Seven year old girl tells Lego off for gender stereotyping in toys: "make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!"

Sorry, got on a tangent: Strong Female Characters.

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When I was a little kid, I apologized to my mom for voting for Bush. I didn’t know anything about the election and couldn’t remember who Dukakis was.

The multiple corrections make it seem to me as though she made one go-through and then got some help on the grammar.

I think it’s at least as plausible as “FAKE! FAKE OMG FAAAAAAAKE!” but then I don’t have an ax to grind.

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Presumably you’re talking to people who already have careers outside of toy manufacturing who aren’t necessarily in a position to take out a multi-million dollar loan to set up a factory.

Presumably this is true to the extent that companies are willing to pay millions of dollars for an ad spot during the Superb Owl. Use your own goddamn logic: if marketing didn’t work profitable companies wouldn’t bother with it.

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No, @SoLongDentalPla nailed your argument. “If there was a better way to do it people would already do it that way.” To which the only possible response is: “And yet people find better ways to do things all the time…” That’s a proof by counterexample which is essentially the strongest form of argument possible. You say, “There is no such thing as X.” Someone else says “here is an X”. That person obviously wins the argument.

I already pointed out that your arguments are self-refuting too, since if marketing didn’t have a measurable effect your reasoning would imply that profitable companies that know what they’re doing wouldn’t bother with it.

Legos were gender neutral for decades and sold quite well. Sounds like the assertion has already been tested with a positive result.

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I have a friend who manufactured a product sold at Walmart and this is what he also said. He was forced to manufacture in China when he sold to Walmart - but he said, “They are one of the few places that can cut you a check for millions of dollars.”

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Walton family values.

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Thank you.

Yep. Good ol’ traditional values ಠ_ಠ

Bullshit. I could do the same at seven.

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As a shout of appreciation, which to my understanding is the only way it can be used in english, its actually Bravo.

In its original italian and even in spanish, to call someone bravo would mean (very loosely translated) fierce/brave, and would be used as an adjective, therefore you would have to say, “that girl sure is brava” or “You are brava”, but it still doesn’t make sense unless you assume everybody knows italian or spanish, and even then its slightly rude to call a little girl “brava” (at least in Mexico we only use bravo for dogs or people who are dog like, I’ll let you figure out for yourself why we would not call a little girl brava withouth most people within earshot cringing,( Though it might be fine in Spain, maybe))

as with most troglodyte sapiens, mediocre people can only imagine what they were/are capable of as what other people were/are capable of.

So, what we hear is that little girls need things marketed a certain way for their imaginative play, when really it is middle aged age executives who need to market it that way to protect their fragile worldview from children with their own ideas.

We also hear that it must have been a coached letter, because the demeaning commenter is probably used to to toeing someone else’s line to keep them happy, and because the demeaning commenter isn’t as self respecting as that little girl whose mistake was apparently asking for what she wanted.

Are we done insulting children for having ideas yet?

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Okay, so if you only use “bravo” for dogs or people who are dog-like, why wouldn’t you use “brava” for a little girl?

We’re all still going on about it, so no.

Well I’m afraid that’s tricky, some people I know wouldn’t mind at all, but they’re the kind of people who find it funny when their kids use swear words.

So just be warned that not everybody would agree with me and I offer no claim that I am an authority on language, just that in more educated company this term is avoided for both human males and females and even then when it is used there’s a double standard to saying someone is bravo or brava, in males it is almost certainly a compliment, but when referring to a woman, not so much, the same could be said with the word bitch, even when used as a “compliment” its still awkward and says more about the person using the word than anybody else.

Like I said, using a term like this really depends on context and how its used, It can be inoffensive depending on the relationship of the people involved or it can be merely rude, in the right context it can be a compliment.

TL;DR
Bravo is used to: “express approval when a performer or other person has done something well.” (I´ve always though of it as a more sophisticated “wohoo”)
It is not a gendered adjective, not in english anyway. In spanish, it can be used as a gendered noun/adjective but it is not used to “express approval when a performer or other person has done something well.”, for that you can use: “Bravo!”.

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Sadly I have to concur with this. My little one (only 3, but we do love visiting the lego store in the local mall) will only build with seemingly random colors. Black pieces are a huge hit, as are purple. Add in some green, and bats from the halloween sets, BUT NO SPIDERS!!! Blue? Eh no. Pink maybe.

Point? Kids are really weird about what they do and don’t want. Mine is definitely a “pretty pretty princess” type, but wanted her own hammer (real) a while back [and don’t worry, she only uses it supervised and with help]. I like to think that we’re pretty progressive parents, and support her in whichever direction she wants to go, but offer her something pink and shiny and she’s all over it. Martial arts classes or dance? Dance.

I guess that the bottom line is that Lego is out to sell what people want, and what people want is what their kids are clamoring for. Little girls for the large part do seem to want the horrible “girly” pink crap that’s marketed towards them. The “Friends” figs exist not as some tool of the patriarchy, but because little girls actually want that kind of junk… eep. Darn those wee kids and their lack of realization that their preferences are being forced upon them by an underlying sexist culture sarcasm(in no way implying that culture isn’t preferential to males or that gender roles can’t be socially imposed, but rather noting that, much to my chagrin, there do appear to be some inherent gender based tendencies in terms of type of play and preferred color palette etc…).

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Mind you, I still don’t think that kids’ preference for gendered toys is inherent. It’s perpetuated by the culture that kids pick up at school and from their friends, which is perpetuated by the large numbers of parents who still do think that boys should play with guns and girls should play with dolls. No matter how progessive your parents are, it’s hard for a kid to resist internalizing peer pressure once they’re outside the house. If you’re a six-year-old boy who likes pink, and every other boy you know sneers at you for liking pink, pretty soon you’re going to decide that you don’t actually like pink all that much.

But either way, yeah, it’s not something that Lego can affect directly in any big way.

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Rows of flasks with multicolored fluids? But that must mean… there’s SCIENCE going on there!

Not to mention, can be easily replaced with a bike helmet.

Waving a hammer over this when there is far worse behavior in this thread? This @Jewels_Vern comment seemed pretty innocent to me.

Not gonna get into it with some of the others here who have been very impolite towards you, but I saw your point from the beginning. In this day and age of easy access to CAD, crowd funding and relative ease of outsourced manufacturing, maybe there really is a decent opportunity for someone who wants to make toys that don’t fall within normal gender profiles.

My childhood memories can be vague but I remember some distinctly gendered LEGO sets in the 70s. FWIW I don’t mind the increase of pink and pastel bricks/parts as that means a wider color palette to build with. I’ve bought some distinctly “girly” sets just for the colors not available in other sets and ended up using the parts to add detail to pirate ship cabins for example.