I don't think Lego can be blamed for Lego Friends. They made gender-neutral lego toys for years and years, and never made the kind of spectacular traction they got with girls through Lego Friends.
A LEGO block is sex-neutral, but the decades of marketing and LEGO character pieces certainly were not. LEGO can't take all the blame, given that many parents probably didn't buy LEGOs for their daughters given their own internalized stereotypes, but it could have recognized that this was a phenomenon and aggressively worked to include girls in their "neutral" toys.
As usual, the actual problem is deeper than symtomatic entities like LEGO. We will see the end of this issue when we see the end of the world's obsession with sex and sex stereotypes.
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I don't think Lego can be blamed for Lego Friends. They made gender-neutral lego toys for years and years, and never made the kind of spectacular traction they got with girls through Lego Friends.
A LEGO block is sex-neutral, but the decades of marketing and LEGO character pieces certainly were not. LEGO can't take all the blame, given that many parents probably didn't buy LEGOs for their daughters given their own internalized stereotypes, but it could have recognized that this was a phenomenon and aggressively worked to include girls in their "neutral" toys.
As usual, the actual problem is deeper than symtomatic entities like LEGO. We will see the end of this issue when we see the end of the world's obsession with sex and sex stereotypes.