Paradox Lane: Gender Excursions Beyond the Legoland Wheelhouse

"Illustrative as it is humorous.?The title implies a mythopoetic navigation of witty, didactic, sardonic and even some childish profanity; thanks to?Lego-props, Randy allows us to take a novel look at?mythopoeia.?Categorically, this one was an easy choice; it goes into the Rogue Randy basket."?~?Daniel Deardorff (3D), Founder, MythSinger Consortium

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If you're a 5–10-year-old boy Lego has you in their myth-making wheelhouse. ?They know it. ?They even have screen-based, animation programs that consistently feature a ratio that spells this out: a team of three males to one female that nicely weaves a tutorial sub-plot -- on how to construct designs -- into the main storyline.

So, with covid X-Mas past, they are now gearing up — for 2023.? And its early offering does ignite a minor debate over nature, nurture, toys, mythmaking and sex.

Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, pranced into stores January 2019 -- with the goal of becoming a holiday “gotta-have” by the fall.? Underwritten by a progressive $50 million marketing campaign set in mythic "Heartlake City" the line features pastel-colored, new blocks that allow “ladyfig” characters -- sounds yummy, and taller and curvier than the typical Legoland denizen, to craft a cafe or, be it of interest, build various beauty salons.?

On the flip side, Hamleys, which is London’s 250+ year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, dismantled its pink “girls” and blue “boys” sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage:? merchandise is now tactically organized by types (Soft Toys) and interests (Outdoor), rather than floors dedicated to "dress-up" dolls and action figures.

So, is there a right or wrong path?? Is gender something to be systematically expunged from the things we use to play and craft myth, stories and legends.? Or is Lego merely being realistic, meeting girls somewhere in the middle of Legoland (outside that wheelhouse) in an attempt to earnestly prime their STEM interest in engineering?

Ethnologists at the Center of "Heartlake City’s Enthnosphere

Among the “top 10 characteristics for Lego” described in the early 1960's by a son of the founder was that it was “for girls and for boys,” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported.? But the new Friends collection, Lego says, was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — though, I know. I know. This is hard to believe — the sexes typically play different. ?To come to this startling conclusion, Lego recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the company, had them join forces with a cluster of anthropologists, and dispatched them in small teams to shadow girls and interview their families over a period of months in Germany, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.

Conclusion:? while as toddlers they interact similarly with the company’s Duplo blocks, by preschool girls prefer play items that are pretty, exude “harmony” and allow them to evoke a story.? They may enjoy constructing, but they lean toward role play. (Mythmaking, storytelling as it were).? So, it’s too-da-lou trusses, hello princesses.? Today’s toy executives insist they need to be more gender-specific: to be gender-and STEM promoting.

Play’s the Thing

As any cultural anthropologist (or child psychologist) will tell you, those observations are, to a degree, spot-on.? Toy choice among young children is a Big Kahuna of sex differences, one of the stablest distinctions across the lifespan.? It transcends not only culture but species: in two separate studies of primates, in 2002 and 2008, researchers found males gravitated toward stereotypically toys (like cars and balls) while females went “ape” for dolls.? Both sexes, incidentally, did have a keen fondness for stuffed animals and books.

Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios, chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively — but, when given a choice, usually prefer hanging with their own kind.

Myth-Making Prime Time

This speaks directly to how young boys form and shape self-identity and how truly different that process is from girls. Girls, as we know, have obvious biological markers that signal maturity and outwardly predicate change of self-identity.? But what is even more important is how girls begin to formulate their feelings, social view of the world and communicate that to each other. These are features on a girl’s social landscape that aren’t significantly altered by technology.? Boys, on the other hand, forge self-identity by interaction with their physical environment and link their social world through that instrumental style of relationship building. This may not seem like a big difference, but still a score for Lego, right?? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police, eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views.? Yet, according to Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that’s also the age when their brains are pliable, most open to influence on the abilities and roles traditionally associated with their sex.??

No coincidence that’s also prime myth-making time:? when the process of personalizing symbols and anchoring them in the psyche is best manifest.? Think of all the fundamental scripts targeting this age to spell out role expectations, from Aesop's famous fables to Brother Grim.? These are still moral mainstays: used to teach and learn proper community conduct and standing in society.

In addition, every experience, every interaction, every activity — when they laugh, learn, cry, play — reinforce some neural circuits at the expense of others, and the younger the child the greater the effect. Ponder:? boys from more egalitarian homes are more nurturing toward babies.? Meanwhile, in a study of more than 5,000 3-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both girls and boys with older sisters.

Traditionally, toys complement children's developmental capacities for adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents.? How can they hone skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences?? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl-friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty-spa lab” to “perfume factory”?

Our Evolving Nature to Nurture

Whereas multi-media advances have certainly helped girls plug in and increase the amplitude of their expression (as friends and family members can attest), the same multi-media, gaming technology has often had a profoundly negative social effect on many boys.? In some extreme instances boys have unplugged from the real world and insulated themselves in sheaths of computer code.? In basic terms, many boys have lost direct mentors or in more pragmatic terms, created virtual mentors as media technology and peers have taken precedence over parents, educational partners and other significant adult role models.

Rigorous science and new methods of looking at male and female brains in “living-time”, problem-solving situations have laid to rest any debate about identical brain structure: the male brain's thicker right hemisphere cortex favors instrumental, visual-spatial activity such as tossing things at a target or tackling challenges a direct way.? While the female brain's larger corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve fibers that act as a kind of relay station connecting the right and left sides of the brain) favors relational, verbal activity such as intuition and a balanced consideration of life experiences.? Sex differences in brain structure have consistently played out in sex differences in thinking patterns.? One of the best ways to illustrate this difference is in parenting styles between moms and dads when a child cuts their knee and is crying in pain.

While there will always be exceptions and similarities are still more evident than differences, many moms intuitively give a wailing child a long hug first then attend the wound.? Dads are more likely to give a judicious hug and focus the majority of their attention on plastering the injury.? Both responses rely on the wisdom of nature and nurture that make parents a remarkably good team.

At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture evolves with nature:? the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on wee ones’ potential than parents imagine.??

And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial.? There is even quite a bit of evidence coming from Europe that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers.

Yet, perhaps, then, Hamleys is on to something as the latest cute-kid "viral-vid" (viewed 5 million+ times on YouTube: Riley on Marketing shows a little girl in front of a wall of pink packaging, asking:

“Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different-color stuff?”?*??

Good question, young lady!

About the author:? Randy Eady, a Prof. and Course Chair of Cultural Anthropology at the USAF Academy was awarded the USAF Academy’s “Outstanding Behavioral Science Instructor Award” for innovative education/creative treatment with behavioral approaches to trauma and recovery.? During his tenure Eady worked on the task force related to ameliorating the climate of sexual harassment at the AF Academy and created Ko~Sha~Rey Rhythms (KR) Terrapeutics.? Randy has a score of years of specific experience with U.S. Defense Dept. positions as a trauma therapist/counselor -- where he wore blue a lot.

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*Considerations for both the benefits and potential costs of uncertainty (valance) are being addressed in Riley's with an aim of understanding how this process of dealing w/dissonance (emotionally, cognitively & sensorially–synaesthetically) can be better understood in light of creativity, learning, and development.?

Learning and life are filled with uncertainty. Although the experience of uncertainty can cause emotional discomfort and some level of cognitive rigidity, uncertainty serves as a catalyst and condition for change. In this way, uncertainty represents a core facet in the interrelationship among creativity, learning, and development.

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Now, dear reader, you deserve a moment of train-Zen