From my 2012 archives: Seeing the fun my son has with the Friends, I am again left scratching my head about LEGO’s approach to developing and marketing this product line, so I decided to write to the company. My letter is below.
Category: From the Archives
A post from my archives about my puzzlement over Lego Friends, a toy that could have appealed to boys and girls, if Lego hadn’t been so determined to divide their target audience along gender lines.
October, 2021 Guardian article about Lego and its decision to (finally) end gender bias in its toys, another post from my archives about Lego and its “girl toys.”
Another post from my archives, in response to a story in an October 2021 article in The Guardian about Lego seeking to end gender bias in its toys. I wrote the article below in December of 2011, after Lego announced its new product for girls, which would ultimately be called Lego Friends.
There was a story in today’s Guardian about Lego’s plans to “remove gender bias” from its toys. I tweeted this story with a comment about how I had begun writing about Lego’s gender problems ten years ago. My original website is gone, but I still have the posts I wrote. Here is the very first, originally written March 25, 2011.
The widely held notion that “boys will be boys” is problematic for a few fairly obvious reasons: it perpetuates stereotypes of boys and men as aggressive and rebellious; it excuses boys for rowdy or generally bad behaviour—a freedom not granted to girls, who are expected to behave perfectly all the time; and it calls into question the masculinity of “good” boys. It is the last point that I will address in this post, particularly as it pertains to the school environment.
I wrote this post about boys and consent in April of 2013. I was in the midst of researching my book Boys, Sex & Media and the…