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“LEGO is here, hey kids, look a whole new world to build.”
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LEGOs are one of the most fantastic and creative toys ever developed.
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I mean check this out, it’s a LEGO stegosaurus, it even has light up eyes rawr
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Research has consistently shown that playing with LEGOs accelerates childhood development,
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and is upheld as a gateway to math, science and engineering fields, promoting spatial memory, spatial design and of course imagination.
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Sadly, as a consequence of LEGOs decision to design and market their products almost exclusively to boys over the past few decades,
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girls have been largely left out.
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So when the LEGO Group announced that they were committed to expanding the LEGO experience for girls in 2012 in a significant way I was excited,
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but a little skeptical. Here’s what LEGO had to say
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“We actually see ourselves as duty bound to find a fantastic LEGO experience for Girls.
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we are passionate about what the LEGO experience does to children around the world,
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I mean, their development, great experience, ability to concentrate,
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and it’s just not good enough that we cannot do something which is really appealing to girls and delivering that same great experience.”
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LEGO claims to have spent millions of dollars and 4 years doing intensive research on this endeavor and they’ve even budgeted 40 million dollars to market to girls globally.
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So with all that what has the company done to integrate girls back into the LEGO experience?
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“LEGO Friends. New LEGO Friends.
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Welcome to Beautiful Heartlake City. I’m Stephanie, I’m going to a party at the new café with my friend Olivia.
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That’s me, I just finished decorating my house. Time to chill with the girls.
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At the Beauty Shop, Emma is styled and ready to go. This is gonna be so much fun!
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Welcome to the world of LEGO Friends. New LEGO Friends.
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Sigh So where do we even begin?
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This new LEGO collection features 23 sets that focus on the lives of 5 “Friends” Mia, Emma, Andrea, Olivia and Stephanie
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who all hang out and have fun in someplace called Heartlake City, not to be confused with the regular “City” which is LEGO’s longest running theme.
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No, Heartlake City is a pastel colored gender segregated stereotypically female suburban paradise.
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And to make it absolutely clear that these sets are for girls,
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they’ve covered everything in pink and purple, from the branding to the boxes to the bricks themselves.
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Another way LEGO has segregated the Friends theme from the rest of the LEGO universe is by creating a brand new LEGO person.
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The traditional LEGO characters or “minifigs” as they’re called has become a recognizable icon world wide.
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The minifigs are the center piece of the entire LEGO universe
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featured in their videogame and movie franchises, extended merchandise, and even in their theme parks.
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By contrast the new Bratz/Barbie style “Lady Fig” or “mini doll” featured in Heartlake City
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is taller, curvier and they wear little skirts.
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By essentially making the mini-doll an entirely separate species
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it just works to further segregate the Friends theme from the rest of the LEGO universe.
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The Friends theme sets focus on traditionally female identified tasks
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including baking at the City Park Café,
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getting your hair done at the Butterfly Beauty Shop,
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taking care of pets at the Heartlake Vet,
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or homemaking at Olivia’s House.
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Out of the initial 14 offerings the only set that breaks out of this mold might be Olivia’s Inventor’s Workshop,
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which would be really awesome if it weren’t for the inexplicable decision to make all of her tools purple.
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Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with pink and purple, I’m sometimes fond of these colours, obviously,
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pink and purple are just two options out of the rainbow of brick colors available in the LEGO universe.
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The problem is pink and purple hardly ever appear in the sets marketed to boys and Heartlake city is dominated entirely by soft pastel colours.
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There is also nothing inherently wrong with LEGO sets that include
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places to live, places to eat, beauty salons, entertainment venues etc.
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These are all establishments that you’d expect to find in pretty much any city.
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But here is where LEGO starts to go horribly wrong
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First, the activities featured in the Friends theme such as baking, cooking, caregiving, homemaking, decorating, hair styling
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are rooted in deeply stereotypical and limiting roles for women in children’s toys and sadly, in society in general.
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Second, these types of establishments only exist in the girls’ world of Heartlake city.
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The real LEGO city, on the other hand, you know, the ones that come in the blue boxes, that’s marketed almost exclusively to boys
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has dozens of CITY subthemes including Search and Rescue, Police, Firefighters, Construction, the Space Port
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which are all traditionally male identified occupations (though they shouldn’t be).
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Noticeably absent are any places for the LEGO city minifigures to live or eat.
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Isn’t it curious that there are almost no housing, entertainment or restaurant subthemes in LEGO city?
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So what happens when something in Heartlake City catches on fire?
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I guess you have to call the boys to put it out, similarly what happens when someone in LEGO city gets hungry?
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I guess you’d have to call the girls to bake them something. This is just absurd.
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Now you may be thinking to yourself that kids don’t have to follow the instructions, they could build whatever they want out of the LEGO set,
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girls could build spaceships out of the beauty salon for example.
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The problem is that the Friends theme was developed from the ground up based on a story of five friends
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and everything that girls are meant to do with the sets revolves around that specific story.
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This severely limits the possibilities of what most girls will do with the sets.
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And there’s nothing else in the rest of the LEGO universe that will encourage girls to think outside of the gendered walls of Heartlake City.
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It seems as though LEGO is convinced that boys and girls just naturally have different interests,
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the LEGO Group CEO said “We focused on creating a play experience centered on the joy of creation, while heeding the way girls naturally build and play.”
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Using the language of “natural” or “nature” in reference to gender infers
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that girls are biologically predisposed to like dolls and pink things.
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As noted by Peggy Orenstein in her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter,
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if we look to the turn of the century this gendered color dynamic was actually reversed,
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in the early 1900s blue was associated with baby girls and pink with baby boys, really,
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it might be hard to believe but you can look it up.
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This demonstrates that colour association with gender is a social construct,
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it’s not biological, it’s not genetic, it’s not natural. It’s made up.
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Contrary to LEGO’s press release that states that “LEGO Friends is the first 100 percent LEGO building experience fully optimized to girls’ tastes and interests.”
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LEGO has tried this type of gender stereotyping before.
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Here’s a quick history of LEGO’s ridiculous attempts to market to girls.
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In 1979 LEGO released SCALA, a jewelry making kit that featured little plastic pieces with birds and flowers painted on them.
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In 1992 LEGO released the PARADISA collection, which to their credit,
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was meant to fit together with the larger TOWN LEGO theme (which is now renamed CITY).
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“Paradisa, Paradisa, sun is shining all day.
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Let us ride down to the beach, go surfing, camping and play.
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We can do anything we like at the house with the sun.
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Paradisa, Paradisa, this is where we have fun.”
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It included female minifigs so that’s good but all the boxes were bright pink,
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and all the activities were leisure activities like the poolside paradise, the fun fair, and the country club.
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In 1994 LEGO reduced the building experience to almost nothing with the Belville theme.
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And similar to the ladyfigs of the Friends theme,
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the characters of Belville looked a lot more like Barbie then Lego’s traditional minifigs.
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The play focused on fairy tales where girls could play house with prince charming or have magical tea parties.
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A few years later LEGO brought back the Scala theme, in name only,
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this time there was virtually nothing to build and the core of the theme was to play with and dress up the Barbie knock off dolls.
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And finally, in 2003 this happened.
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“You’re a very stylish girl,
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just click to change your style,
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you’re a very stylish girl,
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your way, your style.
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Clickits, click it your way. Clickits.”
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So they brought back customized jewelry making with Clikits.
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I have no idea how this product is associated with LEGO since it has none of the iconic LEGO elements.
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This brings us back to 2012 and the new Friends theme.
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“LEGO Friends. New LEGO Friends.
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Welcome to beautiful Heartlake City.
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We’re here! Let’s all help out, make burgers, shakes, bake the cupcakes. It’s perfect.
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Welcome to the world of LEGO Friends.”
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Yeaaaa….
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But moving on, LEGO’s press release on the Friends theme states that,
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“LEGO Friends delivers on a girl’s desire for realistic role-play, creativity, and a highly-detailed, character-based world”
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and apparently girl’s also desire “more beauty… accessories… and interior building.”
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I’m slightly confused because all of those things are also true about the other existing LEGO sets. Let’s take a look at a few of examples.
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The Medieval Market Village is extremely detailed as is the Death Star which has 13 separate interiors.
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Or what about Hogwart’s Castle?
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It comes with Dumbledore’s office, the Slytherin and Gryffindor common rooms, the Astronomy Tower, the Great Hall.
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It has 11 different minifigs and for accessories you get the Sorting Hat, Tom Riddle’s book, a Basilisk fang, various wands.
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You even get a little Mrs. Norris!
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If this isn’t a highly detailed, creative, role playing, interior building world then I don’t know what is.
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Setting aside the “desire for beauty” which I guess just means pink.
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It appears LEGO already makes toys that offer creative, role playing, character based, accessorized, interior building, construction experiences
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so there must be something else keeping girls from embracing the LEGO experience.
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The real reason girls aren’t interested in LEGOs as a whole is because for the last quarter of a century
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the LEGO Group has been telling girls repeatedly that bricks are for boys.
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How did LEGO’s products shift from its initial relatively, gender neutral, universal building experience to a more male dominated, male identified one?
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Well, it didn’t happen by accident.
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Join me for Part 2 of my LEGO and Gender video series where I’ll dig into exactly how this happened,
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starting with a brief history of LEGO’s TV commercials including Zack the LEGO Maniac.
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I’ll also offer LEGO a couple of suggestion to fix their gender segregation problem.
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I hope you enjoyed that video, it was probably my most ambitious project to date and took an enormous amount of time to put together,
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please help keep Feminist Frequency going by donating today. You can visit feministfrequency.com/donate