That’s an explanation for there being two tweets on that page. It doesn’t account for the other 14.
Tweets are limited to 140 characters per tweet, hence the need to send multiple tweets for lengthier messages.
If it helps you and others, the main message back from Lego was:
I think in the 80’s and 90’s there was a big push for gender free stuff but by the time we had kids in the 2000’s Babies R Us had switched back to the pink and blue sections. It was really interesting to see the split of pink and blue baby and infant clothing.
Oh, there were still 2 small racks of neutral yellow and brown.
I think we are also seeing an end to the trend of giving girls boys or neutral names. But for a while, you were seeing lots of girls named Morgan, Jordan, Sandy, and Skyler or they were named Samantha but went by Sam.
Tell your husband thank you for me. Glad to hear that they were so quick to respond.
The Pedants’ Society would like you to clear out, as they insist they have the room already booked.
Bumping this on account of this article I just saw today (might be behind wall):
Baby steps but progress!
Huh, I thought I had already seen that, or something like it, for sale. Laboratory playset, with translucent one-stud cylinders for test tubes of various chemicals, and a female minifig in a lab coat.
I have a couple of very young nieces and it’s tough. So many toys are clearly gendered for babies and it makes me feel weird. Don’t even get me started on clothes. Can we wait for them to at least start walking and talking before we project to them what they’re “supposed to be”?
But this actually comes from a real problem. Gender roles run so deep in our society that we don’t know what to do with children before they internalize them unless we clearly mark them ourselves. I mean, in our language, how can you sound normal at all and drop (entirely gendered) pronouns? As a response to that, clothing is very gendered – and it seems like the younger the baby (and thus the more gender neutral), the more gendered it is. Stuff for baby girls has to be pink or ruffled or some other clear marker that it’s a girl, and things like hair bows (or I guess head bows, since they don’t rely on hair!) or accessories are really popular right now. Otherwise, it causes social awkwardness as soon as someone opens their mouths and guesses the gender wrong. As stupid as it is, some mothers will get offended if you say “what an adorable little girl!” to their boy. So we market things to avoid that social awkwardness.
I have noticed, at least, that there are some options if you look for them. My niece absolutely loves pushing around her baby walker, and I thought she might like a toy lawnmower. There are actually a bunch of options here, some with ‘boy’ colors, some with ‘girl’ colors, and some sort of indifferent, and that’s for a toy that would be a traditional ‘boy’ toy. And I’ve noticed some of the gifts that are gendered-type toys, e.g. a baby “cooking” set, is in colors you wouldn’t expect (red and yellow, not pastels).
I really don’t believe there’s anything “natural” about boys liking science fiction toys and girls liking dollhouses. Sure, I’m sure girls and boys play differently, but the major difference here is in our cultural expectations and how these things are marketed. And I think it’s good that people call this out, because I’d like to live in a world where any kid can play with any toy without a bunch of adults projecting a lot of adult stuff all over it. And it’s way, way worse for little boys who want to play with the “girl toys”.
Not IME. When I was a kid I played house and Barbie (or some analogue thereof) and all sorts of other stuff. My parents never really ingrained any sort of gender roles in me. It wasn’t super common, but other boys did it too. As far as I know, nobody ever got made fun of for hanging out with the girls or playing girly games. Hell, I had a Britney Spears, N’Sync, and Backstreet Boys CD and so did every other guy in my class, despite nowadays us considering those things “girly” in a way. Girls were allowed to play tetherball and basketball, boys could play Sailor Moon and house and dolls. Nobody cared.
The only thing that ever made it uncomfortable was the adults. There was always this… weird sexualization of kids almost. Jokes about whatever girl I was hanging with being my girlfriend as if boys and girls couldn’t be friends, insinuations about “cooties”. This always came from adults, and while a few kids definitely internalized it, it was my experience that any reluctance to hang out with the opposite sex among me and my peers came more from having to deal with annoying comments from grown-ups, and not any internalized gender norms we picked up. And it was never about the activity. No “you shouldn’t play with dolls.” Just “ooooh you’re with a giiiiirrrrllll smooch smooch.”
Obviously YMMV, and there are probably class/regional boundaries to consider here, but growing up in the '90s and very early '00s it certainly was not my experience that it was any more difficult for boys to do girly things than the other way around. Between three schools and two states nobody was every actively discouraged from participating in “gender inappropriate” activities. The only really big criticism I have was the obsession with “boys vs girls” being used as a quick and dirty way to make opposing teams for sports or class activities. It did promote a bit of unhealthy gender adversarialism.
I used to think the differences between male and female interests were arbitrary, but, as I’ve grown older, I’ve notice that I really do not actually like a lot of stereotypical female things.
I think there is some of it that is just socialized gender roles, but I think some parts of gender are also inherent. If not, transsexuality would not be a thing.
This is important. If you go too far to the “everything is socialized” side, you end up with TERFs, who believe that people born male only become physically female in order to invade female spaces and rape women. Female-to-male trans people either don’t exist for them or I became too sick of their shit to read far enough to find out. As that is clearly idiotic hateful nonsense which is falsified multiple times a day every day, some aspects of gender must be inborn.
So there is a research project yet undone: What, exactly, is due to inborn gender in most people, and what is due to socialized gender? Sadly, I doubt the academic world as it is currently politicized is in any condition to do such a research project competently, given that it would have to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of traditional sexism on one side and misandrist TERF transphobic sexism on the other.
A lot of TERFs believe transmen are “gender traitors”. Not joking.
“TERFs”?
And BigT, if you don’t like a lot of stereotypically female things, is that because you’re male, or just because you’re you? If someone else does like those things, does that make them female, or a male who happens to like different things than you?
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.