How Girls and Boys Play

[the Jester]

Kaodi, you might have misunderstood my statement. I have nothing against the soft sciences. I spent quite a few years as a psychologist, an analyst, and a detective/criminologist. The soft sciences are people, and therefore much harder to quantify, than to qualify. Though sometimes they are very hard to qualify as well.

I was merely making an observation. Self-contradiction is common with people (individually and in large groups), they are often paradoxes. Or at least seem that way often times.

That's okay by me. Just part of the game.

My observation was not intended to be disparaging, merely an acknowledgement that people are not things and therefore behavior is tough to analyze for predictive results. I am just aware of the limitations of soft sciences to accurately predict complex behavior.

Okay, I'll ask too, since you may have misunderstood Kaodi's post: what contradictions are you referring to?

 

[Alzrius]

Do any other men here feel vaguely uncomfortable hearing that the most important quality for girls was beauty?

Just hearing that inspires a reflexive action in me to say "that's sexist!" More specifically, the first train of thought that comes to mind is "either the study was somehow biased, or this is an example of reinforced cultural bigotry in action that made those girls care most about looks."

At the same time, given that there's absolutely no indication in the quoted text of either of those, I have to wonder if I'm being oversensitive to the issue out of some sort of fear of not being forward-thinking enough.

What do you guys (and, for that matter, you girls) think?

 

[Lwaxy]

Some girls have written complaints to Lego about the sexist girl toys offered. The complaint was not about color, but about the idea that just because they are girls they should have passive hairdressers/beauty freaks as figures instead of action types like Buffy or Xena. And my niece complains that she loves the new colors but why aren't they available for building fancy cars or even cranes.

I have yet to hear from a girl buying Legos because of a beauty salon. There are other toys offering that already.

 

[Jack7]

Okay, I'll ask too, since you may have misunderstood Kaodi's post: what contradictions are you referring to?

Or, you could have just pointed out the contradictions. Like he asked for. That would have been helpful.

The skate maneuvers had taken hours and hours to perfect, defying the consensus that modern kids don’t have the attention span to stick with painstaking challenges, especially during playtime.

This observation, based on what is said before and after, is obviously assumptive on 3 levels.

Lego confirmed that girls favor role-play, but they also love to build—just not the same way as boys. Whereas boys tend to be “linear”—building rapidly, even against the clock, to finish a kit so it looks just like what’s on the box—girls prefer “stops along the way,” and to begin storytelling and rearranging.

I've never seen a boy build anything that he didn't attach a story to it. He might finish it first and then build the story, or, as has been my usual observation, have the story first in mind and then build the object/scenario.

He might not discuss the story until the object is finished, but I've never seen a boy who couldn't ascribe a purpose and a story to an object he built or reproduced. (This can easily be tested with any boy you know.) The boy might not discuss his story, might prefer to keep it to himself unless asked, or his friends. Whereas a girl might voluntarily and without prompting describe her story to anyone around.

Some of the conclusions of this study are self-contradictory (and erroneous) to careful observation, and the conclusions are very assumptive. The assumption in this case is because the boy builds in a different way the implication is he's not storytelling or devising purposes other than the act of building, when girls by contrast build to tell stories, or to model things beyond building.

Different methods do not in any way necessitate different purposes.

With complex behaviors it is often very easy to draw the wrong conclusions regarding behavior. It's part of the trickiness of the soft sciences.

I understand it, I've seen wrong conclusions drawn over and over again in the soft sciences, and I've run experiments myself drawing faulty conclusions not because of errors in the evidence, but because of interpretive errors.

It's easy to do because humans are so complex.

But to honest the reason I don't point out things for others is because that's just not the way I think or prefer to argue. I know this seems strange to modern Geek culture (and that is a generalization of course, Geek culture), but I much prefer to point out discrepancies or clues and then let others see these things for themselves and come to their own conclusions about what they mean. I'll make an overt point if I feel it's really needed, but otherwise I'm not a Geek who argues point-counterpoint. It's not meant to be evasive, and I know the modern tendency is to say this obviously means that - but that's what I mean by the examples above. A thing may seem to mean that, but not mean that at all, that's just the conclusion drawn thus far.

And a thing may seem to mean this, but that is only a partially accurate conclusion. That's what I mean by self-contradictory and paradoxical things. A thing can be self-contradictory and still be at least partially accurate, just as a paradox can be true and yet seem logically fallacious.

The modern Geek tendency in analyzing things seems to me a naturally adversarial one of "wrong-proving."

For instance I made an observation about the soft sciences which seems (I cannot be sure, but I suspect) some took as a proof-challenge about the soft sciences, or the conclusions the CAs drew in the article. That thought never occured to me in making the statement, my observation was based around the empirically provable fact that studies (especially in the soft sciences) are ripe with interpretative errors, as are some of the conclusions cited in the article. I meant nothing more by the statement than that. That cultural anthropology is a very fuzzy science open to wide gaps in interpretation. (All science is but especially soft sciences because they are about people and behavior. This is not a judgement, just a fact.)

Arguments about wrong-proving are fine debates to have, but very incomplete ones. Me personally I'd rather see what parts of a thing might be true, and what parts of a thing might be false, and then set about refining things to get as close as possible to the Real Truth, which will never really be, the Real Truth.

My observations above are at best also partial truths. So I try not, if possible, to tell people what I think they can figure out on their own. I don't object to it, just try and avoid it if possible, especially when discussing other peoples work and conclusions.

I think everyone here is smart enough to come to their own conclusions, agree or disagree with me. So I try not to explain the things I think others can get for themselves, unless I'm just giving my personal opinion about some matter.

 

[Incenjucar]

On the sex/gender thing, it's worth keeping in mind that children will start picking up cultural indoctrination before they're old enough to view a Lego as something other than something to put in their mouth. Lego isn't out to encourage children to break out of the social conditioning of their culture; there's no money in fighting the system. As such, the studies aren't about what boys and girls should be doing, just what they are doing by the time they can make Lego money.

 

[Zelda Themelin]

I think truth about the study is no-way related how boys and girls are different when playing with legos. But is has all to do, with fact what makes most mums (females 20+) get legos for their little girl, instead of barbies or other such.

 

[S'mon]

Do any other men here feel vaguely uncomfortable hearing that the most important quality for girls was beauty?

Just hearing that inspires a reflexive action in me to say "that's sexist!"

No, but I expected that someone would feel that way. If people can be indoctrinated to believe that there are no differences in median physical strength between men and women, they can certainly be indoctrinated to believe that girls don't inherently prefer pretty things.

But reality - empirical evidence - says otherwise.

 

[Izumi]

As such, my observation from the findings is:

the Japs are idiots. Legos encourage engineering skills. Of all the toys to hand your kid, a box of legos is on the top of the list.

Not that the Japanese are slackers in the engineering department, but the Germans also rock at that point. Imagine if the Japs hadn't been so foolish to turn down the education toy, in favor of what? Transformers?

It's actually a matter of shikata. The Japanese have had their own brands of lego-like childrens toys for decades. They feel those are designed superior enough to Japanese sensibilities. Foreign stuff, even of good quality, is usually held from the market by excuses until a superior/equal and cheaper Japanese alternative is available. Prideful people and dirty business? Yes. Stupid? Not at all.

 

[Hautamaki]

Do any other men here feel vaguely uncomfortable hearing that the most important quality for girls was beauty?

Just hearing that inspires a reflexive action in me to say "that's sexist!" More specifically, the first train of thought that comes to mind is "either the study was somehow biased, or this is an example of reinforced cultural bigotry in action that made those girls care most about looks."

At the same time, given that there's absolutely no indication in the quoted text of either of those, I have to wonder if I'm being oversensitive to the issue out of some sort of fear of not being forward-thinking enough.

What do you guys (and, for that matter, you girls) think?

I read it not that the most important quality for girls was beauty, but rather that a lack of beauty in the standard Lego line was girls' biggest problem with lego. Which is understandable really, it's all hard edges and simple primary colors and the little lego figures are not exactly the pictures of physical beauty.

So what I took away was that lego has a lot of things that appeal to girls, their ability to use it to create their own stories and role play and so on, and really the one area they were lacking on in their appeal was the aesthetics, which is luckily a relatively simple fix. Just add more 'pretty' colours and slightly 'cuten up' the figures.

 

[Hautamaki]

I think truth about the study is no-way related how boys and girls are different when playing with legos. But is has all to do, with fact what makes most mums (females 20+) get legos for their little girl, instead of barbies or other such.

This is actually a great point. An interesting parallel is how teddy bears and other stuffed animals have evolved in their aesthetics over the years. They gradually developed larger foreheads, larger eyes, larger heads in proportion to body size, shorter limbs, and so on. Why? To the kids it made no difference at all; but to mom, the new style teddies are more appealing because they mimic features you see in human infants.