fellinlovewithagrrl:

feministepiphanies:

There is nothing “natural” about this. Biological essentialism is crap. Individual differences are more statistically significant than gender differences… then you have to account for socialization — which hey, toys contribute to!

femfreq:

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 

One of the reasons I loved lego so much for so long was because it wasn’t gender specific, there is NO FUCKING NEED AT ALL to differentiate between girls and boys.

Hey maybe just add a larger variety of colours to the blocks available and market it at girls AND boys so that boys get used to playing with pink and not feeling so excluded from the ‘girls’ toy world and the girls get to continue to play with the other colours so they don’t feel so excluded from the boys toys, and so limited to the FUCKING PINK BULLSHITT 

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!

~Boycott this shit.

Ah, this… hurts… my soul…

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“Naturally” play? I was having very intricate wars between my beanie babies and dinosaurs over race issues. Gah….