First thing I thought of here for what is gender neutral was the colour green...
Sounds odd I know but backstory follows:
When I was younger I had to have some minor surgery. The anaesthesia used was administrated via a injection through my hand etc. i got to decide what colour tubing I had...So before being knocked out my Doctor/Surgeon basically said "What colour do you want? I've got Blue for boys, Pink for girls and Green for dont knows"
The only true pioneer in gender neutral themes was sadly cancelled.
However, there is still much to be gained by analyzing the concept they were going for.
You don't get why ninja's and pirates (and all the other stuff) are guy things? That is an easy one, boys like death, violence and badasses etc. Girls like playing house, doctor, having tea parties, dress up etc
I am talking broad generalizations and sterotypes but just look at THE boys and girls toys and the things you can get for them. Boys = action man/g.i Joe, girls = Barbie.
Boys have things that shoot spring loaded plastic missiles and about defeating the bad guy. Girls have barbies dream house, barbies dream car, barbies mansion etc.
Boys like war and girls like making relationships.
Do all girls like barbie type stuff? No. Do all boys like action man type stuff? No.
EDIT: Lol, seems I miss understood the topic and figured it was a discussion on the seemingly prevalent trend to ignore the differences in genders.
I'll leave my tirade up for amusement of others though
Gender Neutral is as bad as Gender discrimination, it too assumes the differences in gender is a bad thing to be addressed rather than to acknowledge and respect.
Think of it like this...
(Hypothetical)
I am making a Role Playing Game, one that has different stats for males and females, I would give the male more endurance and the female more dexterity.
In combat the male would be able to take more hits and survive an encounter.
In combat the female would be able to evade more hits and survive an encounter.
Different, yet both equally able to survive the encounter.
Neither superior to each other yet not clones of each other, different.
Gender Neutral would have us make both male and female characters have exactly the same stats so that neither is discriminated but acknowledging difference is not discrimination, claiming superiority due to differences is discrimination.
Gender Neutral is being touted as the answer to years of discrimination, but is it really ? If you remove the need to acknowledge the differences, you wont need to cater to those same differences...right ?
I had a lot of legos when I was a kid, but they were all he basic blocks. I absolutely hated girl-oriented toys and pink when I was little, but I didn't really like overtly boy-type stuff either. I built mostly houses nd animals with my legos. I guess animals are probably one of the most gender-neutral themes, though. Everyone loves animals!
I'm guessing it's less the themes themselves, and more the way they're marketed. Because like you, I fail to see anything particularly masculine about pirates and ninjas. Well, okay, male pirates were masculine as all getout, but it's not like the female pirates (which really did exist, it's not just some pornographic fantasy) didn't kick all kinds of butt too. A lot of it has to do with sexism in the way we raise little boys and little girls. To wit, whether there's anything inherently masculine about pirates or not, we still encourage little boys to play with pirates, and little girls to play with baby dolls -- in a way, socializing boys to go out of the house and do something for themselves, and women to stay at home and raise children.
As for something truly gender neutral: I don't know how it actually plays out in the movie, but I always got the impression from the trailer and the reviews I've read that the crystal spires and togas culture from Zardoz was like that, until Sean Connery showed up wearing a cod piece and not much else.
Sean Connery: so manly, he introduces gender roles into a civilization without them simply by being there.
I don't feel Zardoz has anything to do with gender neutrality at all. All of the clothing worn there looked like a kitsch take on earlier decades of sci fi and fantasy themed art. Look up some of the pulp comics from the 30s to the 50s and you'll see what I mean. IE neo-greek classical and sci fi barbarism. While I have to admit I found Zardoz's costume ridiculous as fuck, I think they were shooting for a sci fi version of Conanesque loincloths and not Borat in a mankini.
As to gender neutrality in general, I feel its an attempt to remove gender based prejudice from society in the most absurd way possible. Rather than trying to forge compassion understanding and tolerance of our various gender and sexuality differences, they instead are attempting to strip everyone of their core gender identity. Which in my not very humble opinion is a massive step towards fascism. Whats next? Making everyone wear a bag over their heads so we can try to stamp out the prejudicial concepts of ugly and beautiful? Or painting everyone a uniform hue to stamp out racism? Bollocks.
The trailer doesn't do a good job of showing it, but the sci-fi society up there had banned sex in order to stop reproduction in its tracks, and they were distributing guns to the people below in order to cut down on the population (the other half of the phrase "the gun is good" from the trailer is "the penis is evil." For some reason it got left out of that particular trailer.) I've never actually seen the movie, so I'm not sure just how de-sexed they were before Sean Connery's character got up there, but it's definitely going on to some extent.
You don't get why ninja's and pirates (and all the other stuff) are guy things? That is an easy one, boys like death, violence and badasses etc. Girls like playing house, doctor, having tea parties, dress up etc
I am talking broad generalizations and sterotypes but just look at THE boys and girls toys and the things you can get for them. Boys = action man/g.i Joe, girls = Barbie.
Boys have things that shoot spring loaded plastic missiles and about defeating the bad guy. Girls have barbies dream house, barbies dream car, barbies mansion etc.
Boys like war and girls like making relationships.
Do all girls like barbie type stuff? No. Do all boys like action man type stuff? No.
Um, did you read the rest of my post? I said there was nothing inherently masculine about that stuff, but we socialize boys in one direction and girls in the other. I'm saying it's more a matter of nurture than nature.
Gender neutrality is ultimately a social construction. Gender neutrality is not girls playing with ninja/pirate-themed toys, or boys playing with Barbies. To add labels such as "neutrality" or "multiculturalism" to things, objects or concepts is still implicitly referring to the opposite. For example, an "unisex bathroom" in a public building is not neutral, because it refers to the concept of gendered bathrooms. The bathroom in my appartment would be "neutral", because it doesn't need any other label to make sense.
Not the best example, I know.
"Playing outside" would be a gender neutral concept, since it is self-evident that it applies to both boys and girls. At least in our Western society.
Oh, nice point, something will still retain an attachment with gender while it uses a term that implies gender. So instead of unisex bathrooms, we just have bathrooms. Speaking on toys and such, it is often (for the most part) done in advertising, while colors and concepts often have no instrisic gender bend, the advertising gives it so.
I recall when I was a kid, there was this journal thingy that locked with a voice password. At the time I found this the coolest thing ever, but it was marketed as "Girl Tech", thus beyond my manly manly reach. Just an example of gender bias in marketing, I bet you something damn near similar was sold as "Spy Tech".
This did, however, make me think of all those times I've heard similar statements. In the past I've heard various people say that Star Wars was a 'guy theme', Cops and Robbers was a 'guy theme', Cowboys and Indians, Firefighters, Robots, Monsters, Aliens, Bugs, Cars, Trains and MANY other themes all favored men over women. At times it honestly seems like any conceivable theme has been declared to be the property of one gender or the other. It really makes you question if anything Lego produced (other than square blocks) could conceivably be considered gender neutral.
Not specifically in terms of Lego, but it seems like a good number of those themes could conceivably be more neutral, but the marketing has shifted them in the other direction for whatever reason - 30+ years ago there were "girl"-branded Star Wars toys (from stereotypical plush baby ewoks to the Princess Leia gun set), and those things have gone away. Same with the cowboy theme - it seems like there used to be some cross-gender marketing there (probably playing into the "girls love horses" thing).
That's happened in the opposite direction as well. I have a 5-year-old nephew who loves baking, so I wanted to get him one of those play ovens for his birthday and it turned out to be impossible to find one that wasn't pink and advertised completely with little girls. But my sisters and I shared one when we were kids back in the 80s and it was green (and the ads had two girls and a boy). And I find that especially bizarre given that most of the actual pastry chefs I know are men.
As far as I'm concerned, those are all toys that don't have an inherent gender outside of what the marketing injects into them.
I'm guessing it's less the themes themselves, and more the way they're marketed. Because like you, I fail to see anything particularly masculine about pirates and ninjas. Well, okay, male pirates were masculine as all getout, but it's not like the female pirates (which really did exist, it's not just some pornographic fantasy) didn't kick all kinds of butt too. A lot of it has to do with sexism in the way we raise little boys and little girls. To wit, whether there's anything inherently masculine about pirates or not, we still encourage little boys to play with pirates, and little girls to play with baby dolls -- in a way, socializing boys to go out of the house and do something for themselves, and women to stay at home and raise children.
As for something truly gender neutral: I don't know how it actually plays out in the movie, but I always got the impression from the trailer and the reviews I've read that the crystal spires and togas culture from Zardoz was like that, until Sean Connery showed up wearing a cod piece and not much else.
Sean Connery: so manly, he introduces gender roles into a civilization without them simply by being there.
I don't feel Zardoz has anything to do with gender neutrality at all. All of the clothing worn there looked like a kitsch take on earlier decades of sci fi and fantasy themed art. Look up some of the pulp comics from the 30s to the 50s and you'll see what I mean. IE neo-greek classical and sci fi barbarism. While I have to admit I found Zardoz's costume ridiculous as fuck, I think they were shooting for a sci fi version of Conanesque loincloths and not Borat in a mankini.
As to gender neutrality in general, I feel its an attempt to remove gender based prejudice from society in the most absurd way possible. Rather than trying to forge compassion understanding and tolerance of our various gender and sexuality differences, they instead are attempting to strip everyone of their core gender identity. Which in my not very humble opinion is a massive step towards fascism. Whats next? Making everyone wear a bag over their heads so we can try to stamp out the prejudicial concepts of ugly and beautiful? Or painting everyone a uniform hue to stamp out racism? Bollocks.
The trailer doesn't do a good job of showing it, but the sci-fi society up there had banned sex in order to stop reproduction in its tracks, and they were distributing guns to the people below in order to cut down on the population (the other half of the phrase "the gun is good" from the trailer is "the penis is evil." For some reason it got left out of that particular trailer.) I've never actually seen the movie, so I'm not sure just how de-sexed they were before Sean Connery's character got up there, but it's definitely going on to some extent.
You don't get why ninja's and pirates (and all the other stuff) are guy things? That is an easy one, boys like death, violence and badasses etc. Girls like playing house, doctor, having tea parties, dress up etc
I am talking broad generalizations and sterotypes but just look at THE boys and girls toys and the things you can get for them. Boys = action man/g.i Joe, girls = Barbie.
Boys have things that shoot spring loaded plastic missiles and about defeating the bad guy. Girls have barbies dream house, barbies dream car, barbies mansion etc.
Boys like war and girls like making relationships.
Do all girls like barbie type stuff? No. Do all boys like action man type stuff? No.
Um, did you read the rest of my post? I said there was nothing inherently masculine about that stuff, but we socialize boys in one direction and girls in the other. I'm saying it's more a matter of nurture than nature.
You really need to watch the whole film as you are rather missing the point on the reasons for the existence of the exterminator cult of Zardoz, as stated before, of which Zed played by Sean Connery is a member.
Basically a group of elitist dicks create a utopian society and wall themselves off from the rest of the world allowing the rest of humanity to sink into barbarism. However the stinky proletariat breed like rats and make the world untidy, not to mention gobble up precious resources. So one of the clever utopians dreams up a religious cult led by a floating stone head named Zardoz which tells the so called "brutals" that when they die they go to "the vortex" a magical mystical land of happy immortality. Zardoz also leads a group of holy executioners of which Zed, played by Sean Connery is a member, who butcher, rape, torture, what have you, all the brutals they desire, in holy Zardoz's name, as a form of population control.
I'm guessing it's less the themes themselves, and more the way they're marketed. Because like you, I fail to see anything particularly masculine about pirates and ninjas. Well, okay, male pirates were masculine as all getout, but it's not like the female pirates (which really did exist, it's not just some pornographic fantasy) didn't kick all kinds of butt too. A lot of it has to do with sexism in the way we raise little boys and little girls. To wit, whether there's anything inherently masculine about pirates or not, we still encourage little boys to play with pirates, and little girls to play with baby dolls -- in a way, socializing boys to go out of the house and do something for themselves, and women to stay at home and raise children.
As for something truly gender neutral: I don't know how it actually plays out in the movie, but I always got the impression from the trailer and the reviews I've read that the crystal spires and togas culture from Zardoz was like that, until Sean Connery showed up wearing a cod piece and not much else.
Sean Connery: so manly, he introduces gender roles into a civilization without them simply by being there.
I don't feel Zardoz has anything to do with gender neutrality at all. All of the clothing worn there looked like a kitsch take on earlier decades of sci fi and fantasy themed art. Look up some of the pulp comics from the 30s to the 50s and you'll see what I mean. IE neo-greek classical and sci fi barbarism. While I have to admit I found Zardoz's costume ridiculous as fuck, I think they were shooting for a sci fi version of Conanesque loincloths and not Borat in a mankini.
As to gender neutrality in general, I feel its an attempt to remove gender based prejudice from society in the most absurd way possible. Rather than trying to forge compassion understanding and tolerance of our various gender and sexuality differences, they instead are attempting to strip everyone of their core gender identity. Which in my not very humble opinion is a massive step towards fascism. Whats next? Making everyone wear a bag over their heads so we can try to stamp out the prejudicial concepts of ugly and beautiful? Or painting everyone a uniform hue to stamp out racism? Bollocks.
The trailer doesn't do a good job of showing it, but the sci-fi society up there had banned sex in order to stop reproduction in its tracks, and they were distributing guns to the people below in order to cut down on the population (the other half of the phrase "the gun is good" from the trailer is "the penis is evil." For some reason it got left out of that particular trailer.) I've never actually seen the movie, so I'm not sure just how de-sexed they were before Sean Connery's character got up there, but it's definitely going on to some extent.
You don't get why ninja's and pirates (and all the other stuff) are guy things? That is an easy one, boys like death, violence and badasses etc. Girls like playing house, doctor, having tea parties, dress up etc
I am talking broad generalizations and sterotypes but just look at THE boys and girls toys and the things you can get for them. Boys = action man/g.i Joe, girls = Barbie.
Boys have things that shoot spring loaded plastic missiles and about defeating the bad guy. Girls have barbies dream house, barbies dream car, barbies mansion etc.
Boys like war and girls like making relationships.
Do all girls like barbie type stuff? No. Do all boys like action man type stuff? No.
Um, did you read the rest of my post? I said there was nothing inherently masculine about that stuff, but we socialize boys in one direction and girls in the other. I'm saying it's more a matter of nurture than nature.
You really need to watch the whole film as you are rather missing the point on the reasons for the existence of the exterminator cult of Zardoz, as stated before, of which Zed played by Sean Connery is a member.
Basically a group of elitist dicks create a utopian society and wall themselves off from the rest of the world allowing the rest of humanity to sink into barbarism. However the stinky proletariat breed like rats and make the world untidy, not to mention gobble up precious resources. So one of the clever utopians dreams up a religious cult led by a floating stone head named Zardoz which tells the so called "brutals" that when they die they go to "the vortex" a magical mystical land of happy immortality. Zardoz also leads a group of holy executioners of which Zed, played by Sean Connery is a member, who butcher, rape, torture, what have you, all the brutals they desire, in holy Zardoz's name, as a form of population control.
Like I said, I've never actually seen it, it's just the impression the trailers and reviews gave me. I'm saving it for a chance to MST3K it in a group, along with a bunch of other B grade movies I've got lying around.
The easiest example demonstrating how pirate/ninja/whatever Legos tend to be "boy" toys: a near-total lack of female figures in those sets. Seriously. I dunno if things have changed, but I was playing w/ Legos in the mid-late 90s and owned a decent amount of castle, space, and pirate sets. One could argue whether the generic-looking heads/bodies are meant to be male or ambiguous, but those sets left me with tons of explicitly male heads and almost no explicitly female heads/bodies. (My sister had plenty, though, since she got a few of the *~*~pink*~*~ sets, so we traded a lot.) Also note that these "boy" sets tend to lack pink, purple, or any sort of pastel bricks, while the "girl" sets tend to be composed almost exclusively of them. (Again, heavy trading took place.)
Pirate/ninja/whatever sets tend to be coded male and marketed toward boys because it's part of a larger cultural narrative: men do, women are [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenActWomenAre]. (This is something that's obv been written about a lot in academia, but TVTropes does a decent enough job of summing up how it manifests in media.) "Active" sets, like castles, pirate ships, spaceships, etc tend to be designed around and marketed toward boys, while "passive" sets like beach resorts, beauty parlors, and... actually I remember them being almost all beach resorts (Google tells me it was the "Paradisa" line, the first and apparently then-only "girl" line) tend to be designed around and marketed toward girls.
To wit, compare Mighty Max and Polly Pocket, toys from a similar era that were almost identical in design/purpose, but made for boys and girls respectively:
(Sailor Moon and its imitators are great examples of media that is explicitly female-coded and incredibly "girly" but at the same time "active" rather than "passive.")
The other big cultural force at play here is that girls playing with "boy" toys is often tolerated, accepted, or even encouraged (sometimes even if it's contrary to the girl's interests,) while boys playing with "girl" toys is generally very heavily stigmatized. As a result, it's becoming more common for traditionally "boy" toys to be marketed toward girls as well. It's hard to untangle all the causes and effects of this... but generally we're seeing the categories become more "This is for boys... and maybe girls too I guess" and "This is for GIRLS. GIIIIIRLS."
Anyway, before I lose track of the point I was going to make... I don't think making Legos "gender-neutral" necessitates stripping them of their narrative/theme. The buckets of multi-colored but otherwise featureless bricks are, frankly, fucking boring. I only remember being interested in them as spare parts to use with my "good" sets to make bigger, cooler things.
Rather, I think the right path would be to decouple the active/passive dichotomy from the way the toys are gender-coded and to encourage the idea that while they may be coded a certain way, they can be played with by boys or girls. Adding more female figures to the "boy" sets and male figures to the "girl" sets would be the simplest and easiest first step. Mix the color palettes up some; there's no reason that every beach resort needs to be all pink/purple/pastel, and there's no reason we can't have some awesome pink spaceships.
I would have fucking loved this thing!
And market both types of sets to both genders, rather than just calling male-coded sets unisex and keeping the female-coded sets "for girls." (I could rant for pages on this, but it's problematic on so many levels. It feeds into a prohibition of boys liking "girly" things, it encourages all children to view the "girly" things as somehow inferior, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the smaller potential customer base means less resources/attention/marketing are devoted to them and then they actually become inferior.)
The important point is that to be more "gender-neutral," the sets do not need to become homogenized. They should become more varied. Have some female knights in the castle. Have some male customers in the beach resort and the beauty parlor. Have some badass fucking pink starfighters. (Not to replace kinda sets that exist now, but in addition to, or better yet, mixed in with them.) And market all the sets to boys and girls.
Basically, let kids have all four combinations of passive/active and boyish/girly and present them all as equally valid and for any gender.
Like I said, I've never actually seen it, it's just the impression the trailers and reviews gave me. I'm saving it for a chance to MST3K it in a group, along with a bunch of other B grade movies I've got lying around.
You don't get why ninja's and pirates (and all the other stuff) are guy things? That is an easy one, boys like death, violence and badasses etc. Girls like playing house, doctor, having tea parties, dress up etc
I am talking broad generalizations and sterotypes but just look at THE boys and girls toys and the things you can get for them. Boys = action man/g.i Joe, girls = Barbie.
Boys have things that shoot spring loaded plastic missiles and about defeating the bad guy. Girls have barbies dream house, barbies dream car, barbies mansion etc.
Boys like war and girls like making relationships.
Do all girls like barbie type stuff? No. Do all boys like action man type stuff? No.
Well to directly answer the question: I see how it's marketed as such, but in a society where women have been taking a more active role for decades now I don't see the theme itself (as opposed to its marketing) necessarily favoring one gender over the other. Though that aside, let me direct you to the rest of the original post, which notes that the pirates/ninjas thing simply caused me to consider similar statements that labeled everything from Star Wars to trains as masculine, thus making me wonder what people might consider an effectively gender neutral theme to be.
To be perfectly blunt, it seemed to me that we'd hit a nasty Catch 22 where most conceivable themes had been declared 'boy-ish' by default and everything else '[stereotypically] girly'. Or at least this would be the case if I took every claim I'd heard on the topic at face value. As such, I was curious as to what others would suggest as a middle ground (potentially including a refutation of the 'masculine nature' of the themes mentioned in the first post) which would bypass that Catch 22.
I don't think you have to have a gender neutral theme because only society decides what is appropriate for a specific gender. The way to make legos or any toy gender neutral is to simply market it to both boys and girls.
Ever notice that when Lego comes out with a new Star Wars or Pirates lego set there aren't any girls in the commercial? Except for maybe a mom and she's probably just there to spoil all the manly fun.
Why can't little sis play with lego pirate ship?
And while we're on the subject, it goes both ways. Lego Friends or whatever the fuck that pastel pink crap is, there needs to be a little boy with his little lego girl baking cupcakes.
That's how you make it gender neutral. You don't have to change the toys, just make it to where both boys and girls feel it's not wrong for them to play with them.
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