LEGO Heroica: Corporate Irresponsibility
Time once again for a rant about LEGO.
As I have said in previous posts (here and here), I don’t get the recent focus on violence nor the dominance of male characters in many of the toy lines the company develops in-house. But because there is some value in LEGO toys, especially once the carefully designed sets are deconstructed and true creativity is allowed to flourish, I have kept my name on LEGO’s email list. Regular communication from the company also keeps me informed of new toys to blog about, like the Heroica line of games.
Looking further into this toy line, I was not surprised to discover that in the LEGO lexicon, “Heroica” means “violence and masculinity.”
All of the Heroica heroes are male, and while it is nice to see some reformed bad guys among them, it is disheartening to see them wielding weapons with such evident malice on the LEGO website. In the animations accompanying the character descriptions, The Knight looks as though he is goring his imaginary opponent with his sword while The Rogue repeatedly stabs at his. (Check out all the heroes here.)
The videos are worse, although no more violent than your average after-school hour on Teletoon I suppose. Here are a few still shots from the first clip in the series that tells the Heroica story:
The monsters are also a rather scary bunch, “crushing” anyone who opposes them and using “brute strength” to defend their turf. And then there are the werewolves’ whose claws and fangs can “easily shred through armor.”
What are boys learning from toys like this or the similarly male-dominated Ninjago?
Lesson One: saving the world is the job of boys and men.
Portraying the leader/saviour/rescuer almost exclusively as male perpetuates the “big wheel imperative,” a phrase coined by psychologist William Pollack in his book Real Boys. Pollack notes that boys raised with the idea that males are natural leaders or authority figures tend to feel subconscious stress as they get older, believing that they need to perform at their highest level at all times. The big wheel imperative also teaches boys to maintain a façade of control, even when things are not going as planned, while never giving into feelings of doubt or betraying the slightest hint of weakness. We see evidence of the latter point every time a boy “sucks it up” instead of crying when hurt or scared.
Lesson Two: boys like to fight.
In Heroica and Ninjago, LEGO presents violence not as a necessary evil, but as something enjoyable. And since women are not invited to help defend home and hearth, the association between violence and masculinity, seen in other areas of our culture, is reinforced. (For the record, there is a female character in Ninjago who likes to fight, but the video clips associated with the toys show her being kidnapped and left behind to mind the store when the boys leave, so it doesn’t appear that she makes much of a contribution.)
This seems a heavy load for me to dump on one company, and I am certainly not trying to pin the blame for gender stereotypes and their impact on LEGO alone. The themes I’m talking about here emerge across all of the pop culture aimed at boys from preschool through the primary grades. But unlike some other toy companies, LEGO is uniquely positioned to do something about it. It is one of the largest toy companies in the world, loved by children around the globe.
When I have written about LEGO in the past, people have commented that the company is under no obligation to promote gender balance and non-violence. True enough. But LEGO has made itself a leader in other areas and seems keen to tout its corporate responsibility bona fides on its website.
In an era when the chemicals used in toys are often in question, LEGO stands out as one of the safest toys in the world. The company has a lengthy description of its safety practices on its website, and also notes that it is part of ICTI CARE, an ethical manufacturing program. LEGO donates toys to SOS Children’s Villages and children confined to hospital. The company was also the first in the toy industry to join the UN’s Global Compact, which covers issues like human rights, labour standards, and environment.
Clearly the company has many progressive practices in place, so why the retrograde attitude toward gender and the increasing emphasis on violence?
Hi
Thanks for this post, I really appreciate the effort you take in holding Lego accountable.
I love Lego, as do both of my kids and I can see the educational benefits and also the environmental/ethical advances Lego has made.
Nevertheless they do have a gender bias (something that is coming up again with their 2012 “girls” line) and it is something as a fan of Lego I would like to see change.
They do have a policy against modern weaponry in their sets which I applaud, but I would just like to see them do more to balance the obvious “action/violence” focus in many of their themes.
So I will continue to support Lego by writing about them and buying their products myself but I will also continue to advocate for change in their philosophy.
Thanks again for making me think.
Cheers
Inger
Thanks for your comment. The toys have tremendous educational potential, but the messages some lines send are of great concern, as you have said. I will be sending the company a copy of this blog post and I’ll share their response here.
I accidentally found this small blog and would like to say that you seem overly concerned and overly critical about Lego. When I was a kid my friends and I enjoyed playing Lego with no concern to gender roles. That seems to be a more adult bias. Also my wife and many of the girls in the daycare that I run enjoy playing Lego and have no concern over violence or what it teaches boys. I think that they are trying to follow a traditional RPG content line with their RPG toys and make an all encompassing toy line that would work for both boys and girls. Girls have barbies and girly things already.
Mego bloks are more of a childs toy and are even more violent and include material from violent video games…..
Thanks for your comment. I also played with LEGO when I was a child, a time when it was just building blocks, not pre-designed sets with weapons and defined characters, almost all of whom are male.
When I criticize LEGO it is not just the toys, but also the marketing that surrounds them. If you look at some of the videos on the LEGO website, like the ones I took the still shots from in this post, they are incredibly violent. What’s worse, the characters seem to enjoy laying a beating on other characters. As other posts I have written show, there is also tremendous gender bias in the marketing.
I understand what you are saying about my thoughts being an adult perspective but I think the impact is not something that boys even realize or adults can detect. It is not the direct impact of these images which might be seen in boys’ immediate behaviour, but the more subconscious lessons boys receive. When boys see male characters acting with unrestrained violence in a LEGO video or commercial, it adds to the “environment of images” (to quote Justin Lewis of Cardiff University) that shows the ideal male as tough and aggressive—a message boys get from all areas of pop culture, including books, popular TV shows, and films.
Few boys will act with violence or aggression as a result of playing with these toys, but the images they see in LEGO and other violent, male-dominated toys and characters, will help shape their idea of what it means to be male.
Yes, this idea can change and it will be affected by the way they are raised, but the notion that males need to be tough and strong at all times is a hard one to shake, once it is established. And it gets set in place early. As an example, I just saw an older boy get made fun of for crying by a five-year-old boy. This is the kind of impact that this macho imagery can have.
It is not just LEGO that is contributing to this environment of images, but, as I say in my post, it is disappointing that a company that is so progressive in many areas chooses to add to the negative images in pop culture by increasing its emphasis on violence and presenting violence as a desirable male characteristic.
As I said in a previous post about gender bias in LEGO advertising: “The site now gets 790,000 visits per day, resulting in 8.1 million daily page views. Back in 2002, visitors were spending an average of more than 45 minutes per visit on the site, a number that has not likely decreased. Not hard to see what these figures add up to—a lot of exposure to stereotypes for kids.” And this kind of advertising does have an impact. In fact, television advertising (presented on websites now) has been called one of “the most important teachers of gendered behaviors.”*
*Pike, Jennifer and Nancy A. Jennings. “The effects of commercials on children’s perception of gender appropriate toy use.” Sex Roles 52, no. 1-2 (2005): 83-91.