I was amazed to see that Lego had made the front page of VG Helg, the weekend magazine from Norway's biggest newspaper VG (Verdens Gang). The caption on the front cover reads: "The Lego girl has become a babe - labelled as a hindrance to gender equality":
I thought you might like to read the nine-page story, so I've translated it for you. Now, I'm not a native English speaker, so I'd be very surprised (and delighted) if my translation is without flaws, but you'll get the idea. Here goes:
I'm a Lego girl in a Barbie world
Around the world, these figures are making people protest: The new Lego babes are too sugar sweet. And gender stereotypical.
She's got long, blond hair, a short skirt, pink shoes and a tiny tight top. Her name isn't Barbie, but Stephanie, and she's Lego's new girls' toy.
NEDRE EIKER/OSLO (VG) They're taller and slimmer than the classic, square Lego figure with the yellow head – and they've got female forms.
With friends Stephanie, Mia, Emma, Andrea, and Olivia, Lego wants to conquer all the world's girls aged five and up.
But the blonde waitress Stephanie, with her singlet and short skirt, has upset the people who regarded Lego as the "good" actor in a toy business that's getting more and more cynical and gender segregated.
Under the slogan #Liberate Lego the sugar sweet figures have been accused of being gender stereotypical Lego Barbies in social media.
Even the Danish Minister of Gender Equality, Manu Sareen, is put off by Lego's new series.
- It's annoying that Lego's unique and inspiring toys are now reinforcing the kind of traditional gender patterns that the Friends line does, the minister wrote on his Facebook profile.
At the same time, an old Lego advert from 1981 is going viral as an example that everything was better back in the old days.
On Facebook, 19,000 people have thus far liked the image of a tough, red-haired girl with jeans and blue trainers, proudly presenting a Lego build stripped of princesses and pink.
The headline goes like this: "What it is is beautiful".
On Facebook the image has been shared thousands of times, with the caption: "Dear Lego: More ads like this one, please".
The image has led to an endless number of blog posts, heated comments and tweets.
- The girl in the ad from 1981 is no tomboy; she's a completely ordinary girl. We are the ones who have turned five-year-old girls into pink princesses – and the toy industry has played a major part, says Solveig Østrem, associate professor at the Kindergarten Centre at the University College of Vestfold. She's been studying children playing and learning in nursery schools, and she thinks that girls' failure to participate in constructional play is hampering the girls' development.
- Pink "princess Lego" that can hardly be used for building won't help the girls. This is Lego designed to be put together easily and played with as dolls, it doesn't invite to constructional play, Østrem says.
According to human geographer Karl-Fredrik Tangen at the Oslo School of Management, constructing pink princesses can have dire consequences.
- Girls are socialised into a world of decorations and care, pulling them into low-salary care jobs. This contributes to women's powerlessness. It is a good thing if the girls learn how to build, but they should be building bridges and skyscrapers. Lego is playing a part in presenting the world like it's natural that women are subdued. Now Lego is going to reinforce the gender segregation in the shops, instead of decreasing it, Tangen says.
In Norway's biggest toy shop, Toys'R'Us at Alna in Oslo, shiny, tiny princess costumes fill the aisles. The pink trail of glitter and dolls continues through a corridor decorated with Barbie curtains. Long, thin legs with stilettos, pink toy castles, and Hello Kitty. And then, a towering wall of Lego reveals itself: Warriors, space ships, fast cars, swords and guns in dark colours.
But in February, the macho warriors will be accompanied by the Lego girls from the fictitious city of Heartland (sic), when the Lego Friends line is launched in Norway.
Birthday girl Agnes Eikseth Aas (7) is right in the middle of the new line's target group. Today, she's invited the girls from her class to a birthday party at Lindern, Oslo.
The girls are excited, sitting in a circle on the living room floor as the girl with the crown on her head spins the bottle.
Whomever the bottle points at, is to give her present to the birthday girl.
- Woooow, you're lucky, the classmates shout in unison as Agnes pulls the blonde Barbie doll from the wrapping paper.
- Mum, see what I got! Agnes shouts, reaching her arms in the air, clutching the plastic box.
Seven-year-old Agnes is no typical pink-girl. She joins in when her dad does carpenting, and her mother is very consciously avoiding the typical girl clichés. For Christmas, Agnes wished for a toolbox – and a make-up head.
- Our mothers were very politically conscious and wanted to show that girls can do the same things boys can do. But now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, thinks mother Barbro Grude Eikseth, who's also got a nine-year-old daughter.
She feels that toy shops are way too occupied with pointing out gender differences.
Her seven-year-old daughter does not play with Lego; she associates it with boys' toys and Star Wars, the mother explains.
- I try to provide a critical voice, but I'm not fanatical. There's something life-affirming in dressing up and live out your dreams, she says.
- She yells at me when I buy Hello Kitty for the girls, laughs father Harald Aas.
Daniel Fernandez-Kaspersen is also celebrating his seventh birthday. The noise level is even higher than at Agnes's all-girl party.
- It's Lego! The birthday kid from Nedre Eiker shouts, throwing the paper away.
- Oh, it's war!
The seven-year-old boys gather around the box of Lego Kingdoms, knights with armour and shields.
The next present contains Lego Star Wars. It's a battlepack that Daniel's already got, then some NinjaGo, and some Bakugan figures.
- Boys are supposed to play with Spider-Man, Star Wars, Beyblade and karate. Girls play with dolls, Barbie and skipping ropes, classmate Andreas Wernar Hasselberg says, before the birthday boy's dad steps in to negotiate which one of the boys will get to borrow Daniel's Star Wars light sabre.
- Nowadays the toys are supposed to be very boyish. I was always thinking that I wouldn't let my children play with gender-stereotypical toys, and we gave him a toy kitchen when he was a little boy. We also thought that we weren't going to buy just pink stuff for our two-year-old daughter, but it doesn't work that way. She likes to dress up, and she likes pink. And boys like to be tough, says father David Fernandez-García.
- Toys are more divided into typical girls' and boys' toys now. At Daniel's age it's a crisis if he get something that can be considered girly, mother Eva Fernandez-Kaspersen chimes in.
- We had a lot of good intentions, but we can't escape the fact that we're living in a society, David sighs.
- It's been a clear trend for the past ten years that toys and clothes are less unisex, says Mari Rysst, a researcher at Norway's National Institute for Consumer Research (Sifo):
- Girls are supposed to be cute, pretty and even sexy, while boys are hard and tough. This stereotypical pattern is something that the gender equality movement has worked a long time to get rid of, so it's a paradox that this is the situation for children today.
Rysst thinks the extreme gender segregation in the toy industry shows two things:
- For one, that the manufacturers are looking for new niches to make money. And secondly, that maybe gender equality is taken more and more for granted, so one doesn't really realise that toys can reproduce old, stereotypical gender patterns, Rysst says.
But the consumers have spoken.
The Lego Friends figures are the results of four years' worth of research, design development, focus groups and play testing in girls' homes in several countries.
A collaboration between the company's own team of analysts, called "anthros", external consultants, designers and marketing people has resulted in what Lego thinks is exactly what girls and their mothers want.
So far, Lego products have proved not to appeal to girls; 90% of today's Lego users are boys.
- The idea of the unisex toy is dead. There's no use in giving girls and boys the same thing, states Niels Sandal Jakobsen, head of Market and Consumer Insights at Lego.
Even though girls like to build, they don't want to be warriors or aliens in Lego concepts like Star Wars, Hero Factory, Alien Conquest or NinjaGo.
- Lego might just as well have put up a sign saying "No girls allowed", Peggy Orenstein commented in the international best-selling book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" from 2011, where she describes how the princess mania has taken over the present generation of little girls.
Internationally, the Danish toy manufacturer has gone from losing a million dollars a day in 2005 to increasing profits by 106% since 2006. The main focus has been on cultivating a portfolio with focused boys' themes. In Norway, Lego has grown with approximately 30% a year for the past five years.
After a very successful turnaround, Lego is now hungry for the remaining half of the market.
Lego is planning to use more than 40 million dollars on marketing for their new girls' concept.
- We're doing what we can to remain relevant for girls, and to reach them we need to move towards everyday themes and roles that they can identify with, Jakobsen declares.
In the decade leading up to the "tomboy's" appearance in the Lego ad from 1981, the battle for gender equality rages. There should be no differences between the sexes in children's toy boxes, either: Baby brother gets doll stroller. Baby sister gets hammer and saw.
- This has had no effect of any importance. The girls who grew up back then still didn't get any less traditional or concerned with make-up, Stein Ulvund says. He's a professor of pedagogy at the University of Oslo, and he has studied the importance of toys on children's intelligence.
Ulvund's opinion is that the toy business isn't solely to blame for the fact that children are trapped in an old-fashioned gender pattern, but he does think that the business is moving in the wrong direction.
- The toy industry reinforces traditional gender patterns, speculating in pink and blue. The gender segregation has become more extreme than ever, Ulvund says.
He doesn't think it's as simple as the gender difference in toy preferences is something that we're born with, like previous research has hinted at.
- I think that it's to a major extent something we learn through our social environment. We can't rule out the possibility that gender-segregated toys will have consequences for how children develop – we don't know a lot about this, Ulvund says, but he still thinks that the main influence on children's perception of gender roles is their parents.
Ulvund is disappointed in Lego.
- I've been thinking of Lego as a serious player, and I think they could have gained much more by resisting the pressure for gender segregation, the professor says about the new Lego.
Beauty has been an essential factor in the development of the new girl Lego.
- Girls like pretty things, and care about details and finesse, says Lego's Niels Sandal Jakobsen.
He thinks all kinds of play are about identity.
- When the girls are between the age of three and nine, they grow conscious about their sex and who they are. There are roles to adapt to, says Jakobsen. He's convinced that children's preferences have got to do with genes.
He thinks that the critics' opinions are based on a misconceived anxiety that the children will become what they play.
- They see "fashion dolls" and a view on women that they don't approve of, and conclude that "I won't let my daughter play with these kinds of products, because she'll become just like the dolls."
Despite the fact that Helle Vaagland, a program host with Norwegian national broadcaster NRK and author of the book "Go Mum", is a self-proclaimed feminist, she welcomes the new Lego line.
- I don't think the urge to decorate, or what we think of as typical girls' interests, can be oppressed. I have to admit that I have a hard time being engaged when my sons build Star Wars spaceships and Indiana Jones planes. But if I could build a pink café instead, where the Lego friends could get together for a chat, I might just get more interested, says Vaagland.
She's pleasantly surprised by the new Lego ladies, in spite of them "naturally being slimmer than the Lego figures for boys".
- They're very versatile. They build tree houses and run a design school, a beauty salon and a veterinarian clinic. And the fact that they also enjoy giving their dogs pink ribbons can hardly be dangerous, she says. Vaagland thinks that the politically correct approach from the 70s and 80s could actually work against its purpose.
- My mother dressed me up in blue jeans and brown corduroy, but deep inside I really wanted to wear pink princess dresses, a dream that I didn't fulfil until I grew up.
- Now I wear pink as often as I can, while fighting for gender equality on a daily basis, says Vaagland.
In seven-year-old birthday girl Agnes's room, VG Weekend introduces a little surprise to the girls' party: A sneak preview of the Lego Friends figures.
- Ooooh, so nice!
- That looks like a lot of fun!
- I want to be Mia, says Hanan (6).
- I want to be Sophia, says Sofie (6).
- I want to be Olivia, says older sister Ella (9).
- But there's none for me, the birthday girl exclaims – before she notices something she wants:
- I'll have the horse!
The girls rip open the bags with the small girl figures and immediately start talking about what clothes they'll dress them in.
- But do you like building?
- Yeeeeaaah, the girls answer in unison.
- But we must look at the building instructions first, says Helene (6) and picks up the little brochure buried under the pile of pink and purple bricks.
By ida.giske@vg.no, beate.koren@vg.no, janne.moller-hansen@vg.no
