The LEGO Boys Club - Lego & Gender Part 2

In part 1 of my two part LEGO and Gender series, I explored how LEGO went terribly wrong with LEGO Friends and provided a brief history of LEGO's ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls since the late 70′s. Watch Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmRxGLn0Bk

In part 2, I delve into how LEGO shifted their products from their initial relatively, gender neutral building experience to a more male dominated and male identified one. The LEGO group intentionally did this in three ways: 1. Marketing exclusively to boys, 2. Producing male identified and centered themes and sets and 3. Focusing on stereotypical boys play scenarios with an emphasis on combat. The strong focus on boys has effectively kicked girls out of the LEGO club house. Keep watching until the end where I provide a few suggestions to LEGO oh how to fix their gender segregation problem.

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Watch the LEGO Violence Ads Montage - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDThHosFS_0

“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.

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

but in the Lego friends marketing the construction is not central to the narrative being sold

drive by Olivia's house

pass the vet with all the pets

to the newly built cafe

we're here!

Let's all help out

make burgers, shakes, bake the cupcakes

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

The minifigs just show up at the newly built cafe

and the playtime is supposed to happen after the building is complete

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

as a part of their Lego experience

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

despite Lego's best efforts to ignore us and kick us out of the Lego clubhouse

So Lego spent four years and millions of dollars

to research the desires of girls to create another Barbie wasteland

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

it's called Lego

or it used to be

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

as Lisa Wade pointed out on the Ms. Blog

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

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

that we see throughout our culture...

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

their products send

The real takeaway from Lego's research

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

over the last couple of decades

on aggressively gendered marketing and gender stereotyping has worked

We see fewer commercial of boys and girls playing together

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

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

all of this marketing is inescapable

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

Although we dont want to believe it,

the truth is that advertising works to manipulate us

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

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

is to actually include them in a meaningful way

Not segregate and separate them into their own pink enclave

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

to think about when producing and marketing new products

First, they've got to integrate more female minifig characters into their themes

and make them the focus of those sets

Then they've got to completely drop this ladyfig doll thing from the entire Lego universe

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

that children of all genders will adore

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

and create universally appealing sets