Slash2x said:
I do not ask for the "girls" or "boys" toy for my son when I get a Happy Meal. I ask him what toy he wants to play with and I ask for that toy. He wanted the some MLP stuffed animal on an end cap the other day, and I was like sure buddy. Then the lady at the register asked him if that was for his sister and he (2 year old) got pissed of at her and said "it mine!"
Good for your son, and good for you for being supportive over that.
I'd imagine it would be better to have more opportunities to choose "girl" toys 'cause toys are toys.
So to the OT if it were a step toward "promoting diversity" then it would be 50% M/F, like life, not 100% Female or 100% Male, like nowhere. Instead it is just a toy set with only women, just like the ones before it only had men.
That would be a valid argument if there weren't already a huge majority of male versions already. It's a false equivalency. When one person wants a 100 meter bridge, and the other doesn't one a bridge at all, the solution is not to make a 50 meter bridge. Adding a toy set that's dedicated to a historically underrepresented group of people is not being unfair to the group of historically overrepresented people, it's simple representation.
WhiteTigerShiro said:
In my eyes, the solution to there not being enough female Lego characters in playsets is to mix-up the genders to be something closer to 50/50 - maybe even include an extra figure or two if needed - not to release all-new "girl" Legos. All that does is lead to additional segregation.
Again, this would be valid
if there weren't already a huge skew in representation towards men.
Lets take a mathematical approach to this, switch things up. Lets say there are 75 male figures, and only 25 female ones. We could have sets that are now 50/50 male:female figurines, but that still leaves male figurines in the majority. The
only way to get a proper 50/50 representation is to
provide female-only sets. Especially considering that there are already a plethora of male-only sets, I don't see the issue. I do not assume malicious intent by Lego, it's just what it is.
That's like saying that the solution to slavery is that blacks should have been allowed to enslave whites for a century or two; or that we should still have "whites" and "blacks" bathrooms, but now the blacks will have the nice bathrooms, then eventually when we've "evened-out" we can start sharing bathrooms. As the old idiom states: Two wrongs do not make a right. "Girls-only" Legos is not the answer to the notion that Lego playsets are too male-oriented.
It is not the equivalent at all. Slavery is not equivalent to representation in most any sense that I can think of, they're two widely different topics. Slavery involves one group dominating itself over another, and ideally would be better with
less representatives. Segregation involves
disenfranchising already underrepresented minorities, it works opposite of representation.
Really think about what you're saying. You are comparing a toy set intended to bring more representation to a historically underrepresented group to the act of slavery and the arbitrary segregation of people based on factors they cannot control (an act that, as I said before,
limits representation). You're saying it is unacceptable for women to have more representation in a medium that is dominated by male representation. The only solution is to arbitrarily go 50/50, still giving men the dominant supply of representation.
If you really wanted to keep with your slavery/segregation analogy, a better version would be to say that, say, back in the 1960s we should have emphasized great black teachers in our school systems to show that minorities could achieve greatness, or show black kids in segregated and low-quality schools that they can be just as successful and hard-working as their supposed better whites.
This toy set is intended to highlight an underrepresented group of people because they shouldn't need to in the first place. That's why it's important.
ALL THE KIDS![/sub][/sub]
