shopping for the part of your little girl that wants to be a secret agent/spy/martial arts superhero = errrr …

even in this day and age, raising a butt-kicking girl takes creativity and crossing the gender aisle at toys r us.  and trawling youtube for canceled cartoons with female protagonists (hi, juniper lee!).  anyone who doubts the existence of the girl toy ghetto had never been in one.

Probably not Hollywood enough for the marketrons though.  Still, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I think the Bechdel test may actually be relevant in discussing (and solving) Lego’s problems.

In order for female characters to have identities independent of men, there ought to be at least 2 female characters (who thus have the ability to converse with one another about something other than a man).

I poked around Lego’s online store, and found a large number of playsets containing only male minifigs.

Lego sets are for play; they aren’t about strict historical recreation. There’s no reason not to include females among the pirates and ninjas and knights and firefighters and robbers and X-Wing pilots and so forth.

There’s a general rule “don’t mess with success.” If you measure success in terms of sales and profits, then their boys’ product lines are successful.

But Legos are supposed to be about learning through play. And what are boys learning about the world if their play universes are devoid of women?

IMO, any Lego kit containing 4 or more minifigs ought to have at least 2 females – or a very good reason why that’s not possible (limits of licensed properties, for example).

I think that would go a long way towards feeling more inclusive towards girls — and would be beneficial to boys as well.

Aside: Thinking about this gave me some renewed respect for the classic boardgame Clue, which managed to have 3 female characters to choose among, without the game itself being in any way “girly”

From my experience the logical step for lego is not to make a separate line for girls (which is incompatible with their other lines), but to make more female minifig parts so girls can have more to “identify” with in the lines of toys they already produce. 

Also, these new ones will probably be all pink and won’t have the emphasis on building and imagination…which a gender neutral concept and what legos are all about

On another note, my mother is 62 and still builds lego sets. She loves them. She even readily started loving IKEA furniture because the instructions are laid out like the ones for lego sets.

OMG – who the fuck would notice or care about such things?

So if one of your dolls action figures was supposed to be a knight, you wouldn’t notice if he was wearing flip-flops?

I never liked Barbies or other dolls, and didn’t identify with them in the least. And I’ve always felt that dolls that look like babies/children are creepy and repulsive. (And I’m Childfree. Coincidence?)

(As a boy) I remember my friend’s sisters had a few if the Belville  sets and how the doll/figs were just so alien to the rest of lego it’s like they were Barbie knock-offs. So of course we exiled them from the glorious bins and into the sandbox in mock funerals. I think I remember the Scala (what an Ikea sounding name) had some cool special parts.
Also I think may of you are being too harsh (and in the term of tvtropes RUINED FOREVER) when these haven’t even come out yet. Judge something by it’s own merits and not the narrow lens of an article (preview). Don’t put the pre in prejudiced. 

Like it or not, we live in a society with customs. You can teach your kids to understand those customs and to question them, bend them or throw them out completely. But kids pick up on these customs and they do ascribe gender to figures, no matter how generic they are. And making all of them generic in a male way (designed by males for males) is what led to Lego being such a predominantly male toy. 

I love these. I think all of Lego should be like that.

(As for Mega Bloks, my impression is that they’re less accurate than Lego, which makes them less suitable for building.)

Lego’s main problem is their own attitude. They target Lego entirely at boys, and then complain that no girls play with it. But instead of making all Lego more unisex, they just make a separate (small, and probably quick to die) girl line. That’s really not going to fix their problem. They need to make more female minifigs.

The fact that you see an ungendered figure that doesn’t have any immediately visible gender cues (i.e. breasts) as masculine is more of a societal problem than anything innate to the figure itself.  Little girls generally haven’t developed breasts at the young age Lego seems to be aiming for, and I never had a problem as a kid putting ladyhair on my minifigs and seeing them as female.

What lego has ended up with is a pointlessly aged up figure, taller and curvier, wearing makeup, and working at either a salon, a vet clinic, a cafe, or whatever the hell a “horse academy is.”  That’s not accommodating the way girl’s play, that’s is setting up a divide- saying these are for girls, these are the things girls like, and as a side effect immediately gendering normal Legos as “male.”