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“Each day there’s adventure, always something new, and the team that dreams tomorrow up is LEGO Land and You”

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In my last video we visited the pastel coloured,

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gender stereotyped suburban wasteland that is the LEGO Friends theme.

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We also took a tour of LEGOs ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls in the past several decades.

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So if you haven’t watched that one go ahead and check it out before continuing on to this one.

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It’s not secret that LEGO’s clubhouse is currently designed and marketed primarily for boys.

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Reporter: There are very few toy brands as ubiquitous as LEGO.

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And yet research shows that LEGO only clicks with about half of all children, the male half.

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Boy: Look at mine mommy

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Reporter: Since 2005 LEGO has embraced that, marketing almost exclusively to little boys.

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And it’s giving boys a boost in the world,

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LEGO play has been attributed with accelerating boys development.

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Research shows that it helps fine tune spacial and math skills.

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How did the company shift from their initial relatively gender neutral universal building experience,

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to a more male dominated one?

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Well it wasn’t by accident.

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The LEGO group intentionally did it in three ways.

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#1 Marketing exclusively to boys:

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LEGO has been intentionally designing, creating and marketing

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almost the entire LEGO universe specifically and exclusively to boys since at least the mid 1980’s.

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First lets take a quick look at the history of LEGO’s marketing before this gendered shift occurred.

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LEGO can be traced back to the early 1930’s but started producing their interlocking plastic bricks in 1949.

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LEGO a whole new world to build

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This young girl had such fun, she used LEGO one by one.

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With a nic-nac-paddy-wack build a house of grand, this young girl’s a LEGO fan.

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LEGO focused on marketing their products with a strong emphasis on creative play, cooperation, and imagination

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for the next three decades in a relatively universal way to children of all genders and even as something that families can do together.

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By the mid 80’s, however, girls had all but disappeared and LEGO was marketing almost exclusively to boys.

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Some of you might remember Zack, you know, the LEGO maniac.

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I know a boy his name is Zack,

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his micro chips are out of wack,

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he built a Blacktron Cadillac,

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he’s Zack the LEGO Maniac.

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He sent his cosmic fleet to Mars,

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he’s out there cruising with the stars.

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His mind is lost in outer space

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A cosmonaut, earth calling Zack, hey Zack come back!

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ZACK became the official LEGO mascot,

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he embodied the LEGO experience, and helped to identify the brand with boys’ play.

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Boys continued to dominate LEGO’s marketing for the next two decades.

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Once upon a time a boy discovered a magic castle.

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Inside was a bat lord and his knights, a witch and the smell of rotting bones.

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It was time to go, and the boy tried to escape but the witch insisted he stay…

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for dinner.

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LEGO Mania. LEGO Mania.

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Yeaaaaaa…

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Pistons that pump, gears that will get you going, motors that muscle, and blades that’ll blow you away.

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Technically speaking it will turn you on.

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LEGO Mania. LEGO Mania.

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In 2011, LEGO made sure to drive home the point that LEGOs are for boys with their Build Together marketing campaign.

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Ah the father and son roadtrip, just a little imagination and you’re good to go.

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It’s been said that a man’s home is his castle

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and truer words were never spoken when that home is in the hands of this father and son team.

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Well done gentlemen, well done indeed.

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Each ad revolves around fathers and sons collaborating on imaginative LEGO creations.

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You’ll notice there are no grandmothers, mothers, daughters or sisters building together.

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#2 Producing male identified and male centered themes and sets:

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Over the next of couple decades but especially in the late 90’s and early 2000’s

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LEGO began creating and producing more sets that were intentionally male identified and male centered.

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To reinforce that LEGOs are specifically for boys,

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LEGO made their products male centered by populating their sets and themes with male minifigures.

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Male centered means that the focus of attention is on men, their stories and what they do.

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In terms of LEGO, this refers to their shift from their original less gendered minifigures to sets and themes dominated by male characters,

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moving away from the 2 dots and a smiley face to frowns, sneers and facial hair.

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On the rare occasion when women do appear, they’re sporting bright red lipstick, curves and cleavage.

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The lack of female minifigures in the LEGO universe is staggering,

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conservative estimates reveal that the ratio of unique male identified minifigures to unique indentified female minifigures is 18:1.

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The minifigure gender disparity only got worse when LEGO started making sets based on movie franchises

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such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean,

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because those films are male centered and male identified,

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not surprisingly the themes and sets based on them are also male centered and male identified.

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Out of the two hundred and fifty plus unique mini figures in the Star Wars sets for instance,

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you can count the number of women on your fingers.

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This positions boys and masculinity as the default for the LEGO universe.

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Who can help us?

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ADU is here. Step aside ma’am, let the ADU take over, go get em boys!

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#3 Focusing on stereotypical boys play scenarios with an emphasis on combat:

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Remember that whole creativity and imagination thing?

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You can build this transport pretending you’re on Mars.

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The box shows ways to change it by snapping off the cars.

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You can snap them back together and get a scouting craft, or match them with a laser for a base defender craft.

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You can make up something wild, supercharged and new.

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The sky’s the limit when the team is LEGO Land and you!

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That was back in 1985, let’s check in on what’s happening in the contemporary LEGO themes.

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Ready your weapons. And get ready.

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You control the battle.

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Transform to attack mode.

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Prepare for battle.

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Arm the rockets.

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Arm the weapons.

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Load the missile.

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You can load the bombs.

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Man the canons.

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Load the rockets.

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Arm the missile.

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Prepare the torpedoes.

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And fight back.

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Fire at will.

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Fire the canon.

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Fire the mighty catapult.

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Fire.

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Fire.

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Fire the missile.

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And attack!

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While LEGO group itself has admitted that they have prioritized catering to boys,

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this has notably shifted their marketing and product design

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to be less about LEGO’s educational benefits such as fostering creativity and imagination to more about combat,

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aggression, conflict and competition scenarios

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which feel a lot more like G.I. Joe then they do the LEGO of yesteryear.

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Even in the popular CITY theme we’ve started to see these conflict elements take center stage

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with the edition of the cops and robbers subtheme over the last couple of years.

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It’s not that women and girls are never interested in combat based play—-

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aggression and competition are of course, possible human behaviours for people of all genders.

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In our current patriarchal society, however, traits associated with men and masculinity are more highly valued,

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even ones that aren’t exactly the most socially beneficial.

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Narrator: Ninjago, rebuild your spinner and win the fight

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But what about my sister?

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We’re saving a girl? Is she hot?

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Become the master of spinjitsu

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In this case LEGO has strongly emphasized combat and violent conflict in order to market to boys.

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This marketing choice has a further consequence of limiting boys because they miss out on toys that help develop

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cooperation, relationship building, nurturing and caregiving.

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Now let’s bring all of this back to the new LEGO’s “for girls”.

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While the entire concept and marketing of the Friends theme is deeply problematic,

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it’s not without some small merits.

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The emphasis on sharing, cooperation and nurturing are values that I would love to see infused in toys for children of all genders.

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Even the title of Friends draws attention to the importance of relationship building,

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however, these values are almost exclusively found in media and toys for girls and are wrapped up in harmful gender stereotypes,

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meanwhile, these positive values are almost entirely absent in toys aimed at boys.

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The repercussions of this can be grave,

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relegating the responsibility for fostering healthy relationships and communications on women

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and simultaneously reinforcing to boys and men that using violence is a practical option for solving conflicts,

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even interpersonal ones.

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Once LEGO had doubled down on gendering all their products as 'for boys'

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they were backed into a corner where they were forced to create a distinct and seperate "for girls" collection.

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LEGO Friends is clearly marked as “Not for Boys”

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which defacto reinforces that the rest of the LEGO universe is “for boys”

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and for boys alone.

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If we look at the language in advertisng for the sets marketed to boys,

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they're encouraged to actively participate in the building as a core part of the story.

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You can build the huge helicopter.

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You can build the massive clone turbo tank.

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You can build the Batmobile.

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You can build the dino truck.

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You can build the rocket.

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You can build the king’s castle.

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But in the LEGO Friend’s marketing the construction is not central to the narrative being sold.

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Drive by Olivia's house,

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pass the vet's with all the pets,

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to the newly built café.

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We’re here.

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Let’s all help out,

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make burgers,

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shakes,

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bake the cupcakes.

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See how things have been built but the action is not attributed to anyone?

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The minifigs just show up at the “newly built cafe”.

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And the playtime is supposed to happen after the building is complete.

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Unlike in the other commercials where boys are encouraged to actively build and construct

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as a part of their LEGO experience.

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Now, to the credit of girls and women, many of us have stubbornly continued to like many of the classic sets

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despite LEGO’s best efforts to ignore us and kick us out of the LEGO club house.

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So Lego spent four years and millions of dollars

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to research the desires of girls to create another Barbie wasteland

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and continues to ignore the fact that they already have a potentially great product for girls

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it's called LEGO,

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or it used to be

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Lego's logic surrounding giving girls what they "want" sounds and awful lot like self fulfilling marketing,

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as Lisa Wade pointed out on the Ms. Blog

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"Executives are going to great lengths to explain that the line is based on research...

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This frame gives the company an excuse for reproducing the same old gender steryotypes

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that we see throughout our culture...

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In this way they are trying to make it clear that they shouldn't be held accountable for the messages

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their products send"

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The real takeaway from LEGO's research

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is that the literally billions of dollars that the media and toy companies spent

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over the last couple of decades

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on aggressively gendered marketing and gender stereotyping has worked.

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We see fewer commercial of boys and girls playing together,

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and more products that segregate boys and girls into different categories of people

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each with very rigid and limiting ideas of what roles are appropriate.

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All of this marketing is inescapable

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and young people and adults alike internalize these deeply harmful and limiting messages.

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Although we don't want to believe it,

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the truth of it is, that advertising works to manipulate us

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and it works really well, or else corporations wouldn't do it.

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What LEGO should have done if they were serious about expanding the LEGO universe to include girls

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is to actually include them in a meaningful way,

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not segregate and separate them into their own pink enclave.

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In the future here are two suggestions that LEGO can use as a starting point

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to think about producing and marketing new products.

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First, they’ve got to integrate more female minifigs characters into their themes

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and make them the focus of those sets.

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Then they’ve got to completely drop “ladyfig” doll thing from the entire LEGO universe.

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Secondly, LEGO needs to go back to the drawing board and create products that foster creativity and imagination

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that children of all genders will adore.

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They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat,

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and create universally appealing sets that include occupations and adventure scenarios for children of all genders.

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LEGO can look to their own specialized Creator collection

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which includes sets that are more reminincent of the original LEGO building experience.

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These sets even come with three different instruction guides

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which help to encourage builders to think about the bricks as remixable elements,

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to be taken apart, hacked and rebuilt again in different ways.

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Unfortunately the Creator line is not prioritized within the LEGO universe.

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This ad campaign from the early 1980’s has been passed around online quite a bit,

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not only because it strongly emphasized the confidence building benefits of creative play

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but it did so without exploiting gender stereotypes and remarkably it didn’t prioritize boys over girls.

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This ad in particular features a young girl proudly displaying her new LEGO creation with the text,

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what it is, is beautiful.

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And in fact it is beautiful to feature a girl who is unconstrained by regressive notions of gender.

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In addition to being critical of gender stereotyping,

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we ought to be consciously critical of the values being promoted in children’s toys.

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And let’s be honest, toys that promote sharing and cooperation,

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creativity and imagination are probably a better educational experience for raising healthy, well developed kids

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than a constant focus on blowing stuff up and shooting people.

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Between the Creator sets and this ad campaign,

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its clear LEGO already knows how to create an inclusive, universal play experience

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that children of all genders can participate in.

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So the next step is to actually do it, across the entire LEGO universe.

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I hope you enjoyed that video,

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it was probably my most ambitious project to date and took an enormous amount of time to put together,

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please help keep Feminist Frequency going by donating today.

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You can visit feministfrequency.com/donate