“Each day there’s adventure, always something new, and the team that dreams tomorrow up is LEGO Land and You”
In my last video we visited the pastel coloured,
gender stereotyped suburban wasteland that is the LEGO Friends theme.
We also took a tour of LEGOs ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls in the past several decades.
So if you haven’t watched that one go ahead and check it out before continuing on to this one.
It’s not secret that LEGO’s clubhouse is currently designed and marketed primarily for boys.
Reporter: There are very few toy brands as ubiquitous as LEGO.
And yet research shows that LEGO only clicks with about half of all children, the male half.
Boy: Look at mine mommy
Reporter: Since 2005 LEGO has embraced that, marketing almost exclusively to little boys.
And it’s giving boys a boost in the world,
LEGO play has been attributed with accelerating boys development.
Research shows that it helps fine tune spacial and math skills.
How did the company shift from their initial relatively gender neutral universal building experience,
to a more male dominated one?
Well it wasn’t by accident.
The LEGO group intentionally did it in three ways.
#1 Marketing exclusively to boys:
LEGO has been intentionally designing, creating and marketing
almost the entire LEGO universe specifically and exclusively to boys since at least the mid 1980’s.
First lets take a quick look at the history of LEGO’s marketing before this gendered shift occurred.
LEGO can be traced back to the early 1930’s but started producing their interlocking plastic bricks in 1949.
LEGO a whole new world to build
This young girl had such fun, she used LEGO one by one.
With a nic-nac-paddy-wack build a house of grand, this young girl’s a LEGO fan.
LEGO focused on marketing their products with a strong emphasis on creative play, cooperation, and imagination
for the next three decades in a relatively universal way to children of all genders and even as something that families can do together.
By the mid 80’s, however, girls had all but disappeared and LEGO was marketing almost exclusively to boys.
Some of you might remember Zack, you know, the LEGO maniac.
I know a boy his name is Zack,
his micro chips are out of wack,
he built a Blacktron Cadillac,
he’s Zack the LEGO Maniac.
He sent his cosmic fleet to Mars,
he’s out there cruising with the stars.
His mind is lost in outer space
A cosmonaut, earth calling Zack, hey Zack come back!
ZACK became the official LEGO mascot,
he embodied the LEGO experience, and helped to identify the brand with boys’ play.
Boys continued to dominate LEGO’s marketing for the next two decades.
Once upon a time a boy discovered a magic castle.
Inside was a bat lord and his knights, a witch and the smell of rotting bones.
It was time to go, and the boy tried to escape but the witch insisted he stay…
for dinner.
LEGO Mania. LEGO Mania.
Yeaaaaaa…
Pistons that pump, gears that will get you going, motors that muscle, and blades that’ll blow you away.
Technically speaking it will turn you on.
LEGO Mania. LEGO Mania.
In 2011, LEGO made sure to drive home the point that LEGOs are for boys with their Build Together marketing campaign.
Ah the father and son roadtrip, just a little imagination and you’re good to go.
It’s been said that a man’s home is his castle
and truer words were never spoken when that home is in the hands of this father and son team.
Well done gentlemen, well done indeed.
Each ad revolves around fathers and sons collaborating on imaginative LEGO creations.
You’ll notice there are no grandmothers, mothers, daughters or sisters building together.
#2 Producing male identified and male centered themes and sets:
Over the next of couple decades but especially in the late 90’s and early 2000’s
LEGO began creating and producing more sets that were intentionally male identified and male centered.
To reinforce that LEGOs are specifically for boys,
LEGO made their products male centered by populating their sets and themes with male minifigures.
Male centered means that the focus of attention is on men, their stories and what they do.
In terms of LEGO, this refers to their shift from their original less gendered minifigures to sets and themes dominated by male characters,
oving away from the 2 dots and a smiley face to frowns, sneers and facial hair.
On the rare occasion when women do appear, they’re sporting bright red lipstick, curves and cleavage.
The lack of female minifigures in the LEGO universe is staggering,
conservative estimates reveal that the ratio of unique male identified minifigures to unique indentified female minifigures is 18:1.
The minifigure gender disparity only got worse when LEGO started making sets based on movie franchises
such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean,
because those films are male centered and male identified,
not surprisingly the themes and sets based on them are also male centered and male identified.
Out of the two hundred and fifty plus unique mini figures in the Star Wars sets for instance,
you can count the number of women on your fingers.
This positions boys and masculinity as the default for the LEGO universe.
Who can help us?
ADU is here. Step aside ma’am, let the ADU take over, go get em boys!
#3 Focusing on stereotypical boys play scenarios with an emphasis on combat:
Remember that whole creativity and imagination thing?
You can build this transport pretending you’re on Mars.
The box shows ways to change it by snapping off the cars.
You can snap them back together and get a scouting craft, or match them with a laser for a base defender craft.
You can make up something wild, supercharged and new.
The sky’s the limit when the team is LEGO Land and you!
That was back in 1985, let’s check in on what’s happening in the contemporary LEGO themes.
Ready your weapons. And get ready.
You control the battle.
Transform to attack mode.
Prepare for battle.
Arm the rockets.
Arm the weapons.
Load the missile.
You can load the bombs.
Man the canons.
Load the rockets.
Arm the missile.
Prepare the torpedoes.
And fight back.
Fire at will.
Fire the canon.
Fire the mighty catapult.
Fire.
Fire the missile.
And attack!
While LEGO group itself has admitted that they have prioritized catering to boys,
his has notably shifted their marketing and product design
to be less about LEGO’s educational benefits such as fostering creativity and imagination to more about combat,
aggression, conflict and competition scenarios which feel a lot more like G.I. Joe then they do the LEGO of yesteryear.
Even in the popular CITY theme we’ve started to see these conflict elements take center stage
with the edition of the cops and robbers subtheme over the last couple of years.
It’s not that women and girls are never interested in combat based play—-
aggression and competition are of course, possible human behaviours for people of all genders.
In our current patriarchal society, however, traits associated with men and masculinity are more highly valued,
even ones that aren’t exactly the most socially beneficial.
Narrator: Ninjago, rebuild your spinner and win the fight
But what about my sister?
We’re saving a girl? Is she hot?
Become the master of spinjitsu
In this case LEGO has strongly emphasized combat and violent conflict in order to market to boys.
This marketing choice has a further consequence of limiting boys because they miss out on toys that help develop
cooperation, relationship building, nurturing and caregiving.
Now let’s bring all of this back to the new LEGO’s “for girls”.
While the entire concept and marketing of the Friends theme is deeply problematic,
it’s not without some small merits.
The emphasis on sharing, cooperation and nurturing are values that I would love to see infused in toys for children of all genders.
Even the title of Friends draws attention to the importance of relationship building,
however, these values are almost exclusively found in media and toys for girls and are wrapped up in harmful gender steryotypes
meanwhile, these positive values are almost entirely absent in toys aimed at boys
the repercussions of this can be grave
relegating the responsibility for fostering healthy relationships and communications on women
and simultaneously reinforcing to boys and men that using violence is a practical option for solving conflicts
even in our personal ones
once lego had doubled down on gendering all their products "for boys"
they were backed into a corner where they were forced to create a distinct and seperate "for girls" collection
Lego friends is clearly marked as not for boys
which defacto reinforces that the rest of the Lego universe is for boys
and for boys alone
If we look at the language in advertisng for the sets marketed to boys
they are encouraged to actively participate in the building as a core part of the story
you can build the huge helicopter
you can build the massive clone turbo tank
you can build the batmobile
you can build the dino truck
you can build the rocket
you can build the king's castle