LEGO announced that after 4 years of intensive research, they have finally come up with a LEGO product that fulfills the desires of “how girls naturally build and play.” This new theme is called LEGO Friends and it’s a pink and purple, gender segregated, suburban wasteland populated by Barbie/Bratz style dolls. Many parents, educators, feminists, and media critics have spoken out against LEGOs attempts to separate girls into their own stereotypical isolated enclave within the LEGO universe.
In part 1 of my two part LEGO and Gender series, I’ll explore how LEGO went terribly wrong with LEGO Friends and provide a brief history of LEGO’s ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls since the late 70′s. In part 2 I’ll delve into LEGO’s intentional strategy to market almost exclusively to boys since the mid 80′s by developing and marketing sets that are male identified and male centered. In conclusion, I’ll offer LEGO a couple of suggestions that they can consider when creating and marketing new products.
For more information, links and a full transcript visit Feminist Frequency
This is awful … I always categorized LEGOs as gender neutral. As a kid (born in ‘91), I constantly played with LEGOs, and so did nearly all of my friends and cousins of the same age group, male and female. After all, how can you segregate building blocks?
Oh look, LEGO felt the need to answer that unnecessary question. Guys, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
For the most part, I had those completely unisex buckets of pieces that my best friend and I would just dump out on the floor and go to town with. Why does that need to be changed?
(via jinxess)
