As a girl, I loved to play with my brother's legos, spending hour building houses and horses. But the legos were always HIS. Eventually, I gravitated to activities which weren't so territorial.
Historically, Lego has made several attempts to market to girls. The first that I became aware of were the Belville sets that I saw in Europe. These sets were based on fairy tales many of them by Hans Christian Anderson, a tribute to Denmark's native son and where Lego hails from. The figurines were 3-4 inches high with lots of details. They were expensive and difficult to find in the US. The next girl lego sets were big pink plastic boxes in the shape of a giant lego cube filled with "girl" colored blocks. My daughters were ecstatic to have legos of their OWN and not their brothers'. However, a neighborhood girlfriend refuses to play with pink legos though, preferring to use her brother's real ones. The most recent Lego sets aimed at girls are called "Friends." These sets feature scientist and teacher sets as well as a bakery, a treehouse, and a dog show. (I think an ice cream shop too Robyn.) According to an article entitled "Lego is for Girls" written by Brad Weiners from Bloomberg Business Week on Dec. 14, 2011, one of Lego's founding principles is that creative play is conducive to learning. (Something I believe in even for the college classroom.) Lego has anthropologists on its team who when they observed girls' play with legos found "the greatest concern for girls really was beauty" (3). Additionally, the researchers found that girls favor role-playing with their legos, and project themselves onto the figurines (Mulvey issues here) while boys engage in 3rd person play.
Admittedly, Lego has fallen into the Pink Think trend, and there is a danger of boy legos being "normal" and girl legos deviant (van Zoonen). Segregation is also apparent as girl legos are also found in the girl aisle and not with the regular legos. Interestingly Legos are usually not advertised on TV. This new "Friends" line may be the exception as they pinpoint girl consumers and their mothers' deep pocketbooks. Despite these issues, positive trends are also evident. Legos are a non-traditional girl toy possibly leading to careers in construction, architecture, graphic design or engineering while developing math and spatial skills. Gender equality is approaching as Lego realizes all children like to play even if the current stance is separate but equal.
Your blog is really interesting. I had no idea that legos developed a line specifically for girls. My interest piqued, I went on my iPad and looked through legos site. They also have a line of web games that are rpg oriented and seem to target both boys and girls. However, as a curious side note, I found myself looking for little girl images or little girls represented in the game description thumbnails before I ever read the titles of the games.
ReplyDeleteI like your post. You raised a lot of interesting points in your Lego example. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a toy store that I didn’t even think about how girls and boys toys are segregated. As we know from the civil right movement and the history of class relationships—separate can never be equal. Hopefully this realization will come to pass and we will start to see more gender equality in toy production, distribution, and advertising. But I think more integration needs to take place first. One way this could begin to take place is through more overlapping of gendered toys that no gender necessarily owns. We might start doing this by first abandoning or (at least greatly reducing) gendered themes (as I discussed in my post) in advertising.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about boys' toys as the norm. I notice that we often celebrate girls who play with boy toys (we see them as precocious, spunky) but there's a real panic when boys take up girls' toys. Remember the uproar over the little boy who painted his toenails or the string of books like My Princess Boy (http://www.amazon.com/My-Princess-Boy-Cheryl-Kilodavis/dp/1442429887/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341951616&sr=8-1&keywords=my+princess+boy) and 10,000 Dresses (http://www.amazon.com/10-000-Dresses-Marcus-Ewert/dp/1583228500/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1341951616&sr=8-2&keywords=my+princess+boy). Why the difference?
ReplyDeleteDoes society allow girls and women as the castrated sex the opportunity to compensate for a phallus, which they must want, by playing with male orientated toys. Psychoanalytically is there something erotic in it? Hence, when boys play with girl toys is it a castration of their male-hood? I'll leave that to Freud and Mulvey.
DeleteAre there literal castration stories in literature I'm not aware of? Yes, there's eunuchs and Oedipus, but Oedipus is more of a mental impotence. Of course maybe to Freud it's all the same. I'm trying to understand this idea more. Where does this cultural fear come from? Historically, it's also possible that men wouldn't tell stories about castration to a mixed audience.
Oh, I just remembered one of the Egyptian gods was castrated and there is a fertility /rebirth myth involved, but I don't remember who (Horus, Osirus). Anyway, 6,000 years is a long time to hold onto the castration fear.
Do men have less opportunity to experiment as children, but more opportunity as adults?