A young girl by the name of Charlotte has been making the rounds on the internet of a letter seen above that was sent to LEGO.
Dear Lego Company:
My name is Charlotte. I am 7 years old and I love legos but I don’t like that there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls. Today I went to a store and saw legos in two sections the girls pink and the boys blue. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks. I want you to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!
Thank you.
From Charlotte.
I usually don’t write about controversial topics like this but this is something I would like to touch on. From what I’ve seen, many people have been praising Charlotte for writing such a powerful letter to LEGO. As a LEGO fan, I have to disagree with Charlotte’s letter as well as to everyone I’ve seen supporting her and here’s why.
LEGO has been trying very hard the past few years to get more younger girls building from the highly popular LEGO Friends sets as well as the newly released Disney Princess sets. Charlotte’s point in the letter is that she wants more female minifigure to have more adventures. There have been plenty of female minifigures in “boys” sets such as a robber in the High Speed Police Chase (60042) as well as in the Police
and Fire
Accessory sets. There are also very strong female characters in the DC Universe
sets like Batgirl, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn. Heck, even Eris from the Legends of Chima
sets/cartoon series go on tons of adventures with Laval and usually saves Laval from harm. Let’s also not forget about the female characters in the Star Wars
sets like Princess Leia or Padme Amidala. Leia is in the Millennium Falcon sets and you can even let her pilot the ship if you wanted to. Finally, take a look at Wyldstyle from The LEGO Movie
. She is on an adventure with Emmet and the other Master Builders to save the world from Lord Business. It can’t get any more adventurous than that!
My point is that you should start making your own adventures with the LEGO bricks and minifigures. You don’t have to follow what the set has given you. LEGO’s mission statement has always been to “inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow” and to have children think creatively. I suggest that everyone, kids and parents, take a look at all the “boys” sets and you can see that there is unlimited potential of what female characters can do. If you want the female minifigures to swim with sharks, then let them. If you want them to pilot a star cruiser, why not let them fly it? If you broaden your vision of what LEGO has to offer, you can see that LEGO has something for everyone.
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But let’s be fair: those female minifigs in the more popular sets almost always take a back seat to the male minifigs. Proportionally, you’d be hard-pressed to make it a 1:1 ratio.
And yes, LEGO encourages people to make their own adventures, but the big issue with the “Friends” series is that it excludes girls with minfigs that are completely different than anything else in the LEGO world. There was no good reason the “Friends” series couldn’t have normal minfigs, and while any child is still free to combine the two, but it’s the constant reminder that these girl sets are “abnormal”.
I work in a retail store, and what’s most disappointing for me is that Lego has so defined what a “girls set” is. When Friends came out, I was disinterested mostly because the characters were alien and out of place with regular yellow figures (I dislike licensed sets for the same reason), but of course there was also a lot of pink (I’m just not a fan of the color). When the new princess line came out, however, I was really sad, because they use the same type of doll-shape for that line, as well – solidifying Lego’s aim to differentiate which sets are for girls.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with “girly” things, and I’ve seen many little girls who absolutely love the Friends line and are exploring new creativity because of it – and I think that’s great to see. I think the disappointment, and some of the ensuing support for a letter like this, however, is that the company is echoing the social queues of limiting gender interests. Many of our customers (even a majority, perhaps) have children who build the sets as-is, play with them, and don’t create things on their own… and I think that, coupled with the segregation of specific girls sets, has created this particular animosity among some.
2 points,
First, 7-year-olds rarely care that much about the world they live in and they shouldn’t. Its our job to shelter children from things until they are a little older and can deal with ugly life things. In my experience, I found any children that do say they care about world things, they are just regurgitating things they heard from adults who don’t respect that child’s right to be a child. An adult sent that letter to Lego, put it on the internet, and is probably happy that child shares their own opinion while not understanding that the child may just be agreeing for their parents approval.
Second, I am annoyed the friends sets don’t have more male characters and Lego city doesn’t have minifigs just sit at home, go to the beach, shop, and not have jobs that are police or firemen. Why are all the males minifigs having adventures, saving people, and even swimming with sharks?! Totally not realistic.
The answer is that it isn’t Lego’s job to change perceived social roles. They can try new things and see how they work, but if Lego made everything as ideally as weekend-do/feel-gooders their sales would drop significantly. Its not Lego’s fault for the gender roles established over thousands of years but to make sets that appeal the most people and maintain profitability. So Charlotte, blame your girl-friends for buying Friends, not blaming Lego for making what they want.
Tell Charlotte to buy a set, any set. Now take the box and instructions and throw them away. What are you left with? Whatever the hell you want it to be! LEGO isn’t about what’s on the box or in the instructions. I’m sick of this “build and display” attitude. Build freely and use your imagination. It’s the plot of the LEGO Movie (though I have yet to see it) to be creative and not to follow the instructions all of your life?
I’m a scientist, my wife is a scientist, and I have family members that have spoken in front of Congress about issues related to women in science. My 7 year old daughter plays with the Friends line and I have zero problem with it. She takes it and expands the world to fit her imagination. The other day she MOC’d a gate for the Olympics using nothing but bricks from her Friends sets.
That being said, I think TLG is missing an opportunity with the Cuusoo set. What reason do they have for not making it? It isn’t licensed, and has a relatively low piece count. If it doesn’t sell well then they have something to point to to say that the consumer demand just isn’t there. There really isn’t a negative to producing this set.
This is pretty damn tone deaf, but not nearly as bad as the moron talking about gender roles established for thousands of years, like firefighters and cops. What a dingus.
I have to say that I’m amazed whenever this issue, or an issue of cultural sensitivity, emerges in the LEGO world, because an underlying current of conservatism emerges in the LEGO community. For a toy that really is, in many ways, not about gender at all – we all love building – for the LEGO fan community to be so blind to the ways in which LEGO is reinforcing gender stereotypes is staggering. Of course LEGO includes some female mini-figures, like the aforementioned female bank robber, but the scarcity of such figures is clear. So, from the point of view of a young girl, she could certainly ignore the instructions and build what she wants, and she could also pop on some female heads onto male bodies, but that she should have to is the problem. Little girls have to be creative in order to imagine themselves as LEGO figures, but little boys simply have to buy a set.
As for the long list of female mini-figures, including Princess Leia and Amidala, I really think you need to use your imagination a little bit more to understand how all of this is perceived by young girls. The latest round of Star Wars films, and the accompanying toys, were a little bit better at having some kind of gender representation, but the older films had men in all the best roles. Were there any female Jedi’s until the latest set of films? But even in the latest films, female Jedi’s existed, but certainly played no important role. So, as a young girl, if you’re pretending to be in the Star Wars films (as all young kids do), and if you want to pretend to be one of the important Jedi’s, you have to pretend to be a man. Now, this type of pretending can certainly be healthy – after all, why shouldn’t we pretend to be other genders? But, young boys never have to do so. They never have to imagine themselves as the female role if they want to imagine themselves as one of their hero’s from a film.
In fact, I could easily see many of the commenters here being up in arms if there little boys were found to be pretending to be a women – even if she was a kickass Jedi.
“Were there any female Jedi’s until the latest set of films?”
Yes. 20% of the Jedi that appear in the original trilogy are female. She just doesn’t know it yet. 🙂
The answer is so simple it’s astounding that people are taking “sides”. Either put female minifies in at a ratio of 1:1 or let families exchange male minifigs for female minifigs. How big a deal is it to throw in some extra gendered heads and hair? Alternatively, they could sell sets of female minifies for parents to make the substitutions or additions that suit their needs.
I understand exactly what Charlotte is getting at and if Lego doesn’t they’ll only be hurting their own sales potential. This is one of their potential customers giving them free market data! There are plenty of girls out there that aren’t into the Disney princess mold. As a grandmother I can say that I’ve never been and if I were buying for a granddaughter instead of a grandson I’d be walking right past the Disney and Friends stuff.
Check out the pick a brick section on the Lego shop at home website. Female hair and faces are available for purchase. Also the Lego brand stores have a build a minifigure station that always has female hair and faces.
This is because the Ghostbuster set won the Lego Cuuso project and not the Female minifigure set. People need to understand that in the Western world there are no “barriers” preventing women and men for that matter from becoming anything they want to be. Just because you play with a certain toy that does not mean you will be X when you grow up. These are parents forcing their political agenda on their children or using them a social experiments. There are boys action figures and girl dolls but notice how nobody complains about that, because they are not as popular as Lego.
There are more male minifigures (although it’s moving away from that a little) but I don’t think Lego has to apologize for it. It only makes sense that there are more male knights and pirates and sheriffs and soldiers. There’s nothing wrong with that. Males kind of have a monopoly on historical action roles. Perhaps Lego can come out with a Joan of Arc set, someday.
Additionally, some of the licensed themes are based on works of fiction that have male dominated casts. There are more male than female characters in Star Wars, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, etc., by far. That’s not the fault of Lego.
That makes sense if it were “historical” children playing with these sets. Fact is, it’s contemporary children. They don’t buy into the gender defined stuff and there’s no reason they should.
Play is preparing them for their lives and girls want to see themselves in the sets they choose. They don’t want to be ghettoized into Friends or Disney Princess crap as their only choice. Why is that difficult to grasp?
Why do you think that girls are only being presented with Friends and Disney? The Creator and Bricks & More lines have zero gender bias attached to them. The Horizon Express even has a female engineer.
This letter suspiciously looks like it was dictated by an adult or even written by an adult and make it look like it was written by a child. No 7-year-old I know talks or thinks like this. It sounds more like one of those adult feminists who haven’t touched a LEGO set for a decade or ever, but love to stir up some controversy.
LEGO sets in the past few years have been full of female characters and heroes taking part in all kinds of activities. This includes the LEGO Friends line where there is everything from a pet-shop, a vet’s clinic, school, science lab, music stage, soccer field, karate dojo, and the summer line is going to be jungle adventures!
LEGO may have favored boy characters in the past, but at least in the last 5 years or even more there has been a great increase of female characters in sets and also taking leading roles.
Whoever wrote this letter is completely out of touch and have no imagination. If it is an adult, shame on them, and if it is a child, I feel sorry for them. There are plenty of sets to choose from with female characters in licensed sets, LEGO’s own lines, and in LEGO Friends sets. And if this person still feels stuck, they sould go see The LEGO Movie this weekend for some inspiration! 😉
Wow I’m, I’m Touched.
lego minifigs don’t have penises. maybe they’re ALL girls. if you think having short hair makes a character a boy that’s your problem. and you can always change the hair or make them bald like sinead o’connor. or do what real legomanics do: sell the minifigs on ebay to buy more brick to build whatever you can imagine and create.