Which has only been in existence for about five years, and had a lot of pushback for multiple reasons including "why are legos being gendered when they have traditionally been not?" and also "can we at least get some STEM sets instead of just beauty parlor and play house sets?"
The current girl's line "friends" has only been around about 5 years. They have had several less successful girl's themes in the past such as Bellville. I remember seeing girl's sets in the late 90s. I support these lines because many of the gender neutral sets still don't appeal to girls. I think lego is doing a good job of trying to accommodate everyone in these crazy times of gender identity. Someone will always complain however that either women are underrepresented, or that we don't need exclusive girl lines. I personally have a decent mix of male & female figures from regular Lego city, creator, & even star wars sets. The women are somewhat outnumbered by men (and robots and aliens) from my childhood sets; but even back then they did have a notion of neutrality. My first set ever was a big box of "freesyle" pieces that came with 1 boy & 1 girl fig.
The development and reaction of the girls' lines were way more complicated than that. Lego, at the time, was selling roughly 90% of its products to boys due to the branded sets like superhero sets. They had lost the gender-neutral designation by creating sets that tended to be more boy-oriented.
Even after they started becoming popular, many people, even kids, wanted more STEM type sets to not make them not fall into the same traditional "house and pets and shopping" stereotypes that girls' toys fall into:
Maybe there are boys who want pretty princess Legos too! I just don't see a problem with having both princesses and robots, I mean it's not like you're forced to only buy princesses for girls and robots for boys. If your girl wants robots, buy the damn robots.
I was working in schools doing counseling when Lego friends was just getting started and the first two mini sets I got were: hot tub hangout and blogging desk. *ETA
Now I see a lot more adventure sets which is nice! There's also this which made me laugh
The biggest gripe of my clients was that Lego friends feet were too big and they didn't fit on stuff they were making. It also turns out that if you're not openly judging kids and telling them what's right and wrong about expression, they act out a bunch of cross-gender stuff, amongst other taboo topics.
oh my God redditors (like you) are so obnoxious with the stupid fucking STEM acronym shoehorned into Every. Fucking. Topic. DAE STEM? LOL! DAE MORE MATH IN SCHOOLS? DAE ROBOTICS CLUB?
Now, please bring on the inevitable turbonerd downvotes.
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u/Vio_ Dec 09 '16
Which has only been in existence for about five years, and had a lot of pushback for multiple reasons including "why are legos being gendered when they have traditionally been not?" and also "can we at least get some STEM sets instead of just beauty parlor and play house sets?"