The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to Say

[Tuesday Afternoon]

By Lori Day –

In mid-January, this article on The Huffington Post hit my Facebook newsfeed like a Justin Bieber deportation petition—it was everywhere. In it, HuffPost Family News Editor Jessica Samakow writes:

Pay attention, 2014 Mad Men: This little girl is holding a LEGO set. The LEGOs are not pink or “made for girls.” She isn’t even wearing pink. The copy is about “younger children” who “build for fun.” Not just “girls” who build. ALL KIDS. In an age when little girls and boys are treated as though they are two entirely different species by toy marketers, this 1981 ad for LEGO — one of our favorite images ever — issues an important reminder.

Something about this piece with the iconic 1981 ad tapped the zeitgeist and it became one of HuffPo’s more viral articles in recent memory, receiving over 60,000 shares. And along the way, the small world of Facebook led to a comment thread on my wall where someone, upon seeing the little red-haired girl holding her LEGOs, wrote, “Hey, I know her!” And now I do too, because that’s the serendipity of social media. Her name is Rachel Giordano, she is 37 years old, and she’s a practicing naturopathic doctor in Seattle, Washington. Giordano agreed to talk to me about her childhood and the ad, and to pose for a new Then & Now photo meme, which you see above in the lead image.

As I was planning my interview with Rachel Giordano, I saw this blog post by Achilles Effect, and knew immediately what Giordano should be holding in the new version of the photo. Enter the Heartlake City rolling beauty salon TV news van, one of the latest additions to the LEGO Friends line. Advertising copy lets us know what being a news anchor involves for minifig Emma:

“Break the big story of the world’s best cake with the Heartlake News Van! Find the cake and film it with the camera and then climb into the editing suite and get it ready for broadcast. Get Emma ready at the makeup table so she looks her best for the camera. Sit her at the news desk as Andrew films her talking about the cake story and then present the weather to the viewers.”

more at link:
http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/little-girl-1981-lego-ad-grown-shes-got-something-say/

[shenmue]

1. Awesome!

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I refuse to buy 'girl' Legos for my granddaughter. Just the regular ones.

P.S. If the story about Lego's Emma is true, I may not even buy the 'boy' Legos! How demeaning can a toy company get?

[kysrsoze]

9. Same for us. Our daughter all about Cars and Jake the Pirate Duplo blocks.

She hasn't expressed any interest in the girly stuff, and my wife is completely unconcerned. My observation is that all that pink/non-pink, masculine/feminine business is the product of obsessive, insecure parents and marketers who feed off of it. Without that undue influence, what kids like can be just about anything, and none of it has any potential negatives, IMO. I sometimes played dolls with my sister, and the only bad result was that I destroyed a lot of the outfits, props, etc.

[seabeyond]

20. best thing my parents did, and they were good, they raised us as people, not gender.

to this day thank my father.

[Xithras]

13. I can't even FIND "regular ones" any more!

Nowadays it seems like the Lego displays in the "boys toys" areas are full of cartoon-style castles (Chima), outrageously priced Star Wars sets, Lego ninjas, and the mass marketing product tie-in du jour (seriously, I recently spotted Hobbit Lego kits and Lone Ranger Lego kits in the "boys toys" aisles). Over in the "girls toys" aisles you can find the Disney Princess Legos and the Lego Friends lines.

I went looking for an old fashioned bucket of Lego bricks for my son last year and NOBODY carried them in the stores. You can apparently order them online, but retail stores only sell the "themed" Lego kits that actually come with ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS. The era of inventing something "creative and new" out of a bunch of random generic bricks is vanishing anyway. Lego does still make plain old buckets of "Bricks and Bits", but you have to really go hunting for them to find them.

It's bad enough that they segment the toys by gender, but they now assume that kids are idiots who lack the creativity and intelligence to build things on their own.

[mikeysnot]

16. We are lucky here in Chicago

We have three Lego stores and an Legoland Aventure park.

They have bulk bricks at on that you can buy by the pound and the other two you fill containers for a set price.

My son and I are masters at filling them as tightly as possible.

Now, the last time we filled them, they had pink and purple colors and he grabbed as many as he could fill, since he did not have those colors.

BTW, we just got back from the Lego Movie, and all I can say is it was fun and funny, I would recomend seeing it.

I have no problem with the gender geared Lego toys.

I believe this feigned outrage is just BS.

[Triana]

3. Fabulous! And I do believe she's right. Kids haven't changed...

...marketing strategies have. I remember those LEGO ads. They were not (and do not need to be) gender-specific.

[reusrename]

4. Different?

What it is is fucked up.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. ?

[reusrename]

14. Sorry, it's from the ad.

What it is is different fucked up.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

17. ?

What is "fucked up"? I don't see that phrase in the ad. Aside from the extraneous reference to copulation, what are you referring to? How is that you are extending the analogy? Are you saying Lego or feminism or gender stereotypes or education or doctors or advertising or graphics (mislabeled "memes&quot or something else is "fucked up".

I wonder if you have a point that can be elaborated at all, since your cryptic remark has such little information content.

[reusrename]

23. That's it, the objectification in the new Lego campaign.

It ain't right.

Actually, I found the actual copy in the photo a little cryptic, but once I figured it out I thought that my edit would be self-explanatory. Obviously it isn't. Sorry.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

24. Thanks. I agree with you about the objectificatiion in the new Lego object.

I would add that the article by Lori Day (or at least the five paragraphs excerpted) is very badly written and makes references to many things the writer is familiar with but others may not have seen or connect.

[reusrename]

25. Both the author and the subject seem very accomplished.

It's a great job they both did in putting this together.

[progressoid]

5. Actually LEGO had been using gender specific marketing before this as well.

From 1971, the 'Doll's Kitchen':




From 1968:

[seabeyond]

21. they are not color coordinated though, ya, get your point. why would we become MORE

extreme, though, than less in a period of woman progressions and advancement.

[progressoid]

27. Agreed. It's much more extreme.

When my girls were young, we bought them the basic blocks. No themes sets. Although their Grandmother did buy them a Harry Potter themed set which they used once and then ignored.

[grilled onions]

6. In The Fifties "engineering" for kids was a non color issue

Lincoln Logs were brown. Tinker Toys were a generic color. It was an all gender construction era. Bricks do not come in pink and blue. We do have female engineers just like we have great cooks that are male. We need to get over this gender geared toys to gender geared careers.
I used to hate seeing little girls stuck with changing baby diapers, "playing with her iron and cook stove while the boys were playing with big trucks, guns(mostly toy thankfully) and remote planes and cars. Already it seemed the girls were destines to be locked in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant while the boys were free to play and grow in a direction far away from the home fire.

[kysrsoze]

10. Amen. Hope it goes back to that.

[seabeyond]

22. i was so excited to find the old lincoln logs and got for 4 yr old nephew.

i loved them as a kid.

[alp227]

8. hate to crash the party, but i can't read this site from my college campus

because apparently it's got malware. still an interesting story though.

[JDPriestly]

12. Thanks for the warning. I am scanning my computer right now.

[alp227]

19. scanned that URL, no problems.

http://app.webinspector.com/public/reports/20057406

firewall must have gotten a false positive.

[JDPriestly]

26. I scanned too and it was fine.

Hey! If I could change my user name on DU, I would seriously consider the moniker: Legolover.

[JDPriestly]

11. What is this with all these pink toys for girls?

I still have the American Toy Builders -- wooden Lego-like toys -- and the train set I got in the 1950s. The train is interesting but it doesn't work any more.

I was the second child in a family of girls. My father wanted boys toys, so I was the designated boy-toy recipient. I am very grateful for the message I got. It didn't make me into a boy. But it made me feel like I was a person, not just a "girl."

I still love Legos and recently organized my children's Legos for my grandchildren. My kids' Legos have literally traveled a good part of the world. They are going to go to my grandchlidren now.

Legos are for all children. They teach math and mechanical skills. They teach children how to plan and give kids confidence. They encourage creativity. I love Legos. But they should be unisex. None of this pink for girls stuff.

[glowing]

15. Not only is the "girl's Lego" demeaning in color and horrific

about "doing make-up" and looking "pretty", it also takes away any spark of creativity a child should have with their toys. Did Lego really need to teach the child, like a teacher giving instructions, how exactly to play and what exactly the story headline should be.

Seriously, do your make up to look pretty, tell a story about cake, follow up with the weather, oh and the boy character is going to film this because women wouldn't possibly interested or capable of handling a camera or editing or covering a news report completely different. The person at Lego designing this toy must be a Gox News watcher. There they literally do purposely hire and put on the air, women who have a tendency to be blonde, look a bit stepfordish, and sit on couches or behind glass desks so that men viewers will be drawn into watching lots of leg and pretty bobble heads regurgitate talking points and lies. I'm not sure that I've seen any Fox woman, besides Gretta and guests, where anything but short skirts/ dresses with tight tops. No pant suits for this crowd.

It really bothers me that there are assigned colors for girl and boys. Little boys should be able to wear pink and purple and have toys in these shades without being called effiminite; likewise for little girls. Disney is one of the worst offenders of doing gender specific colors and toys... Even their character drawings for women and men are stereotypical. Pretty young gal, who normally needs rescuing, drawn with big wide eyes, normally white, with large breasts spilling out of whatever small costume they have picked, and with a small waste. The little mermaid wore clam shells, and her hair was perfect even in the water. Belle from Beauty and the Beast didn't seem to own a dress that could contain her breasts, Jasmine from Aladdin had a basic strip of clothe across her breast area and lots of flat tummy shown. And then they take these characters and create "kid's costumes" for little girls to wear.

On the other side of the play spectrum, it is frowned upon for little boys to want to play with a baby doll, push around a grocery cart, play "house", play with Barbie's. When I was growing up in the 80's, my playmates were my sister and my boy cousin. We would play with barbies, cabbage patches, collect garbage pail cards, play with matchboxes, thinks trucks, regular unisex Legos, etc. We all had just as much fun playing with "boys toys" as our cousin had playing "house" with the Baby dolls. Best was when we combined play and had Barbie crashing out of a tonka truck or using the Legos to build houses and garages for our match box toys. AND some of our best imaginative play came about when we would use a large boxes to make up forts or had an old set of pots/ pans etc to play with (we would make mud pies or use the collanders or sives to pretend we were archeologist on a dig).

[seabeyond]

18. made it to here, full stop

In an age when little girls and boys are treated as though they are two entirely different species by toy marketers, this 1981 ad for LEGO

in an age, when our men are working so damn hard to create a great divide between male/female. interesting how these coincide. and i think you will see the constant beating of the drum in our media, ect...

backlash, plain and simple

cause you know, equality in marriage means.... not as much sex. bah hahhaa. this is coming in useful.

[BrotherIvan]

28. The same holds true for boys

At a friend's baby shower, I gave a gift that I thought was gender-neutral. It was absolutely lovely and my friend cried when she opened it. But her mother-in-law shrieked that some of the design was too "girly" and eeek! was that coral color PINK? I couldn't believe that this woman was so afraid of a baby having anything touching him that might be somehow feminine. I asked my friend if that meant she thought he would turn out gay? If his baby blanket had a swirl and something in the range of pink, he might not be a manly man? Mon Dieu!

So I do see gender norms as getting more rigid in much of the country, just as we have had this strange backlash of fundamentalism. I hope it's just a small backtrack before we move forward. In places like Santa Cruz, I saw the future as I hope it will be: the coolest, gender-neutral, multi-racial beauties I have ever seen, not helicopter parented, just all chill and happy as sunbeams. This didn't include the yuppies who are taking over the area, where it was very clear that the intense competition for ivy league colleges and money also fueled intense gender stereotypes. So I hope, as equality goes forward in all walks of life it pervades advertising and the way we deal with kids.

[JI7]

29. i can't stand it when people tell a boy "that's for girls"

and discourage him from having any interest because it's considered to be a girl thing. and it's often the parents themselves.

i once met a woman who had 2 very small kids and she included her son in everything they did including getting manicures and painting their nails. maybe there might be a point when he is old enough and would not care for those things, but the same could be true of the daughter. but there is no reason to exclude them from certain activities and make assumptions about what they should do and play with based on gender.

[JTFrog]

30. My 23 year old son still enjoys pedis and sparkly pink toenails.

My son in the foreground (my granddaughter in the background getting her tiny toes done!):



My daughter with the rainbow toes and my son with the pink sparklies.

[ismnotwasm]

32. Nice!

You know I see that more often than you'd think on guys

[BrotherIvan]

33. I totally agree

Not only does it separate, it also often belittles girls' activities. I just don't understand why parents still believe the superstitious nonsense that somehow if a child is interested in "girly" things they will turn out gay and that that is somehow bad. I guess as more people get to share their stories as they come out, people will understand that it's natural and you're born that way.

It's also so much about control. It's obviously getting you off to a horrible start if you think you can mould your baby's personality and make that person be who you want them to be. I see so many parents working so hard to do just that their child's whole life and it takes many years for the person to break free from that conditioning if they ever do. Kids show their personalities and proclivities instantly and yet here is mom & dad trying to make them in their own image or worse, an image of something they could never have, so they can live vicariously.

Fun is fun. Imagination, play, learning, it can come from anywhere. My friend's son loved flowers, plants and gardening. He always drew flowers at school. His father is a pretty conservative, football playing manly type. I know it disappointed him and stressed him out that his son might get teased and was not interested in the things he dreamed would happen on becoming a father. I'm really proud of how he handled it though, and rather surprised, he just let his son be who he was and helped find things the kid liked. He has grown up into the sweetest, most caring young man I've actually ever met (his express goal when going to college was finding a career "that helps people" and has chosen nursing). And believe it or not, he has girls throwing themselves at him because he is so damn nice and not like the jerk jocks at school.

So I guess this simple ad about Lego's has me thinking about lots of things. Our society is really going backward in so many ways and the rigidity of gender roles and the cartoonishness of what "men" and "women" are supposed to look like are indicators that we are not living in a period of enlightenment. I blame consumerism first and fundamentalism second, but I'm sure there's more in there. It's like we just lost our way somehow.

[ismnotwasm]

31. Legos

Are one gift I don't give. The fact that they've become gendered is an even better reason than the fact they're hard to clean up, they hurt when you step on them and parents often have fat too many.

This is very interesting though. We have sexed up Barbie, the abysmal "Brats" dolls, every fucking thing in pink. If this new grandbby is a girl she's going to learn to love great and blue and red abs violet-- anything but pink.

[Nikia]

34. As a parent, I find this gendering of toys as disturbing as well

Even at McDonald's (the only drive thru restaurant in our town), almost all the Happy meals come with either "boy toys" or "girl toys". Sometimes I want to get the "girl toy" for my son, but feel weird about it because they usually ask "Is this for a boy or a girl?"
My son went to 4k this year and has just become conscious about the whole girl and boy toy things. I think that it really puts kids into a box at a young age. If boys and girls really do have a "natural" tendency to gravitate towards certain toys and activities, society wouldn't have to try so hard by their marketing.