House of Eratosthenes

Margot’s on the warpath, again, this time about Lego building blocks for girls. You know the aggravation runs deep because she has many posts up about the same thing, but I had to pick one of them and use the comment space underneath to make inquiries because, after all that has been written, I haven’t quite understood what all the fuss has been about. I tried my best to be non-offensive, although I didn’t put that much sweat & adrenaline into that because honestly, now that I look back on it and see I’ve failed at it again, I’ll not be losing too much sleep over it.

That’s the price to be paid when you start agitating for some kind of change somewhere, and your strategy at the very outset is to be offended. People start to figure it out. The natural response, over time, evolves to one of “Okay, I’ll give it my best shot not to tick off so-and-so…but if it happens it happens, if it doesn’t it doesn’t.” We all remember at least one uncle or aunt like this, right?

Anyway. The shot heard round the world is Lego’s launch of Legos for Girls. Mercifully, the first thing we examine is something on which I concur with the everlastingly-angry feminists, although this is a matter of taste. There are humanoid dolls in the Lego sets. There have been human-shaped Lego pieces for years now, and this has never met with my approval; perhaps I’m dating myself when I point out that in my day, if you wanted a human in your Lego creation, you took those beautiful bricks and made yourself something that looked like a human. If the point is to stimulate the flow of creative juices in a maturing child, the toy manufacturer has already lost me and they lost me many years ago. Human shaped Lego pieces because all the kids are building humans? So what if they’re all building humans? Let them keep building humans.

So I share in the complaint, but it turns out that by deciding on an action that just makes sense — finding a place where you can get tubs of plain old blocks, and declaring the matter settled — I have done something different from what the aggravated feminists would do about it. Which is, of course, to say I have angered them again. Oh, dear.

We seem to be recognizing the same problem but looking at it in two different ways. To me, it’s like: I cannot stand the taste of Starbucks Pike Place coffee, which the coffee franchise is pushing very hard. If I walk in and order a “Venti” of plain coffee, I get that awful stuff that tastes like McDonald’s coffee unless I take the time to spec. So feminists wandering into Toys R Us and finding an anemic selection of toys for their girls, find sympathy in me…in fact, a lot of sympathy…but it’s like anything else, the way I see it. Retail and Internet. With retail you can have it today after you burn a little bit of gas. You don’t have to pay for shipping, but you pony up, oh, maybe sixty percent more…and your selection is limited. So you’re not happy with the selection; to the browser we go. Just like sneakers and razor blades. Simple.

Okay, get ready to be creeped out. Sitting down?

That is not the problem at all, you’ll see I was told in no uncertain terms.

The feminist issue, Morgan K Freeberg…is the message this type of marketing sends out to people, especially the young girls being targeted by it. It reinforces the old, stifling stereotype of girls being nothing more than pink, passive and pretty. This is what girls get to aspire to, this is what we are told to aim for.

Holy shit. The Wall Street Journal column, linked above, includes a passing reference to mothers who see another side to it…and feminists, true to form, seem blissfully unaware of it:

But another mother with two daughters said that when she saw the link she was thrilled, knowing instantly that her girls would love it. She said that even her tomboy daughter loves to play with girly things, and she said she thinks there haven’t been enough of those in the Lego product lines.

“I see nothing wrong with sets being targeted to girls, and the parents who are so outraged by the issue seem to be blind to the fact that no matter how hard we try to push gender-neutral things on our kids, they eventually get drawn to ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ toys,” she said. “It’s typical, it’s healthy, it’s expected.”

Indeed, most of us grew up in Barbie’s slightly warped world, and we turned out just fine. We’re smarter than any marketing campaign and kids today are even savvier.

Here and there you’ll find some comments from mothers-of-girls who share this common desire and in some cases the common complaint: They want their girls to play with toys that are conspicuously identifiable as girls’ toys. They like the pretty-in-pink stuff. And while my authority to speak on this is sharply limited, since I’m not in this crowd, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that much of the reason for the moms liking it is purely practical. Just as the excerpt above indicates. They are liking it because the daughters are liking it.

Lots of girls like pink things. More than a few have come up with a theme for the childhood bedroom involving a favorite color, some red, some violet, and — come on, let’s face it — a tub full of blue and yellow and white Lego blocks wouldn’t fit in. I could see how the lack of choice would generate a complaint, or at the very least, a desire.

It appears that consumer-driven demand, and supply that fulfills it or provides a new option that services it, is the source of the feminist ire.

They are not complaining about lack of choice. They are complaining about the presence of it.

New Costume This ties in to that other observation I made about the weird, strange people who have long been obsessed with sticking Wonder Woman in long pants. Just like Wonder Woman in a skimpy costume: A product is offered. A great hue and cry emerges about “messages” that are sent out by means of this product offering…and a media maelstrom swirls around some silly issue that really doesn’t matter.

The noisiest among the opinionated are allowed to pretend they are crusading for choice, when they are in fact opposed to the choice. They want the choice removed and that is what they are all about. They want everything done their way. They want the next generation to learn to recognize the world in a way of their choosing. The noisy opinionated people, that is, not the parents. They don’t want it left up to the parents, and they don’t want it left up to the children either. They want to decide this.

And their objection is to the contrast. They say if Batman and Superman ran around sans capes in little shorty wrestler’s outfits, they won’t be so upset about WW’s tiny costume. And I believe them. Bare legs and a rip-away bustier is not what gets them all piqued; they want the gender distinction to be erased. Thus it is with the pink Lego sets. Pink is not the problem, the problem is that there is something special and unique about girls.

So they object not to the girly attributes, like a skimpy but iconic super-heroine costume or a pink plastic toy, rather, the higher level of concern which is the ability of the consumer to select these attributes if they are desired, thus acknowledging there is a difference between girls and boys. But there is yet another even higher level of concern they have: If the choice is to be made available, so that it can be acknowledged that the two sexes are not the same, then who is going to make it? Consider how the feminists feel about their own movement taking charge of the “messaging” to little girls, that there is something special, unique and appealing about being female. They actually do that quite a lot, and it’s plain to see they’ve got no problem with it. Therefore, I conclude, their area of concern must be that they want the right people doing it. Parents are not to be trusted. In their world, girls are remarkably different from boys, since you cannot make boys unsympathetic and inferior without establishing a difference. But they want direct control over the critical task of defining what that difference is.

The irony is: For the nearly fifty years this crusade has been taking place now, what the feminist movement touches, it destroys. Back in the day, everyone loved watching Wonder Woman and it wasn’t just because the guys liked watching Lynda Carter’s boobs and legs. It was cheesy, stupid, funny and fun. Those days are long gone now, and it isn’t because Wonder Woman’s costume covers up more, it’s because the feminists have messed with it and there’s nothing fun about it. The same is true of Legos. The product is going to end up completely destroyed because of this little crusade going on, the manufacturer of the toy is going to come out of it looking rather rode-hard-and-put-away-wet. Nobody anywhere is going to be enlightened about a damn thing anywhere, other than that feminists are mean, inflexible and nasty. And just leave the girl stuff alone from now on, okay? Not worth the trouble. Go back to marketing the toy for boys. Retire Wonder Woman, let Superman, Batman and Green Lantern make all the money.

The stated goal’s exact opposite is achieved. Something will get wrecked, completely, and the feminist movement will look down, say “Our work here is done,” and walk off somewhere to lurk, waiting to be offended by something again. Not waiting long.

It has been ever thus.

Thing I Know #322. Feminism exists today to make women disposable; it attempts this by confining their energies to those specialties a man could pursue just as capably.

It appears that consumer-driven demand, and supply that fulfills it or provides a new option that services it, is the source of the feminist ire.

Replace “feminist” with “leftist” in that sentence and you’ve described the entirety of liberalism for the past thirty or forty years.

In the great used record store of life, leftists are the intense young fellows in the emo glasses behind the counter who refuse to sell you CDs of bands that suck. You shouldn’t like such and such group, their music isn’t important; you should like this band over here, and we’re going to limit your choices until you do (or until you give up, which is secretly the point of lots of leftist social agitation, leftists being the kind of elitists who would make the Hapsburgs blush).

I do wonder if this is peculiar to American leftism, though — this insistence that all our pleasures (if that’s the word) necessarily send “messages.” Old-school leftists were very concerned about the proper proletarian content of high art — all those paintings of smiling farmers and factory workers — but most of the stuff our liberals complain about would’ve been lumped into “capitalist decadence” and ignored (to be dealt with later, in toto, by The Revolution). European socialists were (are) dour, unpleasant, toothache-y people, but I don’t think even they wanted to outlaw street mimes and soccer matches. It’s only after Americans got ahold of it that you start seeing obnoxious lifestyle liberalism — politically correct tv shows and kids’ dolls and rock bands and toilet paper.

[And feminism is a quintessentially American movement, let us note.]
- Severian | 01/07/2012 @ 08:51
Yesterday, I drove past an elementary school playground at recess time.

At a passing glance, more than a third of the kids wear wearing pink. I’m betting that none of them were boys.

I’m also betting, based on my limited experience with two nieces, that they were not stuffed, kicking and screaming, into pink outfits they hated.

They, not their moms, chose that color scheme.

I’d love to know why girls prefer pinkish schemes, and why boys go for strong primaries. But the preference is there, and it starts early.
- djmoore | 01/07/2012 @ 09:36
You know how I could have made this MUCH shorter: Lego engaged in “the most extensively researched product launch that we’ve ever had in 80 years” to make their product appealing to girls, and the feminists are telling them — don’t ever, EVER do that again.

The rest of the story just kinda writes itself.
- mkfreeberg | 01/07/2012 @ 09:41
Wait… “extensively researched?” But isn’t the left all about Teh Science (TM)???!!!??? 🙂

I kid, I kid! Research into human behavior isn’t allowed, because it pretty starkly reveals that people have innate preferences…..which makes socialism impossible.

Leftism: Forcing us to pretend to live in air castles since 1848.
- Severian | 01/07/2012 @ 10:29
I’d love to know why girls prefer pinkish schemes, and why boys go for strong primaries. But the preference is there, and it starts early.

I once heard that it goes back to the Middle Ages, to a time when people were more superstitious than today. Boys, for some reason, were thought to be more vulnerable to corruption and attack by demonic forces, so to ward off these spirits, they were dressed in blue clothing – the color of the sky. Celestial objects like clouds, stars, the sun, and the moon were associated with heaven…the opposite of the dwelling place of evil.

Girls were put in pink, red and purple because it reminded the women of pretty flowers that bloomed in spring.
- cylarz | 01/08/2012 @ 00:04
Hey, those “special” Lego accessory bits weren’t colored in China were they?
Growing up, I always thought that girls liked pink stuff because they thought they wouldn’t end up having to share such “toys” with at least half of the other contenders for adult approval.

Not sure how long ago (last five years or so) when those members of the toy manufacturing industry named the cardboard box as the “best toy of the year”.
I think it was the very next year when “A Stick” was so honored.

“This is promoting the stereotypical blah blah blah by “society” that girls SHOULD be blah blah blah….”
Um, no, actually YOU are sweetie.
- CaptDMO | 01/08/2012 @ 21:17
Good Lord! I wonder where the line should be dawn?

No more sparkly items? No more baby dolls, ribbons, bows, or miniature purses?

You would think they would be happy yo see little girls BUILD towns vs just ride through them on their Magic Pony.

The feminist movement needs to just acknowledge their win, dry up and go away. Since I was a little girl(and that was a long while ago!), I have had the freedom to be girly, be a tomboy, exel in math and science, and in homeec, marry or stay single, have kids or not, whether married or single, get paid the same as men for similar work, and once in a while remind some doof in a hardware store, that I can do things, OR, in the same store, act like idiot and get someone else to do it. We have every freaking thing we could possibly want and now they want to remove pink leggos?

Bring me my Magic Pony. This world is too much. I am always grateful that most men are smart enough to know we are not all whacked.
- tgoon | 01/09/2012 @ 16:20
[…] genderphobia, to describe our culture’s irrational fear of calling the sexes what they are. Morgan Freeburg, at the blog that nobody (but me) reads, is also trying desperately to grasp what it is that has […]
- Feminists Outraged Over Girly Legos! Why? | 01/11/2012 @ 15:42

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