{"id":7096,"date":"2014-02-22T15:31:20","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T21:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=7096"},"modified":"2014-02-22T15:40:05","modified_gmt":"2014-02-22T21:40:05","slug":"why-i-still-love-goldieblox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2014\/02\/22\/why-i-still-love-goldieblox\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Still Love GoldieBlox"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GB_Box_BT002_v1_r1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you care about smart toys or if you don\u2019t live under a media rock, then by now you\u2019ve heard about GoldieBlox, the girls engineering toy<\/b><\/a>. Maybe you read about it here at Girl w\/Pen<\/b><\/a>. Maybe you saw the viral video about the toy that parodied the Beastie Boys song, \u201cGirls.\u201d<\/a> In the video, three girls set off a Rube Goldberg machine and aim to take over the world. The only problem was that the Beastie Boys said thank you by suing GoldieBlox. Then the toy got critiqued left and right\u2014too pink, too princessy, too wrong for \u201cstealing\u201d a Beastie Boys song. Well now, no matter how you felt about the toy, you likely saw their new ad<\/a> while inhaling nachos during the Super Bowl. GoldieBlox won Intuit\u2019s small business Super Bowl commercial competition which means they essentially won 4 million dollars, the amount equivalent to make and then screen a commercial during the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n

And that means that GoldieBlox really just became a household name.<\/p>\n

This commercial puts GoldieBlox, a small start-up toy company that wants to, as they say, \u201cdisrupt the pink aisle,\u201d at your local toy store, back on top. And to make matters even better, days ago GoldieBlox\u2019s \u201cSpinning Machine\u201d won the People\u2019s Choice and Educational Toy award<\/a> of the year at the 14th<\/sup> annual Toy Industry Association (TIA) Awards. Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox CEO, invented one of the first engineering toys for girls. She shares her challenges in her TEDX talk<\/a>: her path as a female minority in a Stanford engineering program, a woman inventor in the big business androcentric toy industry, and as a female entrepreneur in booming Silicon Valley. Sterling\u2019s vision as an entrepreneur, and the ideological work of the toy, are the reasons we wanted her to help us open a new gender center, the Cassandra Voss Center<\/a>, on our campus. So this Fall, we became the \u201cMidwest launch\u201d of GoldieBlox.<\/p>\n

What did that mean? Debbie Sterling and VP, Lindsey Shepard, spoke on our campus and taught us how to engage hundreds of kids with GoldieBlox when we created a toy zone in our Center. St. Norbert College was also among the first colleges to include the toy in their curriculum. As Assistant Professor of Education, Chris Meidl, said when he introduced the toy in his class on \u201cPlay,\u201d \u201cNo matter any other criticisms about the toy itself, the clear message delivered is that girls can build too. And that is a message worth being heard, for girls and boys, for women and most importantly for men.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m loyal-it\u2019s true. I know the founders personally and heard them speak passionately about their dream of the toy and for girls globally. The toy, though, has come under a lot of critique. When Slate<\/i>\u2019s holiday gift guide tagline read \u201cForget GoldieBlox. Buy a Birdfeeder Instead,\u201d<\/a> I wanted to throw a birdfeeder at my computer screen. The holiday season is, of course, the biggest commercial moment in the toy company year. Slate<\/i> just kept going with, \u201cFirst Everyone Loved GoldieBlox. Now Everyone Hates GoldieBlox.\u201d Hate is a strong word and I guess Slate<\/i> figured that out since at this writing, they removed the above title and have given GoldieBlox a second look under the article, \u201cGoldieBlox: Great for Girls? Terrible for Girls? Or Just Selling Toys?\u201d<\/a> Well good for you Slate<\/i> for modifying your backlash after the fact. Sigh. Then when Jezebel recently wrote, \u201cGoldieBlox Means Well But Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype,\u201d<\/a> I had to weigh in.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been in Women\u2019s and Gender Studies since I was 19 years old. On the one hand, I welcome and get the onslaught of feminist critique of GoldieBlox that is now coming to a blog near you. On the other hand, I am no ideological purist and I wonder the degree to which critics grasp what it takes to break gender barriers in all these fields\u2014STEM, toy industry, start-up\/Silicon Valley culture\u2014and make a toy that has mass appeal. I repeat\u2014mass<\/i> appeal.<\/p>\n

My supportive response really comes from watching the toy work on the ground. I saw hundreds of girls play with GoldieBlox for an entire day. I watched as girl after girl mastered a \u201cbasic belt drive,\u201d the first engineering challenge of the game and saw how they interacted with the \u201cbill of materials\u201d that is designed to be especially welcoming to girls\u2014girls who rarely play with construction toys. Debbie made the wheels look like thread spools, the axles resemble crayons, and the belt mimic a thick hair ribbon. A hair ribbon is stereotypically feminine, but it\u2019s likely a girl has seen one, unlike other construction toy parts that can appear off limits in gender-segregated toy aisles. Debbie conducted research for her start-up toy and discovered that girls would frequently turn her prototypes into non-competitive games. In other words, girls needed all the adorable animal characters to spin on the spinning machine or ride the float. Everyone needed to win. So Debbie redesigned the game.<\/p>\n

Now as a gender critic, I know that girls are socialized into these sensibilities rather than born into them, but that fact does not make their gender socialization any less real. When my three year old picked up the toy, she gravitated first to the character animals just as GoldieBlox VP Lindsey Shepard had predicted. \u201cThe character animals are the way for girls to feel invited into engineering,\u201d said Lindsey who urged us to reach out a hand with, say, Katinka the dolphin, and welcome a girl into play. The GoldieBlox mission is to make engineering as appealing a job for a girl as the pink-collar work that so many girls are still ushered into. Debbie\u2019s basic gender critique in her Kickstarter video<\/a> asserts a claim in Gender Studies about inequity and representation\u2014engineering is still 89% male, women make up half the population, women and girls need to be building for a better, more inclusive future. Few toys offer such a gender critique which is why GoldieBlox had an initial feminist appeal.<\/p>\n

Critics say about the toy: it has pink on it. And the second game is called \u201cGoldieBlox and the Parade Float\u201d where girls partake in dreaded \u201cprincess culture\u201d and help build a parade float. It\u2019s all true. The toy has pink on it, but is mostly yellow. Debbie talked about how using some pink was intentional. She aimed for girls to \u201cwant to pick the toy up,\u201d in the first place. Debbie said recently to the New York Times<\/i><\/a>, \u201cIt’s OK to be a princess. We just think girls can build their own castles too.” The deeper story of the princess float\u2014and I loathe princess culture\u2026I avoid saying the word out loud in my house\u2014is that Goldie\u2019s best friend, Ruby, who is African-American, is actually the winner of the pageant. This fact prizes afro-centric beauty in a racist culture that makes beauty synonymous with whiteness. Now it is certainly more troubling that Ruby is the best friend of Goldie and not Goldie herself. Goldie of the Blox is a white protagonist, a central critique that is rarely mentioned in the feminist response. Though I wonder if Goldie is \u201cGolda,\u201d an homage to Debbie\u2019s Jewish foremothers. The Jewish cultural allowance for smart girls is something Debbie mentions in her TEDX talk<\/a>. On the ground, watching girls play with the toy, they actually play with the animals in the set which are not necessarily racialized. The question remains: can a toy ever be designed (add books, movies, etc.) with a girl of color at the center? Girls and women are barely represented authentically in mass culture at all, let alone women of color. We know something will have shifted with a girl-of-color is at the center of a story.<\/p>\n

So the answers to the GoldieBlox critiques are a bit more complicated. I appreciate critic Deborah Siegel\u2019s more balanced provocatively titled piece, \u201cIs GoldieBlox Trojan Princess, or Trojan Feminism?\u201d I<\/a> think it\u2019s both. Which brings me back to my point about ideological purity. Why do we keep asking this binary question of \u201cis it or isn\u2019t it\u201d feminist? Let\u2019s step back and take the long view. The truth is I want GoldieBlox to have the same appeal as Bob the Builder or Lego dudes because girls still get nada in girl toy world. Like I teach my students\u2014you can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and still make a commitment. GoldieBlox is listening. Let\u2019s commit to help them navigate the hyper-stereotyped toy world many of us are resisting by giving them some advice as The Brave Girls Alliance<\/a> is doing with Lego when asking them to make smart girl Minifigs. I appreciate that GoldieBlox is trying to meet girls where they are. We can<\/i> find the common ground between these worlds intellectually and maybe we can even find it around play. And even if we can\u2019t, GoldieBlox is about to change play nationally regardless.\"Goldieblox_Commercial-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you care about smart toys or if you don\u2019t live under a media rock, then by now you\u2019ve heard about GoldieBlox, the girls engineering toy. Maybe you read about it here at Girl w\/Pen. Maybe you saw the viral video about the toy that parodied the Beastie Boys song, \u201cGirls.\u201d In the video, three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1971,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27659,1],"tags":[46,216,35,25829,245,21387,21395,25828,4374,27660,19525,305],"class_list":["post-7096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genderlab","category-uncategorized","tag-activism","tag-beauty","tag-children","tag-debbie-sterling","tag-feminism","tag-gender-studies","tag-girls","tag-goldieblox","tag-parenting","tag-princess-culture","tag-stem","tag-toys"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1971"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7096"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7104,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096\/revisions\/7104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}