From Jonathan McIntosh. Quite Brilliant. Does remind me of the Prada Death Camp ( Tom Sachs ) and LEGO concentration camp ( Libera) from the Mirroring Evil exhibit in New York about a decade ago, which means Jonathan as a pop culture hacker and video-remix expert is also you could say equally dissenting in an artistic and aesthetic sense as well:
Uh oh the LEGO “Friends” house is on fire! Now what?
Jonathan McIntosh. Read More:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmcintosh/6792531251/in/photostream
So what happens when something in Heartlake City catches on fire? Since there are no fire or medical services in the LEGO Friends theme I guess they’ll just have to call the boys to put it out? This is the kind of absurd situation that arise when toy companies perpetuate ridiculous gender stereotyping.
From Feminist Frequency:
LEGO announced that after 4 years of intensive research, they have finally come up with a LEGO product that fulfills the desires of “how girls naturally build and play.” This new theme is called LEGO Friends and it’s a pink and purple, gender segregated, suburban wasteland populated by Barbie/Bratz style dolls. Many parents, educators, feminists, and media critics have spoken out against LEGOs attempts to separate girls into their own stereotypical isolated enclave within the LEGO universe.
In part 1 of my two part LEGO and Gender series, I’ll explore how LEGO went terribly wrong with LEGO Friends and provide a brief history of LEGO’s ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls since the late 70′s. Read More:http://www.feministfrequency.com/
As researchers like Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein have pointed out- and backed up- the gender divide is largely an artificial construction. Lies we tell ourselves that become ingrained. There are differences, but they are exploited, manipulated and shaped in the age old tradition of divide and conquer. Secondly, these large corporations, after sinking so much cash in product development will, based on short profit payoff horizons, choose the path of least resistance to monetize their investment.Market rules. Cute and clever Bill Bernbach style advertising is not coming back.
ADDENDUM:
Peggy Orenstein: At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers. …
--- ...was offset by Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, will hit stores this month with the goal of becoming a holiday must-have by the fall. Set in fictive Heartlake City (and supported by a $40 million marketing campaign), the line features ne
astel-colored, blocks that allow a budding Kardashian, among other things, to build herself a cafe or a beauty salon. Its tasty-sounding “ladyfig” characters are also taller and curvier than the typical Legoland denizen. --- Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/does-stripping-gender-from-toys-really-make-sense.html?_r=3&src=tp
…The rebellion against such gender apartheid may have begun. Consider the latest cute-kid video to go viral on YouTube: “Riley on Marketing” shows a little girl in front of a wall of pink packaging, asking, “Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different-color stuff?” It has been viewed more than 2.4 million times. …Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/does-stripping-gender-from-toys-really-make-sense.html?_r=2&src=tp
---Once upon a time LEGO also had a wonderful marketing strategy directed at girls. A 1981 LEGO ad featured a little girl proudly showing off her multi-colored LEGO creation, with the caption "What it is is beautiful." When SPARK partner organization, PBG (Powered By Girl), posted on LEGO's Facebook page a challenge to "bring back beautiful," within hours hundreds of posts from parents flooded LEGO's page, the challenge popped up on Twitter as #Liberatelego, and over 1500 signed PBG/SPARK's Change.org petition. How is it that four years of research and a billion dollars didn't buy LEGO a little reconnaissance into the desires of parents and girls sick and tired of pinkified toys that invite girls to dream of shopping malls, beauty salons, and hot tubs?--- Read More:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lyn-mikel-brown/legos-for-girls_b_1172876.html image:http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/17/vintage-lego-ad/
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