Little girls are sick of the girl hate, too. Gimme my pink legos!

3 Apr

Trigger warning:  IMAGE OF ANDREA DWORKIN FOLLOWS

Hey, guess what?  In the interests of supporting ALL the little wannabe engineers and architects and builders and makers around the world, Lego has designed some blocks JUST FOR GIRLS.  I mean, boys can play with them, of course, but Lego has decided that little girls and their interests are just as valuable and interesting and worthy as little boy’s interests.

pink legos

I know.  Outrageous!  What, little girls are just as deserving of being acknowledged as little boys?  And not just acknowledged, but actually applauded?

Oh, come on now.  It’s not that controversial. There have been oodles of campaigns designed to promote the interests of girls, specifically.  Here are just five.  You can find more. Lots more. It’s pretty easy.  It’s not like the campaigns to support and empower girls are hidden behind the ones to support boys.  Those don’t exist.

girls

girls 5

girls 4

girls 3

girls 2

So what’s the problem with Legos for girls?  Let’s take a look shall we?  Here is Jake Simons, writing for the Telegraph.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jakewallissimons/100210036/pink-lego-is-an-abomination-end-this-gender-fascism/

Pink Lego is an abomination. End this gender fascism

By Jake Wallis Simons

lego

Take a look at the picture above. This is a Lego advertisement from the early Eighties, which has recently been circulating online. Beautiful, isn’t it? A cheeky-looking child wearing scruffy child’s clothes, proudly clutching a Lego creation which would resist any attempt at interpretation by an adult. The fact that the child happens to be a girl is neither here nor there.

She’s not wearing a “child’s” clothes.  She’s wearing a “boy’s” clothes.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course.  Maybe she has a couple of older brothers and hand me down boy clothes are just the way it goes in her life.  That’s fine.

In case it’s too small to be legible, the first paragraph of copy reads as follows: “Have you ever seen anything like it? not just what she’s made, but how proud it’s made her. It’s a look you’ll see whenever children build something all by themselves. No matter what they’ve created.”

No matter what they’ve created.  Let’s keep that in mind.  And watch how much it DOES matter what they create.

Contrast this with Lego Friends, the new range of Lego aimed specifically at girls, which celebrates its first birthday this year. It features the heavy usage of the colour pink; figures which have been moulded to look more like real women than the traditional, blocky Lego people; a large collection of cars, home interiors and pets; and almost zero opportunity for the imagination to play a role. Every model is so over-styled and prescriptive that it is nigh on impossible to be creative. The words “crying” and “shame” spring to mind.

Right.  As opposed to Hagrid’s Hut.  Note that most of his hut is a kitchen!

hagrid

Or this airport.

airport

Or Indiana Jones’ lair.

indy

Or Jack Sparrow’s ship.

sparrow

Or the Millennium Falcon.

falcon

When Legos are styled for boys, or geeky girls, that’s okay.  But when they’re styled for girls specifically, that reduces the role of imagination to zero.  I guess boys can imagine themselves Han Solo pretty easily, but when girls imagine themselves as a specific character, they’re just brain-dead simpletons?

Hey, thanks for the love, Jake.

To bring the contrast into sharper relief, it may be necessary – apologies in advance – to watch the Lego Friends advertisement below. This will likely be the most excruciating 45 seconds of television you will endure this year. (“I just finished decorating my house! Time to chill with the girls at the beauty shop! Emma is styled and ready to go!” “Cupcakes are ready!”) But I implore you: grit your teeth and watch it. Then take another look at the Eighties advertisement at the top of the piece. Where did it all go wrong?

 

It went wrong with your assumption that whatever girls do just automatically sucks ass, unless it’s something boys do, too.

There are two problems with that assumption, Jakey boy.  First of all, it’s some pretty specific characteristics you’re railing against.  Very specifically feminine ones.  Taking care of a home? Caring about your appearance? Home cooking? Why, it’s almost as if the girls feel like itty bitty wives and mothers.  For shame!  Let’s beat those instincts out of them.  Or at least heap SHAME upon the little slatterns.  Caring for others and cooking and looking nice!  What would Andrea Dworkin say?

dworkin

Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.

Andrea Dworkin

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/andrea_dworkin.html#v1geR3qGitb7uI2V.99

Secondly, you apparently haven’t played with a lot of Legos recently.  Indiana Jones has a frying pan and a coffee cup!  No really!  It’s true!  And bananas.  He cooks!  He eats!  He makes coffee!  He can even make coffee for a pink Lego girl!

frying pan

He might also bash you over the head with the frying pan, or Marianne will, or you might just have a nice chat and some fried apples.

marianne

All depends on your ……  imagination?

You probably think you’re gonna score some pussy coming out against those horrid pink girl legos, and who knows?  You might.  But in order to do so, you are denying yourself (and by extension, all other men) the acknowledgement of your own nurturing instincts and you are simultaneously shitting on the very women you hope to score for those exact same instincts!

Not sure how well that’s gonna work in the long run.  Boys cook. And drink coffee.  And take care of their appearance. Girls do, too.  That’s not gender fascism.  It’s life.  Kind of lovely, really.

coffee

Viewed as an isolated occurrence, this may not seem so bad. To people who do not have small children – and who do not have cause to spend time in toy shops, children’s clothes shops, and exposed to children’s television advertising – it might even appear trivial. But it is part of a powerful, cynical and hugely damaging trend that is exerting a profound influence on British childhood.

You got that right.  The main influence it’s exerting is that a girl’s natural instincts to care for others and for her home and to care about what she looks like are shameful and ugly and wrong and in need of correction.

Riddle me this, though, Jake.  If you’re going to holler for girls to ignore their desires to cook and care and nest and bring beauty to life, who exactly do you think is going to do those things?  If you succeed in teaching girls that their very natural instincts and desires are actually despicable chains the patriarchy has slung for the sole purposes of enslaving them, where do you think the next generation of children is going to come from?

Any parent will confirm that the vast majority of children’s products fall into two categories. There are those intended for boys, which tend towards masculine ideals but include a range of colours, themes and ideas. And there are those meant for girls, which are almost inevitably pink, sparkly, and related to princesses, mummies and daddies, beauty parlours or cuddly animals. As we have seen, this stark division was not part of the experience of childhood in previous decades. Both in terms of gender stereotyping and the belief in the imagination, we seem to have catastrophically regressed.

You’re a journalist?  Seriously?  It took me ten seconds to Google “top ten children’s toys” at Amazon.com.  Here’s the list:

LEGO Star Wars 9493: X-Wing Starfighter

Inflatable World Globe

15 X Mixed Colour Jet Bouncy Balls

Wooden Bead Bracelets Set of 5 for Children

The Creativity Hub Rory’s Story Cubes

Tomy Octopals Bath Toy

Scrabble Original Board Game

Syma 2nd Edition S107 S107G New Version Indoor Helicopter (Red)

Insect Lore Butterfly Garden

Bananagrams Game

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bestsellers-Toys-Games/zgbs/kids

You might be able to spin the X-Wing and the helicopter as boy toys and the bracelets as girl toys, but 7/10 are toys for both boys and girls.  I know that math can be tricky, Jake, but 7/10 is 70%.  That leaves 30% of the toys gendered.  Not quite the sweeping majority you claim.

Okay, maybe bouncy balls don’t require the full deployment of a child’s imagination (damn, they sure are fun though – JUST NOT IN THE HOUSE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD), but an inflatable globe?  Scrabble? Bananagrams? A butterfly garden? I’m not seeing this crisis in imagination you report.

butterfly

That’s not to say, of course, that there is anything wrong with princesses, mummies and daddies, and cuddly animals. There is nothing fundamentally objectionable about different genders having different roles, if this is what they choose. I wouldn’t complain if girls’ toys and clothing were generally more feminine, in the same way that boys’ stuff is generally more boyish. It is the oppressive uniformity of girls’ products that I resent, which – unless it is consciously and actively resisted by parents – swiftly brainwashes girls into the belief that if it’s not pink and sparkly, it’s taboo.

Oh bullshit. Monster High?

monster

Play-doh?

playdoh

Wreck it ralph?

wreck

Fijit?

fijit

There are plenty of toys for girls that aren’t sparkly and pink, but you know what, that’s beside the point.  If you’re finding oppressive uniformity, perhaps that’s because you’re only looking to confirm the bias you already hold against girls.  Open your mind, Jake.

In many shops, it is actually impossible to buy anything for a girl that is not pink. To wit: Lego Friends. Why on earth does Lego have to be gendered? For decades, the bricks alone were enough to fuel hours of imaginative play. In 2013, however, girls can either decorate their home, bake cupcakes, or get their hair done. That’s it. All this, added to sexualised clothing and make-up for young girls, amounts to nothing short of gender fascism. And it stinks.

Again, you’re a journalist?  Are you fucking kidding me?

Friends can build a treehouse.

treehouse

They can go quad biking.

quad

They can form a rockband.

rock

They can go jetskiing.

jetski

They can build robots in a science lab.

robots

Friends can do anything.  You know.  With a little …. Imagination?

Speaking of things that stink, so ubiquitous is this phenomenon that various campaign groups have sprung up, including Pink Stinks, founded in 2008 by two sisters in London, which believes that “all children – girls and boys – are affected by the ‘pinkification’ of girlhood”. The group has attracted worldwide support and has notched up many key victories, including the removal of an appalling pink globe, complete with mermaids, from the shelves of the Early Learning Centre. But their efforts have done little to stem the tide of pinkness which threatens to engulf all but the most independent-minded little girls.

What the fuck is wrong with pink?  Is it because pink is the quintessentially feminine color?  Is that what gets you so up in arms?  That girls might actually LOVE their femininity?  That they might actually LOVE themselves?

Buying shoes is a particular peeve. Try and buy a good pair of sturdy shoes for girls which can withstand heavy duty outdoor play. You’ll find it almost impossible. Clearly, somebody somewhere has decided that girls should be wearing shoes that will train them to be better ladies, not let them run about and get the most out of their years of childhood. As a society, we are doing little to challenge the idea that young girls must be fantasy-feminised, in preparation for the sexting and porn culture that awaits them when puberty approaches, or even before.

These are Pinky’s shoes that she wears every day at school.

boots

She is definitely my girl.  Sparkly combat boots!  It’s total and utter horsehit that you can’t find sturdy girl shoes.  I have two girls.  I have bought a shit ton of shoes.  I have never, ever had a problem finding sturdy shoes for my girls.

The principle argument that Lego, and companies like them, mount in favour of the pinkification of girls’ toys is that this stuff sells. When the Lego Friends range was introduced, sales jumped by 24 per cent in six months. In a market economy such as our own, surely this is a simple case of supply and demand? Isn’t Lego simply answering Freud’s question, “What does a woman want?” Doesn’t the profit prove it?

Little girls are getting sick of your grown-up “gender is socialized and if you don’t act like a boy you suck” bullshit?  No kidding!  You might want to consider just how retarded your argument IS when a five year old can see through it.

skeptical

No it jolly well does not. There is far more to this than meets the eye. The fact is that there is nothing inherently girlish about pink; this association has only been made over the last hundred years or so, and at no time so rigidly as today. Indeed, one American trade publication, issued in 1918, suggested that “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl”. At other times, pink was chosen for children with brown hair – from whatever gender – and blue for those with blonde.

Hey, look who finally figured out how to use Google!

It doesn’t matter WHAT color is associated with WHICH gender.  What matters is that gender is NOT a social construct and the feminist effort to make BOTH boys and girls feel rotten about their natural, deeply biological instincts is hurting both boys and girls. And for what?  So you can deny difference?  Pretend away what even a child can see? Why? What is the point?

We’ll get to that.

The overwhelming modern-day preference among girls for the colour pink speaks volumes about the manipulation of the consumer by the manufacturers to create a dependent, niche market, which can be exploited for commercial gain. The persistent reduction of girls’ ranges to a single colour, and a single vision of ultra-femininity, has created a whirlpool peer pressure and an overpoweringly magnetic suggestion of an ideal, which conspire to make girls believe that only pink is pretty. There is no facility made for a girl to use her imagination, or even to begin to think differently. Like it or not, the manufacturers are intentionally creating an addiction.

Except that all the evidence suggests just the opposite.  There are plenty of toys for girls that aren’t pink. A whole rainbow of colors.  And plenty of those toys aren’t ultra-feminine, but even if they were, SO WHAT? It’s the feminine part you hate, isn’t it, Jake?

Here’s my theory:  if Jake were to embrace the feminine as a biological imperative that most women possess in varying degrees, he would then have to consider the masculine, also a biological imperative that all men possess in varying degrees.

And he might come up short.

jake

Better to just hate BOTH ideas simultaneously.  That requires little introspection, zero trips to the gym to put on a little muscle mass, and you get to blame someone, too!

Little girls!

What a perfect target.

I actually don’t find Jake unappealing, but his strong aversion to the ultra-feminine suggests that his internal image of the masculine might be similarly “ultra”.  He’s a little off that ideal.

Nobody is more impressionable than a child. If parents are not vigilant, daughters are easily lost to an ad-man’s dreams. Again, I speak not as someone who necessarily objects to traditional conceptions of femininity, but someone who resents the way in which a narrow vision of the world is ceaselessly foisted upon my daughters in order to turn them into obedient little consumers. And I say this not from an anti-capitalist perspective, but from one that is in accordance with decent, some may say conservative, social values.

You know who’s more impressionable than a child?  A grown-up with a deep fear of not measuring up.  But that fear is YOUR fear.  Your daughter’s complete embrace of femininity may threaten your own sense that you are not quite so completely masculine, or perhaps not as masculine as you would like to be, or imagine yourself to be.

You have a few choices, though, Jake. Hit the gym, for one.  Put on some muscle.  Increase your testosterone. You will literally be more masculine.

gym

http://boldanddetermined.com/

Or stop worrying about it.  Little girls being feminine are no threat to you.  Despite very deeply ingrained, biologically based gendered characteristics, we exist on a continuum, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s okay to be beta.  If you’re happy, then just be happy.  And let others be happy, too.

A few weeks ago, I had the misfortune to visit a “soft play centre”. The establishment had a set of five or six “party rooms”, in which a rotation of birthday parties were taking place, each identical to the others. In one room, I saw a collection of about twenty little girls sitting at long tables eating crisps and jelly, vacant expressions on their faces. Every single one of them was dressed in an off-the-peg Disney princess dress, in various shades of pink. As I wrote at the time, it was like witnessing a battery farm for the cretins of the future.

A battery farm for the  cretins of the future.  And you are the father of daughters.  Your hatred of women is showing.  It’s not that surprising, really.  You probably consider yourself a feminist.  Consider also that in hating women, in hating the feminine, you are inadvertently hating yourself.

One does not exist without the other.  The entire point of feminism is to get women to hate themselves AND men. To hate the feminine AND the masculine.  To create a world of robotic, mindless, soulless, genderless drones.

It’s not new, is it?  Most radical social movements have had the same goals. Marxism. Socialism. Communism. Maoism.

stalin

The world is littered with the bones of millions who paid the price for a small group of elite to rule.

It is the responsibility of every decent-minded parent – indeed, every decent-minded person – to stand four-square against this pernicious, commercially motivated cultural trend. Pink is not pretty. It stinks.

Hating pink is hating girls.  Hating pink is hating the instinct to care.  Hating pink is hating a love for beauty.  Hating pink is hating the desire to nurture.  Hating pink is hating the longing for a safe home.  Hating pink is hating life.

cupcake

And that really stinks.

Lots of love,

JB

31 Responses to “Little girls are sick of the girl hate, too. Gimme my pink legos!”

  1. driversuz April 3, 2013 at 17:17 #

    Good analysis of a trite regurgitation of woman-hating feminist BS, and those tiny pink rifles almost make up for the picture of Dworkin! (Wouldn’t they make darling earrings?)

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  2. sqt April 3, 2013 at 18:20 #

    I would have LOVED pink legos as a kid. My daughter’s bedroom is an awesome shade of purple. I wouldn’t have picked it myself as a kid (I’m not that brave) but it looks fabulous with her blue and green lava lap and “Dr. Who” posters.

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  3. Pirran April 3, 2013 at 18:39 #

    “You have a few choices, though, Jake. Hit the gym, for one. Put on some muscle. Increase your testosterone. You will literally be more masculine.”

    HRT for men – good choice – he does seem to have the archetypal feminine chin of the testosterone deprived. All that’s missing is the neck-beard and beret. Depressing to find this in the (usually sensible) Telegraph. Sloppy, silly cultural relativism a la mode. Pick a frothy theme (pink, children’s TV, gender gaps) and pompously opine for a few paragraphs to enhance your urban chic.

    He’s taking a fair trashing in the comments section, though, including an eminently sensible response from Elizabeth Fraser:

    “My daughter has pink legos, she has orc legos, she has Harry Potter legos. Yesterday they had a big battle that ended in a party. Your child will play with toys in a way that works for them. It isn’t predicted by the colour of the toy.”

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  4. Nergal April 3, 2013 at 18:58 #

    Thanks for the trigger warning. I actually feel like finding Jesus,and then stomping him to death,whenever I view an image of Andrea Dworkin. If God made that thing,he is one diabolical son of a bitch.

    Although I know I’m about to really piss some people off,I have to kinda tentatively agree with Jake on the pink legos, but not for the reasons he states. I don’t give a rat’s ass about “socialized gender roles” or whatever. I just don’t understand what the fucking point is in trying to give blocks a gender,and I’m generally against shit that is manifestly without a purpose. I always hated the Lego “men” too because I thought the purpose of Legos was to build shit. I always assumed the Lego “people” WERE for the chicks. I’m not a woman,so I don’t know, was it impossible to build girly shit with Legos before they Barbified them?

    If women want to buy pink Legos it’d be pretty retarded for Lego not to sell them, I’m just wondering why a girl needs Legos in order to have a playset with little dolls in it. I feel the same way about all the Star Wars Lego shit and whatnot. It seems to me if you want dolls or action figures and some kind of little stage for them you should be buying dolls and action figures and little stages for them and not Lincoln Logs or Legos or something like that.

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  5. sqt April 3, 2013 at 19:44 #

    Oh no, gotta have the Lego men. My son would have a fit if he couldn’t have his Lego men to go with his Lego castles. He can’t really take his big Lego building with him when he visits his friends, but he can take his little men- and he does. Everywhere. I think they’re very practical because they have interchangeable parts (heads, clothes, etc..) and you can use one guy for multiple play structures. I love ’em.

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  6. lelnet April 3, 2013 at 20:01 #

    In his haste to make PC gender-war points, he missed the key difference between the two ads…the difference that really does point out why these suck, compared to Lego products from the 80s. (Because, of course, the modern day Lego products “for boys” suck just as hard. No PC gender-war story there, if you’re honest.)

    The whole point of Lego is supposed to be the open-endedness. They’re blocks. That stick together. You can make _anything_ out of them that can be assembled out of rectangles. This whole playset/model thing that’s taken over Lego in the last couple of decades has undermined most of the joy. (That girl in the ad? The first one, from when Legos were awesome? I’ll bet she had one kick-ass story about what she’d made. And would’ve been thrilled to tell anyone who’d listen, and indeed probably a number of people who didn’t especially want to listen. I dunno…she just looks like that kind of kid.)

    I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. (Well, no…I happen to know for an irrefutable fact that it isn’t _just_ me…but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t crazy.) But it just seems sad, to me, when the stories that go with kids toys are over-supplied by grown-ups (a phenomenon already well underway in my own childhood, and against which Lego was our primary and most effective weapon). Whether or not it’s done in service of, in opposition to, or completely seperate from our collective insanity about sex roles in society.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. judgybitch April 3, 2013 at 20:28 #

    They only start out that way, though. A few years ago, my kids were Harry Potter crazy, and their uncles supplied them with pretty much every Harry Potter Lego set on the market.

    Then they went through a Star Wars phase. And the uncles rucked up again.

    Now their favorite set is the Zombie Apocalypse Pyramid. You won’t find that in stores, because they built it themselves.

    Ripped apart all the little guys and put them back together again with shark heads and Assassin droid arms and flippers and the giant, multi-colored pyramid has stalls for the TaunTaun and Aragog, who gained a few more legs.

    The Knight Bus is armed with an Atgar 1.4 FD P-Tower laser cannon. commanded by Hermione, who has a repeating blaster and whip at her disposal.

    The fact that the legos come in sets hasn’t stopped my kids from adapting them to suit their own imaginations. The lego easter bunny shows up in the weirdest, and most hilarious places.

    Darth Vader is currently sporting bunny ears and baking a pie on the back of deck of the Burrow.

    🙂

    Like

  8. Sherlock April 3, 2013 at 20:39 #

    He looks very similar to other feminist men. It seems to be a very strong pattern that they are rather feminine and they often have that foggy look he has.

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  9. Alex April 3, 2013 at 21:14 #

    i think his main point is that having too mcuh to do with feminism is kinda killing the creativity part. i know when i was younger, you take could take just about any lego person and work them into just about anything you built. but with a set styled too much to be feminine, it just kills that aspect. if you never left the feminine sphere, it’s fine, but you can’t put lego barbie anywhere other than places meant for lego barbie without going way off the fucking wall. which is a problem when all there is happens to be lego barbie

    Like

  10. Renee April 3, 2013 at 22:24 #

    I’m on the fence on this one JB.

    I can see with what you’re saying and I agree; the feminine isn’t bad or inferior. I’m so sick and tired of the insinuation that everything masculine is superior.

    At the same time though, I agree with Jake. Why “genderize” Legos? It bothers me a little that the marketers felt like they had to make Legos pink and outright “girly” in order to attract girls. Not to mention less complicated when it comes to the set-up, going by the appearances. I mean if they wanted to attract female audiences, why not include girls in their ads along with the boys?

    I don’t know. Being someone who played with Legos a little bit as a kid, I didn’t need them to be pink and girly in order for me to be interested in playing with them. It was fun as they were.

    Like

  11. Mark April 3, 2013 at 23:49 #

    I think he’s got it backwards. The range of colors is broader for girls than it is for boys, not narrower. Girls’ clothes can pink or yellow or purple, or blue, green, black, gray, anything pretty much. I’ve never in my life heard of a girl being so much as looked at funny for wearing gray. It is boys who are often restricted from pink, purple, yellow. The prevalence of pink is not oppression, not in the least; it is preference. Children do have preferences. That female preference for pink is not in itself a ‘natural’ tendency is irrelevant. But the occurrence of social trends in preference is inevitable, no amount of reeducation will change that. Such trends in preference differences along gender, cultural, or other lines occur spontaneously as a result of social interaction or group identity formation. Only the most totalitarian kind of system could prevent different groups from developing different aesthetic preferences.

    Oh, and somebody owes me a new laptop and compensation for my lost lunch for posting that picture of Dworkin. The trigger warning didn’t help; my stomach just isn’t strong enough. I can only hope that that wretched creature be placed by history alongside Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Chamberlain as one of the 20th centuries great propagators of bigotry.

    Like

  12. Teresa Dietzinger April 3, 2013 at 23:50 #

    Didn’t Anita Sarkeesian already pound this subject into the ground months ago in one of her videos? Jake’s tirade against Legos isn’t just inane, it’s also unoriginal!

    Like

  13. Moses April 4, 2013 at 01:35 #

    You’re on to something with the idea that feminists have a deeply seated belief that the feminine is inferior to the masculine.

    I was always puzzled by the feminist zeal to eliminate female-gendered words like “waitress,” “stewardess” or “actress” and replace them with the corresponding male-gendered or neutral-gendered word. It’s an implicit statement that they believe the female version is inferior.

    If they really believed women were equal then “actress” would be fine.

    I always chuckle when an actress refers to her herself as “an actor.”

    Like

  14. lancelot April 4, 2013 at 01:40 #

    This whole manufactured moral outrage syndrome has to be stopped. It creates the most predictable “journalism” imaginable, which does more damage to the collective psyche of a society than any atrocities of Lego “pinkification” ever could. No insight, no inquiry, no critical distance, no answers, no nothing—just indignation. How fucking boring.

    Like

  15. Z April 4, 2013 at 02:37 #

    1. LOL at the Andrea Dworkin “trigger warning”. Dworkin quotes always crack me up… her pathological rape fantasies are pretty much on display in most of her quotes.

    2. This whole post makes me want to wear some pink. Or paint my nails pink. Yes, I think I’ll do that last one. incidentally I bought a new pale pink nail polish today, one that’s dark/bright enough to see while still classifying as “delicate”. Damn, I have to be more on alert, the patriarchy just sneaks in and oppresses me every time I go to Target now.

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  16. Z April 4, 2013 at 02:38 #

    That room sounds kickass.

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  17. Z April 4, 2013 at 02:42 #

    lol it’s Lego fanfic!

    Like

  18. Ayurvedic Yogi April 4, 2013 at 04:30 #

    So pink is a gendered color in the UK as well? Interesting. I thought that was an exclusively American thing.

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  19. sqt April 4, 2013 at 05:30 #

    Yes! Exactly. I’ve always been bothered by the feminist notion that gender neutral terms are better. What’s wrong with the female version? I like them better myself.

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  20. Ter April 4, 2013 at 05:51 #

    There was a study by Prof Trond Diseth, Child Psychiatry at National Hospital (Norway). They placed 4 masculine toys, 4 feminine toys and 2 gender-neutral toys in front of babies. From 9 months old, the boys showed a clear preference for the masculine toys, and the girls showed a clear preference for the feminine toys. The conclusion was that biology plays a significant factor in preferences according to gender.

    Ref: from approx 17:15 in the video: http://vimeo.com/19707588

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  21. Ter April 4, 2013 at 05:59 #

    Actually, this whole thing reminds me of some questions I have for feminists:

    1) Do you acknowledge that there exist masculine and feminine traits (non-physical)?

    2) If so, describe what traits are exclusively masculine – and what are exclusively feminine.

    Like

  22. Marlo Rocci April 4, 2013 at 12:17 #

    My favorite girls toys are the Bratz dolls. Not because they’re healthy for girls, but because they are sooooo representative of what our culture has become. In a culture where marriage has been destroyed, girls are reduced to prostitutes fighting over the few remaining alpha males.

    And then when they came out with Bratz Familiez (that’s how they spelled it), seeing that it featured a grown woman with a child and NO FATHER around made SOOOO much sense. OF COURSE if you lived like a Bratz girl, you’d end up with being a single parent.

    But I wrestle with the morality of the Bratz doll. On the one hand, they really are a miserable example for girls, but on the other hand, since marriage is now gone, training girls to embrace the hook-up culture may be a necessary adaptation to the new normal.

    Like

  23. scatmaster April 4, 2013 at 12:52 #

    You forgot the just announced Kinder Surprise for Girls

    http://ladylikeblog.com/2013/02/19/kinder-surprise-for-girls-and-why-pink-stinks/

    Dworkin was a disgusting festering boil on the buttocks of the world.

    Like

  24. judgybitch April 4, 2013 at 12:53 #

    I hate Bratz dolls! My house is a Sarlaac pit when it comes to Bratz. No way. Some of the Monster High dolls are very hooker-ish, but they can be ripped apart and reconfigured. Even so, I will only buy the ones wearing pants!

    Katniss Everdeen, with her bow and arrow and Peeta with his spear generally demolish the Monter High chicks anyways. I find their bodies parts lying all over, while Katniss is all in one piece with a arrow in her hand, ready to go.

    Damn, my house is a mess.

    Lego and dolls and nerf bullets and toys everywhere!

    Might have to do something about that today.

    Like

  25. judgybitch April 4, 2013 at 12:56 #

    How are these kinds of toys limiting for girls?

    Girls can have EITHER regular Kindereggs OR girly ones. Woe unto the boy who wants a pink kinderegg. And woe unto the kid who actually eats that shitty “chocolate”.

    Boys are the ones limited. Pinky can wear combat boots, but I would like to see the reaction if LittleDude wore heels to class.

    Not that he would. LittleDude is too smart for that. He knows you can barely walk, let alone run in heels!

    Like

  26. scatmaster April 4, 2013 at 14:01 #

    I can see my son in a nice pair of “fuck me” pumps.
    His mother tell me he has nice legs. Don’t know how it would go over in his all male military school however.

    Like

  27. jc April 4, 2013 at 16:00 #

    L- You’re just so right. The whole thing behind Legos is their protean quality. When they started doing model sets with defined outcomes, they just kicked the legs out from under the whole concept. BTW, an architect buddy of mine tells me you can get big bags of white Legos for archi modeling purposes. But I guess that’s racist.

    Like

  28. Marlo Rocci April 4, 2013 at 20:47 #

    Sounds like you live in a doll abattoir.

    But at least Bratz aren’t as bad as Disney Princesses. Now there’s a lesson in entitlement.

    Like

  29. Exfernal August 10, 2013 at 16:47 #

    “Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.”

    Once again, feminist wisdom from Andrea Dworkin. What is it supposed to mean?

    Like

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Lightning Round – 2013/04/10 | Free Northerner - April 10, 2013

    […] it seems the gender equalists hate the feminine as much as they hate the masculine. Related: This one’s great just for the feminist ideal list. […]

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  2. Feminism är misantropisk | Yasers hörna - April 16, 2013

    […] [Little girls are sick of the girl hate, too. Gimme my pink legos!] […]

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