Posts tagged toys
SPARK a Movement!
Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge
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Why are we still talking about LEGO? Because girls like to have adventures; they deserve to see themselves taking part in Ninja quests, countering alien invasions, being police and doctors and construction workers, and journeying to distant planets. They also deserve to run cafes, get their hair done, and decorate their homes. There should be no separation between these options. Even if LEGO is not actively telling girls and boys what toys they can and cannot play with, the fact that male and female representation are so carefully delineated in both the toys and the children who populate their commercials sends a pretty clear message. While SPARK has primarily focused on the messages sent to girls, we are equally concerned that boys are not being encouraged to play with cafes and puppies, and have friends (!?!?).
Why Are We Still Talking About LEGO?
We’re meeting with LEGO this Friday to talk about the totally unnecessary gender stereotyping in their otherwise great toys and give them suggestions for what they can do to be as awesome as they wanna be. Get stoked!
Love these images that were submitted to our Toy Aisle Action Project!
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Congrats to 14 year old Adora Svitak, the winner of Women’s Media Center’s Girls State of the Union Contest!
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Pro-tip to toymakers: without Leia, Star Wars never would have happened.
Side-eye,
PBG & SPARK
The issue isn’t that girls shouldn’t cook and have fun with it. It’s that we’re being told by companies, toy stores, and their marketing teams that this is the way it’s supposed to be. Girls should cook and clean (essentially playing “mom”) while boys create, destroy, and learn to save the world. Toys like LEGO, light sabers, and toy cars are all primarily marketed towards boys and these toys have far more creative possibilities and give room for more brain development.
Toy stores play a large role in continuing to support the way children of different genders play and think. From an early age girls are given little options of what they can think and become. It is no coincidence that there is a serious lack of women working in the science and math fields.
That’s why SPARK is asking you to join us in ourToy Aisle Action Projectto bring attention to the gender divide in stores! We are SPARKing this movement armed with Post-It notes and cameras in the blue and pink aisles. (Seriously, some stores have actually have colored their toy aisles pink and blue! When will it end?) With your Post-Its, make a note using slogans like “Where My Girls At?” in the blue aisle, “Your Girl Needs Joe, too” on a GI Joe, “This Is An Option For Everybody” and “What About Dads?” on the baby dolls.
Use statistics, too. Here are some we found: women make up only 13% of architects (I wonder why LEGO?), 14% of active US military (Where is G.I. Jane?), and 4% of executive chefs — so, why are all the kitchen gadgets pink when so many chefs are men?
People have told us “if you want your daughter to play with other LEGOs, buy them for her!” Those of us with daughters have and will. But this isn’t just about parents and their kids; it’s about all children. By age 2, children internalize the narrow messages about gender sent to them by culture and media. By age 5, they’re concerned with expressing those roles as best as they can. These internalized expectations follow them through their lives: research shows that exposure to stereotypical notions of gender in media can affect girls’ and women’s performance in math, and discourages girls and women from stepping outside the perceived bounds of femininity.
In other words, even kids who will never own a LEGO set in their lives are absorbing the messaging of this hyper-gendered marketing campaign. When girls see commercial after commercial of other girls hanging out by the pool, doing their hair, cruising in their convertible, and playing with animals, they begin to think that those are they ways they’re supposed to play; that those are the things they’re supposed to do now and in the future. Meanwhile, toys marketed to boys—including pretty much any LEGO that isn’t part of the Friends line—send a much healthier message that boys can be anything: cops, spacemen, pirates, kings, city workers, engineers, presidents.
We want LEGO, who by their own mission are “not about products, but … human possibility,” to really think about the messages their current marketing is sending. We want pastel colors, cupcakes, robots, and wizards to live side by side in the most fantastical adventures that kids can think of. We want boys and girls to play together with a variety of toys in a variety of colors, not separately with different versions of the same product.
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LEGO Magazine: “Girl” stuff and “Regular” stuff
Recently, a concerned parent and blogger reported that the LEGO Club magazines that had previously been delivered to her and her daughter had been replaced by a very different kind of magazine. LEGO Club Girls is a pastel-coloured, less-interesting version of the original developed around sorely misinformed ideas of what girls like. An online sample from the LEGO website reveals that the original magazine included things like comic strips involving knights and kings, a how-to guide on building LEGO boats and a surfing themed colouring activity. The new LEGO Club Girls magazine, the blogger reports, features comic strips with the new LEGO Friends characters going to a café (yawn) and instead of a surfing themed activity, there’s an activity centred around a lost puppy (double yawn).
Most strikingly of all, there are no building instructions in this version of the magazine. Why not? It certainly wouldn’t have to do with the fact that LEGO thinks girls don’t like building things or aren’t meant to build things; maybe LEGO just couldn’t think of a girly enough thing for girls to build. What would a girl build anyway? Lipstick? A training bra? A tutu? Are there tulle and chiffon LEGO bricks in the works for the next set of girl mini-figures?
If you happened to check “girl” upon signing up for LEGO Club but don’t want to automatically be switched over to a “girlier” LEGO Club magazine, don’t worry! They want you to know that you can opt out and re-subscribe to the “regular” version. Really, LEGO? The message here is loud and clear. There’s girls stuff, like puppies and beauty shops and pink things, and there’s boy stuff, or what LEGO might call “regular” stuff; you know, stuff that forces you to use your imagination and takes you on adventures and has characters with more developed personalities than all the lady LEGO Friends combined!
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SO THIS IS A THING: our petition asking LEGO to ditch the gender divide in their marketing and bring back quality, gender-neutral play for all children just crossed 20,000 signatures on Change.org! Shouts to SPARKteam members Bailey and Stephanie who have been at the forefront of this action from the very beginning—it all started with Steph’s blog!
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Watching this mid-90s SNL sketch called “Chess for Girls” is a lot like watching this commercial for LEGO Friends (for girls!) except this sketch is a joke and LEGO’s commercials are real and will make them millions of dollars.
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Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty spa lab” to “perfume factory”?
(via sociolab)
