*sigh* Oh, I miss what Legos used to be...

[moominmuppet]

(and except for the dimples, that so totally could've been me in '81!  The whole ad just makes me grin)

Feministing nails this one; -- I grew up on Legos, and Construx, and all those wonderful fun construction toys.  What I loved about them was the extent to which they weren't gendered -- I avoided pink like the plague as a kid, I wrote a story in 4th grade titled "G.I. Joe Destroys the Cabbage Patch Kids", I had one Barbie but I sure as hell wasn't going to admit it...  Toys that weren't overtly, aggressively gendered in their marketing made me happy.  Walking through toy departments these days just depresses the hell out of me, for reasons like this Why? Just WTF? The pink plague's always been around to some extent, but it seems like it's getting worse, not better, in the past thirty years.  And toys like Legos that used to be pretty non-gendered have imported those same attitudes in such unnecessary and obnoxiously limiting ways.  Blah.  Every time I go present-shopping for one of the kids in my life, it just makes me want to scream. And as long as I'm bitching about toy selections; I really miss the early days of Legos and other toys, when you'd get a set that was intended to be used for free-form construction, and not as a "follow the directions, and you'll have exactly the pieces for this specific result" kind of toy.

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

1) I was that girl, essentially. I am so sad that kids now don't get to be her too.

2) "What you must do is learn to think for yourselves." "Can you recommend me a good book which can teach me to do that?" I think toys which lead to independence and independent thinking are frowned upon.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* So agreed, on both points...

I'm not generally big on the "back in the good ol' days" nostalgia -- it's a perspective I most often associate with people trying to trade in my rights for a society that never existed outside sitcoms, but I do think there was a time period there when attitudes toward children's toys were more open than they are now.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

My 11-year-old is fairly okay with pink, but even more so with black (she identifies as perkygoth); I think had this happened to us she would have been rather interested in a lesson on dying her pyjamas black.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*grin* I'm sure she would!

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, these days you can go to Lego's website and order the exact pieces in the exact colors you want, so building your own stuff with exactly the parts you want is a lot easier, even if you can't buy the box off the shelf.

*nod* It seems like the freedom and potential for adults and serious hobbyist kids is greater than ever. But for the kids who will get sets largely as presents from well-meaning relatives? That where the limitation frustrates me so much. Those are the introductions to these kinds of toys for most children.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* I entirely agree. If pink hadn't been so pushed at me _because I was a girl_, I'd feel very differently about it, I'm sure.

And my folks were very 70s feminist in their approaches to kids toys; I have two brothers, and we all got combinations of dolls and trucks and construction toys, and all that. They inherited my Transformers and Thundercats. We were very much taught at home that our gender didn't determine our tastes. Sadly, we didn't tend to encounter that kind of genderblind acceptance in the day-to-day of life in rural Michigan. I had my first feminist argument in 1st grade, with my gym teacher. She proclaimed that "Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glisten", and I got in trouble for proclaiming in return that this was stupid and wrong.

I can't imagine having to shop for a bathing suit for a little girl, though. I mean, OMG, they have bikini's for infants!

Oh, don't get me started on that one! *shudder*

[mseuphrates.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the "Libby Loo" stores in the mall...where little girls can go get a "make-over" into a princess, or cheerleader, or whatever? Oh...the pink.

My heart-daughter Ariadne? She saw it, and bolted right for it ('cause OMG the princess runs *strong* with that one...ack). My older daughter? "OMG mom...that's too much pink even for ME! Ewwwwwwww...can we get away from the entrance please?" *snickers* And I'd thought SHE was a girly-girl as a kid (I swear, my first husband - her dad - always proclaimed that kids were generic and any girl HE ever had would be just as much of a boy as her brothers, and so help me she was born with her toes pointed and a dainty tiara - yeah, totally blew his nurture vs. nature theories out the wazoo, as some people really are just born with a certain personality, and as parents you're not going to change it, so cope). :)

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* So true. My mom can point out differences in how we reacted in utero that are still true of us thirty years later.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

Stupid authority figures saying nonsense!

*chuckle* Sure wasn't the last time I elicited that reaction during my education career!

[mseuphrates.livejournal.com]

FWIW - my nearly 12 year old heart-son has never met a lego set he couldn't beat (even the ones designed for kids twice his age when he was 5). His standard procedure? Disappear with it for an hour or so and make it using their instructions (and of course emerge briefly to show me), and then tear it apart and *improve* on it. He took the Spiderman/Dr. Hook on the subway car set and created a realistic "incline" (he and his dad had just been looking at a bunch of the historic info on the inclines Cincinnati used to have to get up the hills back in the day). Kicked ASS! He also tends to take his generic legos ('cause once *that* happens and he gets bored with it, they all end up mixed in together with the generic ones anyway) and recreates whatever jet he's checked out on the internet recently. Example from March (note, he's not high, I swear, I just caught him mid-blink)LOL You'll notice the combination of standard and non-standard pieces:


Sorry...impressed/proud mom moment. :)

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*grin* That's awesome!

Also, there's so much cool Lego stuff at cjdoyle's site -- http://www.reasonablyclever.com

[mseuphrates.livejournal.com]

I heard there's going to be a Lego store in C-bus soon - I've warned the ex. I suspect a field-trip is in order (and OMG, the star wars lego figures I found at Origins this year? I'm afraid to take him now...we'd end up spending a mint).

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* _so_ expensive! _so_ tempting! Run now!

[jajy1979.livejournal.com]

Anna said I can't purchase those until I've paid off our debts, met all our deductibles for the year, and gotten new glasses.

BTW I completely agree about the LEGOs. I really wish I had more "standard" pieces, preferably in gray and black.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* I loved the giant all-purpose sets they used to sell.

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems to me that Lego has gone downhill drastically since i was a kid, when i loved playing with Lego Technic; nowadays it seems to involve essentially prebuilt models with some ability to add or remove a few extras. It's like it's short-circuiting imagination. One of my partners wouldn't buy toy guns for her kids when they were young, but was okay with them building toy guns out of Lego, because at least then they were using skills involving imagination, planning and dexterity.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

*nod* Exactly. I want toys that really require a lot of imagination to play with effectively. Seems like there's too little of that.

[ethan-greer.livejournal.com]

Lego's not so bad. You can get pink legos, yes, but they're not aggressively marketed that I've seen; they're just another option that's there for the people that want that. You can also still get generic freeform sets. Nora got a nice freeform set from for Xmas this year. The freeform sets are out there, they're just not as popular I guess. Lego remains one of the highest quality toys in history, and I don't think that has changed. The focus of the consumer has changed, for better or for worse, and Lego is forced to pander to it.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

I think I'm mostly going off my experience with recent Lego catalogs. It really seems that they only show boys playing with some sets, and only show girls playing with others, and it makes me crazy.

[ethan-greer.livejournal.com]

You may have me there. I haven't paid attention to that particular factor.

[findingthegirl.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes! Yes! As a new stepmother of a six year old boy, I find the lack of ungendered toys to be extremely frustrating. I was somewhat of a femme-y girl as a child, in that I loved Barbies, but I also loved Legos and toy cars and collecting rocks. It makes me cringe every time I hear my stepson say something is "for girls" or doesn't like something because it's pink or purple. There's only so much you can do to affect the massive amounts of social conditioning children are given.

ps. Thanks for the photo too- it looks straight out of my childhood!

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

It makes me cringe every time I hear my stepson say something is "for girls" or doesn't like something because it's pink or purple. There's only so much you can do to affect the massive amounts of social conditioning children are given.

YES! THIS!

[calialleykat.livejournal.com]

As a parent I loathe Legos because if there's one within 50 miles of me I'm going to step on it with my bare feet. As a child I loved the hell out of my Legos and my Tonka trucks and I'm really sad that Tonkas are not made out of steel like they used to be and that Legos aren't just cubes and a platform. I think the limitations of the Legos made us develop our imaginations and creativity to make what we had fit what we wanted. The MIT classes that have students start with a box of parts and the instruction to make a vehicle has it's roots in that idea.

[moominmuppet.livejournal.com]

As a parent I loathe Legos because if there's one within 50 miles of me I'm going to step on it with my bare feet.

Ha! My Dad used to threaten to throw them all in the garbage on a semi-weekly basis, generally while hopping around on one foot and wincing.

The MIT classes that have students start with a box of parts and the instruction to make a vehicle has it's roots in that idea.

*nod* Exactly.