However,
the toys themselves had a distinctly gendered feel.
While the author recalled Legos as gender-neutral, they did not appear
gender neutral in the toy-store setting. Instead, the Lego products were
based on action movies, such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones or else
featured something called a Bionicle, which appeared to be some type of
robot. There were some Legos called Clickits, which were pink and white
and featured teenage-looking cartoon-character girls. However, the Lego
sets from the author's youth, which featured blocks and other features to
build gender-neutral items like towns, simply were not present. Instead,
the Legos seemed less free-form and more structured, and came in boxes to
build specific designs, almost all of them masculine in stereotyping.
The other building materials were similarly gender-differentiated.
While the toy store had apparently gender-neutral building toys like Tinker
Toys and Mega Blocks, they also managed to capitalize on stereotyping....
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