#goldieblocks

Lets talk about GoldieBlox

http://www.goldieblox.com

I have two kids whom I love very much.  I purchase my son dolls and I purchase my daughter legos.  Both of these things are non gender normative but its what they like so I get it for them.

I want to take a second to be clear here.  My daughter get dolls and clothes and hair things too; just like I get my son legos and action figures and video games (which are arguably…

It's Christmas. You are being herded through the shopping centre along with several thousand shopping-crazed drones searching for a bargain. You glance at your watch. It has been 3 hours and you still have to buy gifts for your nephew and niece. Your nephew is easy. You know that he has a new Xbox and that he is football crazy. Fifa 14 is on sale so that seems like the logical choice. What about your niece? No idea. What do girls like? Dolls? You feel completely out of your depth. All girls must love Barbie dolls and princess makeover kits right? Well actually no. It is a horrible cliché that often seems unfair.

You see toy ads aimed at boys and they often involve some sort of constructive element such as "build a spaceship" or "construct the castle". Girls love lots of things but I rarely see a TV ad aimed at girls that isn't completely full of pink fluffy rabbits and Miley Cyrus T-shirts. Girls can be inventors and engineers just like boys so why are we force feeding this message to our children? Has our culture changed much in the last hundred years?

I feel that I don't need to justify my argument with examples but look at Marisa Mayer. Being the CEO of a tech giant like Yahoo surely isn't easy but she hasn't sat back and steered the ship safely. Instead she has taken some bold steps to acquire companies like Summly and blogging giant Tumblr and has disrupted the tech industry by doing so. Future innovators are everywhere and there are surely countless young Marrisa Mayers who will one day make their mark on the tech world.

Goldiblox is a toy company who are on a mission to inspire the next generation of female engineers. Their focus on providing children with construction toys will hopefully develop an early interest in subjects such as science, technology. engineering and maths. They want to create a level playing field in a world that still lacks in equality and as they put it themselves "we believe there are a million girls out there who are engineers. They just might not know it yet". It's fascinating yet worrying to see that males represent 89% of all engineers worldwide so companies like Goldiblox are trying to make a difference and even out those stats. 

It's a much more creative and useful gift than a Barbie doll so I would suggest checking out the website here!! 

I had to put this out there because I really like Beastie Boys and Ive been reading a lot about the Goldieblocks vs Beastie Boys drama.

Goldieblocks are suing Beastie Boys (BB had mentioned copyright infringement, but had not yet started any kind of proceedings) and they are saying that the original BB song was mysoginistic and their new song is a much better parody that should be considered 'fair use' (i.e not copyright infringement).

Its a bit of a morally confusing situation. On one hand, Goldieblocks can help shape the future of women's representation in the engineering and science fields in which they are still underrepresented, and it seems like BB are being a bit selfish and money grubbing. On the other hand, Goldieblocks is still a company flogging a childs toy, yes its an awesome toy, but I think it would have been more respectful of them to at least talk to the BBs ( I assumed they had at first, which made it seem all the more cooler). The other moral issue is that Adam Yauch, who sadly passed away last year at the young age of 47 stated in his will he didnt want his music used for advertisements.

The point of this post  isnt to argue about the law and whether any have been broken, but after reading a lot of negative comments about Beastie Boys being sexist I wanted to bring some light to the situation about Yauch. I think its unfair GB are attacking him. They have gone against a dead mans will, and are implying he was misogynistic. Its not nice to 'defame' the dead.

                                      The following is from Wikipedia.

"Yauch was an American rapper, musician, film director, and human rights activist.  A practicing Buddhist. He became an important voice in the Tibetan independence movement. He created the Milarepa Fund, a non-profit organization devoted to Tibetan independence, and organized several benefit concerts to support the cause, including the Tibetan Freedom Concert.

Yauch was also a strong supporter of feminism and LGBT rights, apologizing for early lyrics which he retroactively deemed offensive. In 1999, the Beastie Boys sent a letter to Time Out New York apologizing for homophobic lyrics, and in their song "Sure Shot" Yauch sings