Lego, I've loved you for as long as I can remember.
From the days of creating simplistic towers and faux weapons with your larger blocks, to graduating to the smaller blocks and building intricate spaceships and cityscapes, you gave me endless amounts of entertainment and creative development as a child. You taught me spatial relations. You taught me the basics of physics. You helped me learn to stretch the creative portion of my brain to realize that with a set of basic blocks, the potential end results were limitless. I even posted about my excitement when it was announced that Legoland would be coming to town.
But I have to admit..you've disappointed me recently. When the news broke that you decided to create a specific line of Legos for girls, I was baffled. Since when did Lego need to have gender-specific subsets? Why, all of a sudden, did a perfectly gender-neutral and universal toy need to be made into something that segregated and dissected its products into 'boy Legos' and 'girl Legos'?
I don't get it. Sure, you pin it on 'research'. You say that girls 'play differently'. But did you ever think that girls 'play differently' because companies like you try to pigeonhole them into a specific way of playing?
You refer to your own product as 'masculine'. I suggest you come over and tell my 2-year-old daughter that she's playing wrong, because she absolutely loves her set of Legos. It's nothing fancy. It's the same tub I played with when I was a kid, in fact.
Sure, you've created playsets for movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. You have sets with rocketships and astronauts. Newsflash: girls can like those things too.
Girls don't need a Lego house with a pink roof where they can pretend to be Susie Homemaker. They don't need a playset where they pretend to be a pop singer diva. Will some of them want this stuff? Sure. But what girls don't need is you telling them 'Hey, THESE Legos are for you! Ignore all of those others!' And from what I can tell via screenshots, your new 'Legos for girls' take away the one aspect of your toy that made it special: BUILDING. My daughter loves to build things with her Legos. She doesn't need a miniskirted figurine to prance around with, and she certainly doesn't need you telling her that's how she should be using your products.
I won't be buying any of your Legos for Girls products. As far as I'm concerned, my daughter will continue playing with my old Lego sets until they get lost or destroyed in a fire. She doesn't need you telling her how to play or what it means to 'play like a girl'. Instead, I'll let her use Legos like they should always be intended: an open-ended tool for her to create whatever her heart desires without instruction.
From the days of creating simplistic towers and faux weapons with your larger blocks, to graduating to the smaller blocks and building intricate spaceships and cityscapes, you gave me endless amounts of entertainment and creative development as a child. You taught me spatial relations. You taught me the basics of physics. You helped me learn to stretch the creative portion of my brain to realize that with a set of basic blocks, the potential end results were limitless. I even posted about my excitement when it was announced that Legoland would be coming to town.
But I have to admit..you've disappointed me recently. When the news broke that you decided to create a specific line of Legos for girls, I was baffled. Since when did Lego need to have gender-specific subsets? Why, all of a sudden, did a perfectly gender-neutral and universal toy need to be made into something that segregated and dissected its products into 'boy Legos' and 'girl Legos'?
 |
| No. Just no. |
I don't get it. Sure, you pin it on 'research'. You say that girls 'play differently'. But did you ever think that girls 'play differently' because companies like you try to pigeonhole them into a specific way of playing?
You refer to your own product as 'masculine'. I suggest you come over and tell my 2-year-old daughter that she's playing wrong, because she absolutely loves her set of Legos. It's nothing fancy. It's the same tub I played with when I was a kid, in fact.
Sure, you've created playsets for movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. You have sets with rocketships and astronauts. Newsflash: girls can like those things too.
Girls don't need a Lego house with a pink roof where they can pretend to be Susie Homemaker. They don't need a playset where they pretend to be a pop singer diva. Will some of them want this stuff? Sure. But what girls don't need is you telling them 'Hey, THESE Legos are for you! Ignore all of those others!' And from what I can tell via screenshots, your new 'Legos for girls' take away the one aspect of your toy that made it special: BUILDING. My daughter loves to build things with her Legos. She doesn't need a miniskirted figurine to prance around with, and she certainly doesn't need you telling her that's how she should be using your products.
I won't be buying any of your Legos for Girls products. As far as I'm concerned, my daughter will continue playing with my old Lego sets until they get lost or destroyed in a fire. She doesn't need you telling her how to play or what it means to 'play like a girl'. Instead, I'll let her use Legos like they should always be intended: an open-ended tool for her to create whatever her heart desires without instruction.
