A week or so ago, awesome dad Josh Stearns wanted to buy some LEGO-branded, construction-themed stickers for his son. But Stearns (who lives in Northampton, MA, so I should probably use the honorific “hippie-dad Stearns”) noted with dismay on his Tumblr that one of the workers — “the only one wearing ‘cool’ sunglasses” — has “HEY, BABE!” written next to him. This guy has a slight smile on his face and one arm raised, presumably in preparation for making a repetitive jerking gesture after the LEGO lady he’s yelling at tells him where he can put his little acrylonitrile butadiene styrene drill. 

Awesome dad Stearns (who in his non-sticker-shopping life is the Journalism and Public Media Campaign Director at Free Press) opted not to buy said stickers. He noted that he’d just attended an event at which reps from hollaback!, a non-profit movement to end street harassment, spoke; he pointed out, reasonably, that being yelled and leered at on the street is unfun for women.

When Stearns’s post started getting traction (including being picked up by the awesome feminist site Miss Representation), he got an email from Charlotte Simonsen, Senior Director of LEGO’s corporate communications office in Denmark. He published it on his Tumblr:

From: Charlotte Simonsen/COM
Subject: LEGO Group response to criticism of Creative Imagination licensed LEGO product
Date: April 27, 2013 9:45:39 AM EDT
To: Josh Stearns

Hi Josh, We are very sorry to learn about your disappointment with this product made by Creative Imagination under a LEGO license.

At the LEGO Group we greatly value all feedback we receive and I’d like to assure you that we also do so in this case.

We know that constructive LEGO play fosters positive, lifelong skills that are valuable to any child.  We firmly believe in the play experience we offer, a system that lends itself to years of unlimited play possibilities for any child.

To communicate the LEGO experience to children we typically use humor and we are sorry that you were unhappy with the way a minifigure was portrayed here. This product was discontinued in the summer of 2010 and we have forwarded your comment to the LEGO Licensing team for their future evaluation of how we can deliver the best possible LEGO experience across our licensed products as well.

Kind regards,

LEGO Group
Corporate Communications
Charlotte Simonsen
Senior Director
Corporate Communications
LEGO System
A/S
Åstvej
7190 Billund
Denmark

corporate weiner

Alas, this apology is as bad as the #30295 Car Base! And I don’t need to tell you how bad THAT is! Repeatedly calling attention to the fact that the sticker was a “Creative Imagination licensed” product (including IN THE SUBJECT LINE — come ON, Charlotte) is a transparent way of saying, “It wasn’t us!” No excuse. Char, is LEGO in the habit of not looking at the products it licenses its name and image to? An essential element of apology is owning the offense. Grafs of huminah-huminah irrelevant PR boilerplate about LEGO’s values are NOT relevant, especially when one would hope that leering and harassment are not part of the LEGO mission statement. The worst of the worst is the capper: “To communicate the LEGO experience to children we typically use humor and we are sorry that you were unhappy with the way a minifigure was portrayed here.” So Char, you’re saying that a. Josh does not understand the complex inner workings of LEGO corporate b. Josh has no sense of humor and c. You are determined to trigger SorryWatch apoplexy by using the construction “sorry that you were unhappy” instead of “sorry we screwed up.” All of which means this apology resembles sincerity as much as minifig Hermione resembles Emma Watson.

Fortunately, our man Josh didn’t let go. After posting Char’s email, he continued posting about other sites’ responses to the stickers. He posted that Architect Magazine noted that “something about the sunglasses renderes the familiar sexless yellow Lego [sic] figurine into a threatening creeper,” (an aside: I love the word “creeper,” though I hate creepers, and am delighted that this usage has entered the lexicon) and shared the response of Amanda Hess at Slate, who noted that another sticker says “Men at Work,” thus telling little kids that construction is purely a boy field. Hess further found another LEGO sticker set by the same company, depicting emergency workers, showing a firefighter leaning back and looking over his shoulder, saying HOT STUFF).

Persistent Josh wrote back to Simonsen, asking how this product made it through the review process. He then heard from Andrea Ryder, head of LEGO’s “Outbound Licensing Department,” who sounded a little less like a packaged plastic figurine than her colleague. Her opening line: “My name is Andrea Ryder, I am the head of the LEGO Group’s Outbound Licensing Department, and I am truly sorry that you had a negative experience with one of our products.” Much better! Though “I am truly sorry that we released a product that was sexist and dumb” would have been better still. The onus of sorry-ness should be on LEGO, not Josh. To her credit, Ryder went on to say that “we would not approve such a product again.” (Char had already said the product had been discontinued — as if that made it OK. Ryder’s addendum was an improvement.)

Josh, thank you from these two vagina’s [sic] for being persistent in the face of officiousness, for understanding that “lighten up” and “I’d love if women yelled stuff at me!” and “no one talks about how men get harassed too!” are not correct responses to sexism, and for modeling great parenting…for moms and dads, sons and daughters.