Toys for Girls

We hosted another great birthday party for all the kids last fall. I know it was great because there was a hayride, cupcakes, and a pair of dueling six year olds.  And, though the fist fight was very entertaining, we also had an outdoor movie.  Such fun to hear thirty kids sing along with the Lego Movie:

Everything is Awesome,
Everything is cool when you're part of a team
Everything is Awesome when you're living out a dream 

As part of Henry’s Lego themed  birthday gift, we took a family outing to Brick Fest, a traveling Lego convention that, in October, made a three day stop in Rosemont, Illinois. This was a fun day spent building Lego derby cars, playing miniature golf on a multi terrain Lego course, and admiring the massive, and also painstakingly intricate, feats of Lego construction.

One thing featured on the vendors‘ overpriced shelves that I had not seen before was a Lego Friends set. The Lego Friends feature pink and purple bricks (compatible with traditional Legos, of course) and not so mini mini-figs who wear attractive clothing and whose curvy bodies prove even plastic bricks can develop body image issues after spending too much time staring at Barbie across the aisle in the toy store.

  I’ve been trying to formulate an opinion about this product for two months.

Is it great that Lego has made a building kit that appeals to little girls? Wonderful that three dimensional creativity is no longer confined to one gender?  Or is it reprehensible that creative directors at Lego think that they can only lure girls to their product line, only encourage them to use their spatial imaginations, if the toy is pink and pretty?  

Apparently, the Lego company received a fair amount of criticism for the Lego Friends.   But I can’t decide whether to applaud or condemn.

Things were made more clear to me last week when I took the kids to the Farm n’ Fleet to pick out a birthday gift for a friend. (Normally, I buy all things online.  “Why not go to the store,” l thought, “and let Henry and Jettie pick out a toy for their friend themselves?”  Following this outing, I will resume my internet shopping habit.)  Amidst the mountains of toy tractors and Star Wars dolls, craft sets and dinosaurs, some items pertaining to this question of gender marketing  caught my eye. 

By the nature toys (binoculars, butterfly nets, archery sets) there was a display of HERventure toys.  These conceivably empowering figurines feature a well-endowed woman riding a horse, driving a camper towing an ATV, and, perhaps my favorite, standing with a rifle in her hands.  The woman with the gun is sold with a white tail buck, but I suspect you could have her kill all your other toys as well.

While I like that the HERventure toys attempt to expand the horizons for little girls’ imaginary play, I will not be encouraging my daughter to play with them as I think they still present some problems – for one thing, the woman with the gun is wearing capris and you just know she is going to get a whole bunch of ticks.  For another, Henry is not encouraged to play with guns, why should Jettie’s dolls be armed?  To be perfectly honest, in this already violent culture I would prefer my daughter adhere to the stereotype of the friendly pink builder. 

Henry ultimately chose a Lego firefighter set for Owen that came with four mini-figs: the fire chief, an angry gas station attendant (the set features a gas pump engulfed in flames), a fire man, and a fire woman.  This is great.  Who cares that she doesn’t make equal wages? She is challenging gender norms, part of a team that is living a dream.  Everything really is awesome!