Friends range: LEGO is already trying to save the furniture ...

I will wrote my skepticism about the Friends range a few days ago. I was probably not the only one to think that this line intended for girls would raise a serious problem: Is LEGO showing sexism? sectarianism? condescending to little girls who want to play with LEGOs?

In A press release fallen like a hair on the soup in full commercial launch of the Friends range, LEGO explains that it is important to clarify a few points about this range that I summarize here: The Friends sets are designed like those of the other LEGO ranges, they are just as constructible, packaged like the others, with instructions and parts in bags like the others, that the pink bricks are not a novelty and that the marketing plan for this range is the same as for the others ...

LEGO then defends itself against offering girls only the Friends range, and that they can play, because they are obviously capable of it even if they are girls, with the other range of the manufacturer ...

In short, it smacks of the emergency rescue attempt of a product whose brand image has tilted to the wrong side in a few weeks ... But LEGO boasts of having tested the product with thousands of girls and their parents. for 4 years, and therefore to have largely covered the issue ...

I think that LEGO has forgotten some basic principles: If this product was not intended for a particular audience and in any case different from the one usually targeted by LEGO, why did you turn the minifig into a mini-doll? Because once again, the whole problem is there and not in the candy pink or the still dubious marketing choice to sectorize the products according to the sex of the customer.

In France, we are less sensitive to the problem of sexism in our daily lives, but I tell myself that there must be an American feminist association that risks asking this obvious question: Why do girls have the right to a different toy from the one for boys for whom the rest of the LEGO range seems reserved?

How can a little girl who sees her brother, her cousin, playing with LEGOs and classic minifigs, hope to share this activity when she does not have the same toy in her hands?

One would have thought that LEGO had learned the lessons of the Belville range. Apparently not, LEGO continues to want to offer a product intended only for girls and significantly different from the rest of the range that made it successful. The LEGO minifig as we know it remains the yardstick of this construction toy, not the brick which is declined by many other manufacturers.

Until proven otherwise, for LEGO, boys create and build and girls therefore play with dolls ...

 Find the official press release at this address.