Dear girls of the world today...

You know what's really messed up? While there has always been gendered toys and "you can't, because you're a girl", there used to be gender-free toys, like Legos. Now there's GIRL Legos, that are pink and purple and have shops and cafes. Because, you know, girls can't like spaceships and ninjas. this ad is from the year I was born. My kid will never see something like this today. She's 6.

I will admit that there's better female role models in today's media, if you look for them. This is a friend's Facebook status from yesterday: "The girls this afternoon, watching Dr. Who with me while I'm sewing. Gray: "Next time we play, I'm gonna be River." Evelyn: "This one, or the Firefly one?" They've got it lucky. I always got stuck playing April O'Neil from Ninja Turtles. She was always the one getting tied up and had to be rescued. Lol, my "badass" character I always wanted to play wasn't even a girl, and not many of my friends wanted to play Indiana Jones with a female Indy. So when they're slaying reavers and riding back to Serenity on their My Little Ponies, it makes me smile."

And I have high hopes for Korra, in the second Airbender cartoon... (They had Toph and Katara for the first one, who got steadily more and more awesome.)

I love that ad! It's perfect! If they want to make 'girl' Legos, just expand the variety of colors Legos come in to include pink, purple, aqua, light green, etc. Throw in some furniture that would work just as well in a command center or fort as a bedroom and kitchen and it's all good. Oh, have some skirts you can snap on over a Lego figure if you want one to be a girl in a skirt. There, 'girly' Legos.

Your friend's girls totally rock.

That's honestly not that far from what the current sets of 'girl' Legos are, if you look beyond the pink boxes.

They're a lot better than some previous attempts Lego has done.

I can't stand the color pink because of how saturated in it 'girl stuff' is. Pastels, less so, but I still find myself going out of my way to avoid them at times. Working in the kids department at Macy's for a year definitely didn't help.

Yeah, no kidding. And the fact that, while I can say the Lego box didn't say "for girls" at all, just "pink brick box", that's kind of being disingenuous because "p-i-n-k" in that context is completely an alternative spelling of "for girls". Argh.

It's gotta be hard to be a socially aware young woman and genuinely like pink.

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When I was looking for a new cellphone a few years back, I settled on a slim, flip-open style in a kind of gray-blue. The sales-rep asked if I'd like a different color.
"Maybe; what do you have?"
"Pink."
"Oh, GOD, no!"

My response was reflexive and unthinking, and the sales rep didn't deserve the blow-back. I actually like pink, have several pink-patterned shirts. But some things don't need to be pink*, especially when it's the only alternative. If there had been five colors, one of which was pink, fine. But to have ONLY gray-blue and pink reeks of sexism.

(*I am less happy with pink when the object is hard plastic, like a cellphone, or a feed-bucket. When I bought a new one recently, there were several colors in the stack, with pink on top. I really didn't care what color, but that pink just looked wrong. I went a couple of buckets down the stack and got a red one.)

I completely agree with you on the saturation of pink in 'girl stuff'. I have a four-year-old great-niece that I sometimes buy clothes for, and it's so hart to find colors other than pink or lavender. And the pictures on the shirts are infuriating -- boys have choices of dinos, or puppies, or trucks, or baseballs, or footballs, or-or-or. Girls have choices of kittens or butterflies or fairies or ballerinas. Grr...
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Don't feel bad about your response to the cell phone. I can totally see myself doing the same thing, and as soon as I realized what I'd said, I'd apologize to the salesperson. It's not their fault the company thinks the only color females like is pink.

Working in the kids section at Macy's, I realized that if I ever have a girl, I'll have no choice but to shop in the boy's section. *sighs* When a friend of mine found out she was going to have a girl, she attached bows to some caps and socks she'd already bought for the baby. That's not as bad as another friend, though. While she was pregnant with her son, her mom gave her some varigated yarn with white, navy blue, and raspberry pink and my friend, totally serious, told her mom she wasn't sure if she wanted to make something with it because there was pink on/in the yarn. *headwall* I so wanted to chew her out for being extremely rude to her mother and for making a big deal over a color. What, are you afraid it'll turn the kid gay or something? Or that there's a chance a touch of pink might lead people to think your baby's a girl? GIVE. ME. A. BREAK!

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I think that points up how easy it is to become immersed in our culture; unless one is self-reflective (by nature or exposure to 'unpacking' articles and posts), it's easy not to recognize that we're responding to cultural 'programing'.

As a speech therapist, I have a number of Tangle Toys to keep fidgety hands busy while another student is responding. Visually, I like patterns, and the toys come with random colors. I took them all apart, separated the colors, and made patterned combinations.

One boy invariably selects the pastel pink / pastel blue / clear combination. Every single damn time, I have to stop myself from commenting on that selection. Not that I would say something shaming, but even a comment like, "It's refreshing to see a boy who likes pink," might make him self-conscious about it, or give one of the others an excuse for teasing. (Which I would immediately squash, but the damage would be done.)

It's hard to fight the weight of our own indoctrination, even when we know better. For those who don't, I guess we become teachers when the opportunity presents, and bite our tongues when that would be inappropriate.
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It's extremely easy because we're inundated by the programming from birth, it's everywhere, and the only time we're not exposed is when we're sleeping. It's an ongoing, conscious effort not to listen to it and let it mold us and our lives. I can have a hard time biting my tongue, especially when I see something that I feel should be encouraged, like boys playing with 'girly' things. It's hard to remember that, sometimes, the best way to encourage a behavior is to act like you didn't see/hear anything.

And the fact that the figures included can't hold the tools and other implements from "normal" Lego sets.

Oh? As far as I can tell, they mostly can.

See, for instance, this webcomic, which is admittedly very strange, but has very clear photos of the hands on the "Friends" and "normal" lego minifigures side-by-side, and of the "Friends" minifigures holding normal Lego minifigure accessories.

(The difference is that the hands on the "Friends" minifigures aren't articulated to rotate at the wrist, because they don't have the oversized chunky arms of the "normal" minifigures. Even so, they're at an angle where they'll work fine with the swords and shovels and most of the common things. The one real problem that comes to mind is the bicycles.)

Good to know, thank you. I was going from what other people had said, and sometimes it's good to be wrong.

Lego has screwed up in recent years, no doubt about it. But it does seems they're willing to listen. We just need to keep on them!

Yeah, I agree.

I do want to comment on a bit of nuance there, though. I'm a member of a Lego club, so I've heard a bit about this, and also paid a fair bit of attention to what's actually in those pink Lego boxes.

Lego's done some excessively-gendered "girl" sets in the past that were pretty clearly "bad" -- they had lots of special-purpose parts that were only useful for the "girly" purposes, they didn't have many of the general-purpose parts (which, admittedly, was a problem with the sets in general for a while), the figures weren't compatible, and so on.

This time, in many ways, they got it about right as they could given the context. Edit: After reading jinian's link, I'll amend that to be "a lot better". There are still problems.

And the context was that they found that, by and large, parents were treating the general Lego sets as "only for boys" and were not buying them for girls. Basic Lego hasn't changed (much), but apparently the average toy-buying public has.

So, what does Lego do with this? Keep making "non-gendered" toys that only get bought for boys? That doesn't seem like the right answer at all.

What they are doing is making what are pretty much standard Lego sets but in pink and purple and green and light blue, and putting them in pink boxes, and putting them in sets that ostensibly build somewhat "girly" sorts of things. But inside those boxes are lots basic bricks that aside from the colors are just like the ones in the other sets and just as generally useful, and the thing on the cover of the box (whether ice cream store or fire station) has very little to do with what anyone is going to be doing with the bricks in a month. It's like a disguise to get perfectly good Legos past sexist toy-buyers into the hands of girls who can then easily do completely non-gendered things with them.

The thing that really drove this home for me was looking at some of the "basic bricks" boxes in Target yesterday. There's a blue box, and a pink one. They're almost exactly the same bricks inside. They don't actually say "for boys" or "for girls" on them as such; the pink one is simply labeled Pink Brick Box. That's very different from last time they did something like this.

And the other thing that will happen, at least some? Kids who really like Legos are going to look at the sets that are ostensibly for the other gender and say, "Hey, I want more colors! Maybe I can buy this set from the other side of the aisle too." Yes, even the boys; I'm pretty sure I would have, as a kid.

(Incidentally, the one difference in some of the "pink" sets -- but not the "Pink Brick Box", interestingly -- is that they've changed the minifigures. My understanding is that this was a direct response to focus groups with actual girls, who didn't like the fact that the standard ones are really very stylized. So Lego made some new ones, which are ... well, still cartoony, but rather less stylized and iconic. And they are the same size as the old ones and can share hair and headgear and things with them, so they mix reasonably well rather than resulting in incompatible sets.)

Now, I'm not saying that all this pinkwashing is non-problematic, at all. The fact that people look at today's Lego sets -- many of which are no different in gender presentation than the ones contemporary to that advertisement (and, in fact, the non-pink basic "Brick Box" is almost exactly the sets advertised there) and think of them as "only for boys" is a big problem indeed. And the fact that all of the pink boxes that are "themed" have sort of female-gendered themes is a bit problematic, too; I hope that broadens once they establish that it's "okay" to buy these for girls. But, given that the context is what it is, I'd rather have Lego making the "pink" sets than not.

And, bringing this back to the initial post: I'm really glad that some girls whose parents would never have bought them the "normal" Legos will get some of these, and make spaceships and ninjas out of them.

She will see that ad. Because you're helping to keep it alive for everyone to see.