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.
Very interesting to me that T. S. Eliot is often quoted as saying “Good poets borrow. Great poets steal.” When in fact what he actually said was “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” Which of course has a completely different meaning, less “All the greats plagiarize,” and more “Completely original ideas are a fantasy; the originality lies in how you weave an idea that has been previously woven differently.”
Today’s lesson isn’t on how to write, it’s about how to accept the fact that your story will never be viewed as 100% original. To give this lesson, I’m going to tell you about how I almost stopped writing.
When I was a little kid, I loved the idea of characters who could control the elements. I even spent time figuring out what nature’s “true” elements were and one of the first stories that I ever thought up was about a group of girls with magical powers who had to save another planet.
Then this was published:
For those of you unfamiliar with W.I.T.C.H., it’s a series about girls with magical powers who control the elements and have to save another planet. It was pretty popular in the early 2000’s and they even made a TV show based on the books.
But that all happened well after this story reached its end, so let’s get back to little me, who picked the book up on a whim and was heartbroken by the time she’d finished it. Someone had stolen my idea and got a book about it published. Now I’d never be able to write my story. What was the point? It would just be called a knock off even though I’d had my idea long before W.I.T.C.H. had hit bookshelves across America.
I won’t bore you with the soul searching and sadness experienced by little me. Instead, I’ll just get straight to the point. Straight to the lesson I had to learn to be a good writer: it doesn’t matter if people view your work as original. What matters is whether or not they enjoy it.
Every book you’ll ever read, every show you’ll ever watch, every movie you’ll sit and gasp at will remind someone, somewhere of another story. Any new magical school books or books about young wizards will be likened to Harry Potter for years to come. The new Pixar movie, Inside Out, has already been compared to the 90’s TV show Herman’s Head for having a similar idea about personifying a person’s emotions and let’s not even mention the dozen or more reboots and based-on-a-book films that we’ve seen in the past few years and will see in the not-to-distant future.
There are 7 billion people on the planet. At least one of them has thought up a story that’s similar to the one you’re writing right now. A fact that was true even when the earth’s population was a mere fraction of that number as evidenced by the fact that so many different cultures have fairytales and folklore that are shockingly similar. But you know what? I bet that your story has something that sets it apart from the others. I bet that you have some clever line that will make people laugh or maybe you’ve got a character that people will connect to in a way that they don’t in the other versions. Or maybe your uniqueness comes from the setting, you’re telling Cinderella in steampunk or Star Wars in the old west.
What I’m getting here is that unique is more important than original. Take 5 stories and blend them together and you’ll get something that the world’s never seen before, even though it’s seen all the base ideas 1000 times.
So don’t give up when you see similarities in other stories. Instead, let those things inspire you to make your story even better than it was before so that it shines, not for being the only one of its kind, but for being one of the best.
And, hey, if you really do have an idea that’s 100% original, definitely get that thing published. The world hasn’t had one of those in millennia.
“If you mean the man who really invented, in other words, originated and discovered — not merely improved what had already been invented by others, then without a shade of doubt, Nikola Tesla is the world’s greatest inventor, not only at present, but in all history.“
“Tesla has secured more than one hundred patents on inventions, many of which have proved revolutionary. Science accords to him over 75 original discoveries, not mere mechanical improvements. Tesla is an originator in the sense that Faraday was an originator. Like the latter he is a pioneer blazing the trail; aside from this he is a discoverer of the very highest order.”
“Ninety percent of the entire electrical industry pays tribute to his genius. All electrical machinery using or generating alternating current is due to Tesla. High tension current transmission without which our long distance trolley cars, our electrified lines, our subways would be impossible, are due to the genius of Tesla. The Tesla Induction Motor, the Tesla Rotary Converter, the Tesla Phase System of Power Transmission, the Tesla Steam and Gas Turbine, the Tesla Coil, and the Oscillation Transformer are perhaps his better known inventions.“
“Why the world at large does not know Tesla, it is answered best by stating that he has committed the unpardonable crime of not having a permanent press agent to shout his greatness from the housetops. Then, too, most of Tesla’s inventions, at least to the public mind, are more or less intangible on account of the fact that they are very technical and, therefore, do not catch the popular imagination, as, for instance, wireless, the X-ray, the airplane, or the telephone.”
”NIKOLA TESLA, in the opinion of authorities, today is conceded to be the greatest inventor of all times. Tesla has more original inventions to his credit than any other man in history. He is considered greater than Archimedes, Faraday, or Edison. His basic, as well as revolutionary, discoveries for sheer audacity have no equal in the annals of the world. His master mind is easily one of the seven wonders of the intellectual world.”
–Hugo Gernsback
“Nikola Tesla and His Inventions — An Announcement.” Electrical Experimenter, January, 1919.
(Hugo was an inventor, writer, editor, and magazine publisher, best known for publications including the first science fiction magazine.)
In this episode Aleen talks to Rosemary Orchard and we discuss getting over barriers to creativity, not holding yourself to impossible standards, and establishing a writing ritual that works for you.
In my recent post about communities I talked about the importance of Finding Your Tribe. In this episode we discuss this in the context of the XOXO Festival and why creating intentional community spaces at conferences like this one matters. Also ways to get to conferences even if you don’t have the funds to do so.
Let me know what you think of this one in the comments!
In the past year I’ve had many occasions to think about the value of community and having a close-knit cadre of friends you can count on. It’s key to my mental health, my creativity, and everything that’s important to me. And that’s what this episode is about.
For about a year and a half I’ve been part of an artist’s collective with five other amazing woman who inspire me with their creativity…
I don’t mean the well of my imagination. That overfloweth. No, I mean the well of my drafts. There aren’t nearly enough pictures coming in nearly fast enough to keep up the pace I’d like to keep, which is mildly frustrating, to say the least.
So I’d like to try something out. It might fall flat on its face, but that would be amusing enough in its own right. What I’d like to try is to extend the offer to you, dear reader, to offer a submission or two.
Previously, I didn’t see a huge amount of sense in a submission on a tumblr. I mean, surely you could post it on your own stream, and then merely have it reblogged? Anonymity is a factor, I accept, and the size of the audience you’re reaching, but still, there was something that didn’t sit right with me.
But then, merely reblogging never sat right with me. I’ve always maintained that I want to add some original content to whatever I post, and so far that’s been almost exclusively been in text.
So why should submissions be any different?
Here’s my offer: If I recieve any submissions, ever, then they’ll recieve the same treatment. I’ll see what part of the picture sparks my imagination, and caption it appropriately. It might be some specific idea about D/s that I think the picture provides a good example of, or a quick scene that’s spurred from what I see. Or anything, really.
That’s the incentive I’m offering.
If you do want to submit something, do let me know whether you’d rather remain anonymous or not, and I’ll credit you appropriately.
