This article about the girl from the 1981 Lego print ad is great. But it’s too simple to state that “children haven’t changed. We have.” The people making advertisements today are the children that were being advertised to in 1981, so if it wasn’t the advertising that changed them, what did? But that’s not the point. The world has changed.
Lego has changed tremendously in the past few decades. They now have licensed toy lines, video games, TV shows, and a movie. They still sell the generic stuff too, but it’s hard to find. They have a huge number of different product lines, some of which are targeted at old stereotypical gender roles, and these just look awful.
However:
1. Lego has always sold kits that come with instructions that are basically just snap-together models.
2. Lego still sells building sets that do not come with instructions and are just a bunch of pieces.
Look, so you understand where I’m coming from: I want a world where everyone is free to be who they are. That means they do not feel any pressure to be anything that they are not. There’s a lot of negatives in that sentence, but the point is that I want the world to be a place where a person can grow up without feeling cultural, physical, or any other kind of pressure to conform to any sort of standard in regards to who they are. Everyone is unique, and that complexity is what makes us human. If we as a whole can embrace that complexity, humanity will be powerful (and peaceful). I want that.
So in as much as pushing for a fluid non-gender binary world is a step in that direction, I am all for it (by all means, go ahead and petition the White House). But I do not understand what the purpose of “gender” would be in such a world.
If “gender” (a thing not related to biological sex) is fluid and limitless, what’s the point of it? What is its purpose?
The Juno Blog 