Phew! Now that legos come in pink, Q will play with them. Just what I’ve been waiting for. Because you know, since he loves pink so much, he hasn’t been willing to play with them before, given the color choices.
Kidding. Totally kidding.
Frankly, I’m disgusted. Pink legos. And the pink legos are to make a house/dollhouse, replete with flowers. That definitely has to be pink. To attract the girls. All the warships/spaceships/star wars stuff — that’s fine in black and grey because it’s for boys. Just another insipient message to our kids about what they should like or what they should play with depending on their color preferences. Or, vice versa, what kinds of colors they should like, depending on their play preferences. Can’t we just let these poor small beings be? Choose what they want? Like what they like? Jeez.
My son has these rain boots. When he was two he choose from green frogs, pink kitty cats, and something else. He wanted the pink kitty cats and I have to admit that we totally didn’t want him to have them. Honestly, we were afraid that people would look at him funny and would think that we were making him wear them. “Luckily” they didn’t have the pink kitty cat boots in his size. Two years later when he outgrew the froggy boots (with which he had been very happy) we went back and he immediately pulled down the pink kitty cat boots and put them on. We said “hell yes. If he’s wanted these boots for 2 years, he gets them.” It’s not even that Ash has any wish to wear any other pink and I don’t think he would notice what he wore any given day. He pulls out the front shirt and pants from the drawer and puts them on and would be happy to wear nothing. But it wasn’t the pink – he wanted kitty cats! I assume the manufacturer decided that cats should be pink and frogs green and that was that.
Oh, and it’s been 9 months or so and no one has ever made a comment other than to say, “Hey, I love your boots!”
I’m going to brand myself as old and say “When I was a kid, legos came in a white box that had both a boy and a girl on it”.
Since I probably got those boxes in the mid-80s, I want to know: what the he** has happened since then that they need to market legos in a ‘gender-specific’ manner?
We also have the pink lego box – came at the thrift store with all kinds of non-pink legos in it – and one lonely pink lego that my son loved so much (pink being his favorite color) that he carried it around tightly clutched in his fist for at least a week.
I think they should go back to the white flat boxes and put cars, trucks, flowers and pink bricks in them all.
We don’t buy lego kits, partly for this reason. I have a huge tub of duplo that sits in the living room (in an aqua container, seeing as it’s built with mostly by a girl) and a huge tub of lego that lives upstairs (in a purple container) and that’s it. I have two boys who are obsessed with minifigs as a result of this, but I can live with this.
I was always ticked off that I couldn’t get pink or purple bricks myself. My standard gift to kids on their dirthday is ALWAYS a huge tub of lego’s, or a Barbie and a GI Joe, or a book on knots and a book on braiding hair. I keep 2 tubs of lego’s, bunch of GI Joe’s, a gaggle of Barbies and a stack of books in the closet for last minute gifts. I always buy them on sale at some point during the year. When a toy store closed and Barbies were $3 I bought $100 worth. I refuse to give gender specific gifts until they are teenagers where they acutally display gender attributes. Boys have just as much fun with Barbie as Girls. My boy’s always used her as the hostage or victim…. My daughter would have tea parties with GI Joe and Barbie attending. Barbie would get cammies, Joe would get pink dresses. or vis versa.
Robi
Oh I’m the dad.
“I assume the manufacturer decided that cats should be pink and frogs green and that was that.”
That reminds me of some underwear that was actually pretty cute, but had a subtle and, perhaps, unintentional message on them… The medium size had a cat design stitched in, the large had, of all things, a cow design instead. What amazes me is that nobody in this company stopped the design long enough to suggest that, perhaps, the cow design would be a poor choice on women’s clothing in general, let alone underwear for those buying a large size.
On the subject of gender funneling, it’s a situation that has probably gotten worse rather than better. It’s often subtle, but with media and advertising everywhere, it’s practically inescapable. When I was a child, much too long ago sadly, that factor was prevelant, but there was much less TV, no Internet, and less general advertising and it was still a struggle to break free of the gender bonds that society imposes. Heck, I did all of the truly “masculine” things including sports such as hockey and joining the military as a form of “cure” for my own feelings because the impression that I had was that they were wrong. I can imagine that it is much harder today with so much more of “what it means to be a man or woman” in our faces, but the flip side is that more information is out there and the younger generations are showing a significantly higher level of tolerance than mine ever did. Maybe that will balance or negate the other side of the coin.
We have the Lego issue here, too. My sister ordered a box of pink Legos for Noah for xmas and it was a rather, uh, domestic set. A new Lego store opened up near us and we were thrilled to think that we could buy pink Legos in bulk and out of an ENTIRE store, and out of 150+ bulk bins on the wall…the ONLY pink Legos offered were the ones in the same box we already have. And they only had THREE of those in stock. Out of an entire store!