Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.
The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.
On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention.
How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the conceptof algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.
I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.
She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did.
I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.
Pink Gears
Lego makes no pink gears.
I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?
I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.
This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork.
In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:
On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.
On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.
For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement.
You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money.
Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Breaking Patterns
I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.
The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it.
I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them.
And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.
People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial.
It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay.
Market Mercenary
You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.
Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.
As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum.
This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else.
The worst thing you can do is nothing new. Remember that the next time you make your gears gray.
Still working on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing! But I’m reblogging this old post since the holidays are coming up, and I (along with probably many others) have been doing this same gift-buying dance yet again.
Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!
A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’twant something that looks like a motorcycle.
Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve.
In short: if you make those pink gears, and you love and understand gears enough to do it well, you’re bound to find an audience. And while some literalpink gears would no doubt bring more women into tech fields than a Barbie doll holding a laptop will, this advice extrapolates to all manner of absences in the market. If you can take something out there and make it just a little different according to your personal criticisms or a demand you see, you can potentially reach a lot of people who share your critique.
I get the sense you’re too eager to dismiss intent when intent is a fundamental component to the legal system in USA. Check youtube for a video titled “Rep. Gowdy Questions FBI Director Comey ”, it should be under 7 minutes long, but the lawmaker explains why intent has to be examined as evidence. In a different video, he brings up the frequency in ignorance being used as an excuse to avoid responsibility (“I didn’t KNOW I wasn’t supposed to kill these people!”).
I didn’t mean for what I was saying to extrapolate to issues of legal persecution! You weren’t the only one to criticize what I was saying from a legal perspective, though. I guess I should’ve made it more clear in my post that I was talking about political discourse and argument - especially if I’m going to just be linking the previous posts rather than leaving the massive reply-tower.
When you’re dealing with crime and punishment, you have a transgression that has alreadyoccurred and are trying to either prevent it from happening again or transfer resources in a way that makes up for the harm (Lawpixels’ reblog outlines this very well, and this response is sort of defending myself to them too). The style and magnitude of correctional action required to dissuade repeat incidents is going to vastly differ between someone who, say, commits murder for revenge versus someone who commits manslaughter by rolling a bowling ball off their balcony, meaning intent plays a large role in determining what response is necessary.
When you’re talking about politics, though, there is no criminal behavior occurring. Someone is engaging in an ongoing action (or inaction) that you believe is causing harm, and - since what they’re doing isn’t wrong in any legal sense - your goal is essentially to convince them that it’s a bad idea. I’d say it’s more equatable to trying to convince a business partner that they’re taking the company in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter whether they’re intentionally trying to elicit the action’s outcome or if they just haven’t thought it through: in both cases, you’re still following the same structure of explaining “this is what will happen” and “this is why it’s bad”.
I can offer you a very good reason to differentiate between them: What you’d need to do to change their behavior is wildly different. […]
That’s sort of the belief I am calling into question, though, because I’m inclined to say that the difference in tactics required to dissuade someone from an action holds little relation to the line we draw between “reckless allies” and “scheming enemies”. Sometimes there are people who directly act against us, yet are driven by simple misinformation and biased experiences that can be easily addressed. Other times, there are people who are trying their hardest to help us, yet adamantly support counterproductive tactics and will take any criticism of their approaches as a personal affront. It’s a very person-by-person thing, where everyone is inadvertently causing us problems for their own unique reasons, independently of whether or not they see themselves as “on our side”.
At best, someone who shares more views with you mightbe easier to persuade, since you may only need to convince them that their actions will lead to a particular outcome, as opposed to also convincing them that outcome is actually bad. However, consider that the inverse is also true: someone who is actively opposing you already knows they are facilitating a particular outcome, and all you have to do is convince them that it’s bad. Even that division isn’t consistent, though, as there are also people “on your side” who have very different views about what constitutes a positive/negative outcome, as well as people “against you” who share your concept of right/wrong but are mistaken about what sort of outcome their tactics will lead to.
I’m not claiming that there is a single tactic that will dissuade someone from a harmful action regardless of whether they are your “on your side” or “against you”, but rather, that the tactics required for any specific individual hold little if any correlation with that individual’s supposed allegiance.
The way I see it, far too many people simplify allegiance into a rigid binary of “enemies” who are trying to harm us deserve our vitriol and “allies” who are trying to help us deserve our endorsement. Not only does this view let false-flaggers and other harmful elements within a person’s group operate unhindered, but it removes the person’s ability to win over even the easiest-to-convert opponents. The entire ally/enemy dichotomy as we currently have it feels almost like a trap: we will defend counterproductive allies because they’re "well-intentioned” or “on our side”, and forego benign communication with opponents because they’re “trying to hurt us” or “are the enemy”. Or, keeping with what I’m saying, it might be more accurate to say this mentality isa trap, regardless of the believer’s intent.
That’s not to say that dissuading someone from harmful action is always easy. Like you got at in your reblog, there are some people who see outright harming others as a viable solution to problems, and there’s probably some deep-seated and hard-to-address issue that leads them to that belief. But this is one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to ignore whether someone is “on your side” or “against you”: these labels don’t really denote how easily someone can be won over or what sort of tactics will work on them the best. In many cases, a person who actively opposes you is doing so based on simple misinformation and you can spur a total flip with little effort at all (especially when it comes to issues of bigotry, in my experience). Other times, a person who genuinely thinks they are serving your best interests is going to be the most difficult, damaging, and steadfast opponent you ever face. As far as I can see, there’s really no reason to even recognize declared allegiance as a concept. The determinant of allegiance should be what outcomes an individual facilitates.
Yesterday someone linked me to an old Cryptome post essentially outlining tactics for stopping activists without ever being recognized as their enemy. I have no idea who wrote it, or how often these tactics are actually employed, but the whole thing is a pretty interesting read in that every tactic it describes is something we’d readily dismiss as unconscious or non-directed behavior. This part in particular, though, really hits home the point about allegiance:
In some situations, to get control, the agent will tell the activist:
“You’re dividing the movement.”
This invites guilty feelings. Many people can be controlled by guilt. The agents begin relationships with activists behind a well-developed mask of “dedication to the cause.” […] It’s amazing how far agents can go in manipulating an activist because the activist will constantly make excuses for the agent who regularly declares their dedication to the cause. Even if they do, occasionally, suspect the agent, they will pull the wool over their own eyes by rationalizing: “they did that unconsciously… they didn’t really mean it… I can help them by being forgiving and accepting ” and so on and so forth.
(emphasis mine)
I’m not saying that we should be constantly suspicious that everyone is a false-flagging agent trying to ram our political groups and movements in the ground. Rather, I’m saying that we should avoid creating constructs that outright facilitate these sort of tactics. People who cause problems while claiming to share our allegiances should be viewed in the same light as those openly against us, and subject to the exact same dissuasion tactics we would show them if they had declared themselves our opponent.
That’s not to say they should be treated with malice, of course - unless you genuinely believe that to be an effective tactic in dissuading problematic behavior. I’d personally say it’s not.
“I don’t see any reason to differentiate between the scheming people…and the purely uniformed” Are you saying we shouldn’t differentiate between intentional and reckless action? It’s the difference between acting to bring about a specific consequence and acting without knowledge or care of what may happen.
I guess it’s a kind of strange position to take, but yeah. That’s basically what I’m saying.
If two people are engaging in the exact same action, one out of carelessness/apathy and the other out of a genuine desire to bring about that action’s consequences, they’re stillboth facilitating the same outcome. Neither person is causing more or less harm than the other. Even the tactics for dissuading them are basically the same: you try to convince them that their actions are bringing about an outcome they will not like. The exact arguments needed to convince them of this might vary, but they vary between everyone.
The distinction between “scheming” and “reckless” makes it seem as though problems are somehow less serious when they’re caused by well-intentioned people who aren’t actively trying to cause problems, which isn’t at all true: a problem’s seriousness pivots on the magnitude of the negative outcomes it causes. Worse yet, this division makes it seem as though scheming people aren’t well-intentioned - treating it like they’re driven purely by a desire to cause us harm rather than because they think their actions will bring about better outcomes - a mindview which inhibits our ability to understand and influence them. At least from my perspective, the difference between these two groups seems utterly illusory, and feels like it exists solely to inhibit our ability to solve problems.
It’s scary, I think, that we have concepts of “on our side” and “against us” that are separate from “helping us” and “causing us problems”. I guess a lot of people would say that it is cruel to treat someone as your enemy for purely accidental behavior, but I take that more as a sign that our treatment of perceived “enemies” is overly hostile, probably to the point of being counterproductive. In the end, “enemies” are just people performing actions you disagree with, no different from perceived “allies” who do the same. And no matter what label you’ve given them, you should be responding with whatever tactic is most likely to stop the harmful behavior.
