Comments on: Feminist Family Christmas: Part One

By: Miranda

Miranda — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:00:44 +0000

In reply to Weasel. I agree - I loved my Duplo and Lego sets. The only time I was ever aware of gender issues in my late 80s-early 90s Lego enjoyment was when I was given a pirate set with a ladypirate figure, who had a lipstick-print mouth and a "wenchier" outfit. There was only ever one of her in the set, and she was always listed on the contents leaflet as basically "the female one" (the others being simply "Pirate" - as in history, where women pirates existed but were certainly something of an anomaly, so in Lego, I suppose!). I used to wish she had some friends, but I remember being quite gratified that she was there. I had this one; this appears to be a more recent version. I used to swap the heads and bodies around so that the ladies got to wear the Captain's costume! :) But yeah, I'm a huge fan of Lego. What I find really disturbing is the way that some toystores at the moment seem to position the Lego in "boys'" areas. Lego is for everyone!

By: Weasel

Weasel — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:38:09 +0000

Lego is the best learning toy ever, you can build anything you can imagine with it. Then you can take it apart and build the next thing you imagine. It’s the building that’s important, taking the thing apart is just preparing for the next time you play with it.

As adults, we make things, build things, create things, and the experience we had as children with Lego means that we understand how to build and create. Lego lets you build something, understand why it does or doesn’t stand up, work or make the right shape and helps you learn.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:02:40 +0000

I’m not sure why anyone would leap to seeing Lego as a destructive thing. It’s a reconfigurable geometric imagination tool. I don’t even see why the putting together needs to be any more ‘right’ than the taking apart. It’s Lego, not symbolism. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

For what it’s worth, most of my engineer friends seem to directly attribute their emerging mechanical adeptness and intuitive understanding of how things fit together to exposure to toys like Lego, Meccano, K’Nex.

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:25:15 +0000

I *adored* Lego as a kid. “build something to destroy it” is, I think, looking at it the wrong way around. I didn’t build to destroy, I destroyed in order to build. I never wanted to take down the things I built – even 20 years later, I can still recall some of the things I built, and the games I played with them – but I had only so many pieces, and there were new things to build, and new games to play.

I could trace an absolutely massive influence for the better that playing with Lego had on my life, both professionally and creatively. It’d be fairly spurious, obviously – no one thing is responsible for the way people turn out – but it taught me about building from my imagination, about cooperation, when to follow the manual and when to deviate from it etc etc.

Lego is something I’d buy kids in preference to almost any other toy, now I think about it. A lot of the licensed/promoted sets are a bit gendered, but you can buy absolutely gender free boxes of bricks, and even within the more gendered stuff, the joy of Lego is that it’s more fun when you ignore the gendered instructions, and build whatever the hell is in your imagination.