 18 to actually explore their bodies safely.

Then again the thought of buying a toy for a child squicks me the fuck out? Like I'm not sure what the right choice is, but when you act like girls should either not masturbate until they're 18 or they should use unsafe objects like many girls do, is messed up. I don't know what the right answer is.