If you’ve ever applied for a job, you know about that tricky salary history question interviewers almost always ask.
Today New York City will officially ban employers from asking about pay history during hiring processes in order to address the city’s wage gap which keeps women and people of color from earning the same amount of money for the same amount of labor compared to white men.
Irecently finished reading mathematician Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction, and learned that even if a question about pay history is entirely removed, interviewers can use questions about salary expectation as a proxy and that can still limit a minority’s chance to be paid fairly. Plus, with the help of third-party vendors and credit check companies who amass data on Americans all the time - selling our personal data - I wanted to learn more about how the law can prevent employers from taking advantage of applicants in our era of data collection and inequality.
So, I spoke with the First Lady of New York City, Chirlane McCray, along with the commissioner on NYC Commission on Human Rights, Carmelyn Malalis, and public advocate, Letitia James, who was the main person to introduce the legislation. Here’s the interview.
Cape Town-based photographer Johnny Miller reveals distinct lines between rich and poor in a striking (and unsettling) series of photographs. Taken using drones, the aerial perspective presents the harsh reality of past Apartheid policies and the continued disparity in a way that can’t be ignored.
No essay or magazine article in the world can convey the stark divide between the extreme rich and the extreme poor as this photo does - taken of the Paraospolis Favela and Sao Paulo, Brazil. The photo is one of a series of amazing images showcased here on the deputydog blog.
This shows the social relationship of economy in space. It is the physical and visual representation of how we are divided into different classes; working class, middle class and upper class. It is the line of poverty (left) against wealth (right). Is this how our space should be used? Or should space be more integrated? Should space be defined by our income and working situations?
With the Torre DavidinstallationUrban-Think Tank won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. After a few years of screening at festivals, schools, exhibitions, and a few news broadcasts around the world, the short film telling the story of Torre David it’s now publicly available.
Centro Financiero Confinanzas, also known as Torre de David(theTower of David), is an unfinished skyscraperinCaracas, the capital of Venezuela. It is the third highest skyscraper in the country after the twin towers of Parque Central Complex. The construction of the tower began in 1990 but was halted in 1994 due to the Venezuelan banking crisis. As of 2016, the building remains incomplete and unused. […]
Alfredo Brillembourg, relative of the late David Brillembourg who was a main investor of the tower, founded Urban Think Tank, which call on international attention for developing “informal settlements”.[5] The group made a documentary on how to make potential improvements with the complex which won a Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale of the Venice Biennale.[2]
After relocation had proceeded in July 2014, newspaper Tal Cual reported that Chinese banks were interested in buying the tower and renovating it for its original use.[9][11] On July 23, 2014, President Nicolás Maduro announced that the government had not yet decided what to do with the building, but was considering at least three possible options: “Some are proposing its demolition. Others are proposing turning it into an economic, commercial or financial center. Some are proposing building homes there. …We’re going to open a debate.”[12][13] In April 2015, the head of the government of the Capital District, Ernesto Villegas, announced that the tower would be used temporarily as a center for emergency care. Villegas indicated that members of the National Guard, Fire Department, and officials from the Directorate of Civil Protection would be installed in the building to serve the public.[14]
However in April 2016, it was reported that the Chinese bank proposal fell through and that the tower was not in use.[2]
During the Summer 2014 Mami-City participated at an intensive workshop organised from the MoMa New York and the Mak in Vienna. Along with many great Universities like ETH Zürich, University of Cambridge and impressive offices like RUA Arquitetos and SITU we could help designing the exhibition. If you are interested in here you can find an article about the exhibition.
This shit is so funny and it just keeps getting funnier. First a three million dollar mansion and now this. He’s living a lavish millionaire lifestyle off the donations of socialists. This is why socialism always fails. None of these people actually live their principles. It doesn’t matter if it’s a talking head, an activist or a politician. The moment they get the money or the power to actually do something human nature takes over and they run with the bag.
I’m literally begging his simps to defend this shit. Please.
wish i was a commie. maybe i could also live off of donations then
BLM leaders and “trained Marxists” getting their collection of million dollar mansions now a commie twitch streamer getting a Porsche on top of everything else.
Perfect example of communism and socialism at work, the people at the top bilking the people at the bottom and living like kings.
Except instead of taxes people willingly hand them the money
Hey I saw a video of this guy the other day where he was getting pressed about his right to use other people’s content without permission when he wants a break on stream
Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.
The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.
On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention.
How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the conceptof algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.
I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.
She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did.
I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.
Pink Gears
Lego makes no pink gears.
I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?
I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.
This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork.
In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:
On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.
On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.
For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement.
You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money.
Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Breaking Patterns
I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.
The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it.
I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them.
And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.
People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial.
It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay.
Market Mercenary
You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.
Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.
As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum.
This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else.
The worst thing you can do is nothing new. Remember that the next time you make your gears gray.
Still working on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing! But I’m reblogging this old post since the holidays are coming up, and I (along with probably many others) have been doing this same gift-buying dance yet again.
Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!
A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’twant something that looks like a motorcycle.
Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve.
In short: if you make those pink gears, and you love and understand gears enough to do it well, you’re bound to find an audience. And while some literalpink gears would no doubt bring more women into tech fields than a Barbie doll holding a laptop will, this advice extrapolates to all manner of absences in the market. If you can take something out there and make it just a little different according to your personal criticisms or a demand you see, you can potentially reach a lot of people who share your critique.
I vaguely remember hearing about the Rebelle line. Of course, I can see the complaints about the Cornersight from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. “Oh, sure, put a mirror on the girl’s gun, so she can check her makuep because she’s a girl. Sexist mysogyny blah blah blah”
I remember seeing a video a while ago that some parents took of their girl saying something like “pink is bad becasue they want to say all this stuff is for girls, and ‘they’ want me to not play with the boy stuff” And that was just so surreal. I think some people just have this attitude that the color pink is the perpetrator in an insidious plot to control women. I just don’t understand.
I think if anyone actually fielded that criticism of Nerf’s Cornersight, my response to them would be “so what?”. A gun you can check your makeup in is like a Swiss army knife simultaneously made manlier andmore effeminate. Their criticism might be warranted if it was a cheap Nerf gun with a superfluous makeup kit on the side, but the whole Rebelle line is solid and functional.
I needed some Nerf weapons for a tabletop game I DMed recently (long story), and it gave me an opportunity to try a bunch out. Compared to most Nerf weapons, I’d actually say the Rebelle line contains much less stuff that is vestigial to its core function. The mechanical, 90s-punk design is foregone in favor of a sleeker, ergonomic build, replacing all the boxy fake mechanics with airy aesthetic choices (compare Nerf’s Thunderbow to their Arrow Revolution). If we’re criticizing non-gun elements slapped on for gender appeal, we should be more offended by all the fake pistons and bolts that line most Nerf weapons to make them more “manly”.
The stigma around pink stuff stems from the fact that - in many cases - it is a legitimately inferior product. When people become too dedicated to the idea that ”pink is for girls”, it means companies can market an inferior or overpriced product and people will stillbuy it if there is nothing better being sold “for girls”. The reason I’m praising Rebelle so much is because it takes the feminine design and fucking delivers. Not only do the weapons have seemingly equal quality to Nerf’s other products (at least from what I’ve seen), but those two bows I linked up there are sold at the exact same price point.
By contrast, the reason I’m so critical of Lego’s female-targeted products is because they don’t have the same level of functionality as the male-targeted ones. They’re getting better, and the new sets have much more in the way of moving parts and creative piece usage (and I kind of want some of the Elves stuff, maybe), but it’s still very much a “gateway drug” to advanced Lego sets, whereas Rebelle delivers a well-rounded arsenal and only stops short of fully-automatic weapons (which I view as understandable, given the whole “elegant spy” aesthetic).
Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.
The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.
On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention.
How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the conceptof algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.
I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.
She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did.
I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.
Pink Gears
Lego makes no pink gears.
I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?
I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.
This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork.
In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:
On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.
On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.
For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement.
You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money.
Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Breaking Patterns
I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.
The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it.
I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them.
And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.
People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial.
It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay.
Market Mercenary
You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.
Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.
As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum.
This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else.
The worst thing you can do is nothing new. Remember that the next time you make your gears gray.
Still working on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing! But I’m reblogging this old post since the holidays are coming up, and I (along with probably many others) have been doing this same gift-buying dance yet again.
Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!
A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’twant something that looks like a motorcycle.
Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve.
In short: if you make those pink gears, and you love and understand gears enough to do it well, you’re bound to find an audience. And while some literalpink gears would no doubt bring more women into tech fields than a Barbie doll holding a laptop will, this advice extrapolates to all manner of absences in the market. If you can take something out there and make it just a little different according to your personal criticisms or a demand you see, you can potentially reach a lot of people who share your critique.
Healthy plants, including crops and trees, are vital for our future. They are fundamental to our food, environment, economy and social wellbeing.
Plant scientists are finding new ways to solve some of our biggest challenges, such as protecting our forests, finding new fuel sources and ensuring that we have enough food for a growing population.
Did you know that ¼ of all medicines contain materials taken from plants?
Flood refugees from Arkansas near Memphis (Texas, 1937). These people, with all their belongings, are bound for the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where they hope to pick cotton.
its so weird how so many prominent economists are fiscally conservative libertarians like… at least choose something that makes sense for the currently relevant system of oppression like social democracy, why would you try to insist on implementing an even more (implicitly) oppressive and more chaotic system of socioeconomics?
Because they understand that the free market is a much better alternative to our current economy and that social democracy is shit?
“it’s so weird how people who are educated on the subject of economics disagree with the economic policies I support. why don’t they try agreeing with me as I’m obviously right and the ones who spent their lives studying this are obviously in the wrong…”
Actually the lead economist who was all for the free market, Milton Friedman, realized how damaging free reign market economies can be due to human error. The 2008 market collapse caused him to realize the error of his ways but people still follow his old teachings and arguments. A free market economy works in theory but because humans are imperfect they cannot be successful in practice. People that still argue that the government had no place in markets need to realize that their way of thinking is outdated and irrelevant and that economics have evolved past them.
Never forget
“‘What happens, happens’ is more oppressive than ‘government planning and oversight’”. Tumblr economists, you never cease to amaze me.
I’m not sure what’s more unbelievable: the claim that Milton Friedman realized the “error of his ways” two years after he died, or that it was the unrestricted free market of the pre-2008 crash economy that would’ve done it.
