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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

s/LEGO/toy manufacturers/

(There, I fixed it for you!)

The trend towards highly gendered media-tie in toys that are designed to generate follow-on sales opportunities for accessories rather than to encourage kids to develop their imagination through semi-structured but open-ended play nauseates me. I am doubtless betraying my personal bias here, but the corporate discovery that the quickest way to a parent's wallet is through their offspring is a bleakly exploitative example of market amorality; it may be legal, but is it decent?

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Hasn't this always been the case... the marketing influence, I mean? I've gone to the Lego store in my town. You can still assemble a nice set outside of the movie tie-in stuff.

Now, whether you can get you kids to think that's cooler or not? That's the real problem.

IIRC, Lego was on verge of bankruptcy in the early 2000's and had to figure out a way to get kids to keep buying. We're witnessing the same type of turnaround Apple had. We snort at this one, though, because we've constructed memories of childhood that remove the marketing we now see as adults.

we've constructed memories of childhood that remove the marketing we now see as adults

You're telling me this: http://www.innovationinpractice.com/.a/6a00e54ef4f3768834013...

Is a piece of marketing? Because that & similar pieces was 95% of what I used.

That's the product, not the way it was sold. That product is still available. My nephews are guilty of the same build the set and chuck it type behaviors. I've got my own son and daughter interested in the building aspect.

I remember looking a the awesome pictures of what you could build with the Technics sets (this is way before Mindstorms). That was me being marketed to. I wanted those sets without knowing anyone that owned one or having ever seen one outside of the adverts. That's being marketed to.

I guess my experience was probably a little different from the usual. My parents simply bought a sack of old pieces unprompted from Goodwill one day and gave them to me and my brother. I suppose they could have been acting on marketing they saw though.

I think one has to see toy manufacturers as a conservative (in a politically neutral sense) cultural force. Let's take this a step further and look at the way heterosexual relationships are sold to kids. We can't see lesbian Barby & Kendra sets because that would be sexual, but Barby and Ken are evidently not.

So here we are selling a specific model of sexuality to young girls as normal. And this is a major aspect of our cultural heteronormality.

BS @ trend.

Go back 50 years and it was dolls and toy guns. Nothing has changed, boys still like building and destroying, and girls still like caring about things and craft things.

You can try all you want to make boys play with dolls, and girls play at killing each other, but they won't in general, because it's not in their biological makeup to do so.

I think the point here is that Lego is fondly remembered as -- and maybe even should be -- a gender-neutral toy. There was never anything inherently male or female about Legos. In fact, I remember playing with my younger sister often -- I'd be building a spaceship on one side, and she'd be putting together a house on the other.

The problem is that Lego has gotten away from being a gender-neutral toy and is now marketed specifically to boys. And the travesty is, they've dug themselves such a deep hole that the only way to get back any female users is to pander to their lowest common denominator.

BS. Utter BS. It is marketed to everyone.

(Speaking as a father of a daughter who has a massive Lego collection and plays with it lots).

It's depressing to see so many comments that seem to believe we're all powerless to go against marketing and advertising. YOU are the problem.

If you're a parent, BUY YOUR KIDS SOME LEGO.

It's not marketed specifically to boys though... Sure, some of the sets are obviously more male-oriented (perhaps even the majority), but there are also sets that are either specifically designed to appeal to girls, or which appeal more to girls for whatever reason.

This trend is really nothing new, either. More than 20 years ago I wanted the Lego spaceships, and my sister got pissed off at me for making wars against her happy little Lego town people. Even 20 years ago there were more sets that appealed to boys than girls, I'm reasonably sure.

We also had a pile of the plain old "gender-neutral" bricks, which either of us might have employed to augment our various constructions.

"boys still like building"

"girls still ... craft things."

I think this says everything that needs to be said: children like making things!

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