This weekend in Sydney, the University of New South Wales volunteer program “Yellow Shirts” celebrated its 25th anniversary. Yellow Shirts are a group of 100+ students who give up their time to help orientate new students, geographically, academically, and socially, arriving at UNSW. Orientation Week, or O-Week, is one of the largest programs of its kind, runs for a full five days from 9am til late, and is filled with activities from campus tours, to jumping castles and giant jenga to clubs and society events and live bands. Volunteers receive extensive training, and become a part of an amazing group of people once referred to as the “sunshine army”. 

Seeing the images and stories from the anniversary pop up in my facebook feed made me nostalgic and strangely homesick. Memories of my four years as a Yellow Shirt volunteer pop up in fragmented fashion. Before living in America, before cutting off all my hair, before engagement, before world travel, there was uni, and there was Yellow Shirts. 

Squads, OT, double squads, quadruple squad outings, the importance of FAFYing and CWEFLS, and never using terms and abbreviations that outsiders/newcomers wouldn’t understand. Running around late at night at training camp and accidentally bursting into a room where two Muslim volunteers were quietly praying. Rehearsing for the band in the Huts and heading up to the Rege for $5 steaks (before I was a vegetarian...) and card games. Sitting in Coffee Republic whilst the O-Week Coordinator consoled me, above and beyond her duties, because I hadn’t been selected as a squad leader - and how that year I was placed with one of the most amazing people I have ever encountered and how he changed the entire way I looked at leadership. The year it poured with rain and we moved everything inside the Roundhouse, and how one squad provided tarp-covered escorts up the Main Walkway for arriving students. The relationships that formed, the boys I fell in love with. The couples still together, the families born. One day soon there will be second-generation shirts...

Beyond the memories of those four years, reflecting this weekend has reminded me how much that time has shaped me as a person. My time at UNSW was marked by the height of my depression. One volunteer recruiting session, which lasted well into the night, saw me escaping out into the cool night air, and sitting sobbing at the top of main walkway and contemplating if I should just end everything. Despite the pain and grief I was suffering, I look back now and think of my world at UNSW as an extremely happy and productive one.

Volunteering gave me an immense number of skills, practical not only on a CV checklist but in the real world. Talking with strangers, engaging with people across cultures, and barriers of language and age, organizational skills, team work, leadership, problem solving, and event planning. These skills have allowed me to confidently venture out into the world, and directly led to paid employment in three different countries in a variety of fields, including theatre, sustainability, retail, teaching, and running my own business.

Being a Yellow Shirt led me to the Contact Coordinator role, a part-time paid position overseeing the running of an information and referral centre at the university - often referred to as the O-Week outside of O-Week. That job covered my rent and expenses whilst I finished my undergrad, and gave me the skills of managing a team of 100 student volunteers, and overseeing the success of a crucial student service at a time when student services were being reduced, or cut altogether, at universities across Australia.

Beyond the skills, the greatest part of volunteering was the people. Like-minded souls with similar interests, people who pushed my comfort zones and broadened my horizons. They opened my eyes to the world around me, taught me about leadership and teamwork, and the bounds of friendship. My fellow volunteers are among the most wonderful, creative, talented, and lovely folk I have ever encountered. They are now dotted around the globe, and have gone on to be come scientists, doctors, lawyers, analysts, economists, historians, writers, politicians, actors, musicians, journalists, mothers and fathers. I am a lucky soul indeed to be able to count them amongst my friends.

Since becoming a Yellow Shirt, I have volunteered in theaters, bookshops, and on farms. I have learnt to put my hand up for projects, and roles, where there is little or no monetary payment, that have gifted me with friendships, books, food, and impossible-to-price experiences.

I have often joked that working a day job allows me to pay for the experience of volunteering. Those countless volunteer hours, in a variety of programs, not only gave me tangible skills, and a degree, they undeniably shaped who I am. And for that, I am eternally grateful. 

Warning: The below contains spoilers. All pictures in this post from here.

The Lego Movie is fun, clever, and visually spectacular. It’s one major flaw is its failure to adequately represent, or include, women in its story-telling.  

You Can Build It!
In a world whose premise is you can build anything if you only have the imagination, it seems we still can’t build gender equality. 

It’s just a movie! Why should we care? Because it has raked in $425 million worldwide, and in the US was the number one film at the box office for three weeks after its initial release, and third in its fourth week. Because media influences both the way we perceive ourselves, and the way in which we frame our world. It is not the be all and end all. Education, family, and a variety of other factors will also come into play. But we cannot deny that media plays an enormous role.

The Lego Movie fails the most basic test of females on screen, the Bechdel test (two or more named female characters, who talk to each other, about something other than a man). While there are more than two named female characters, they never engage with each other (unless the two sentence throw-away lines between WyldStyle and Princess UniKitty constitutes a “conversation”). 

The women in the film are representations of outdated stereotypes of women. The Rebel. The Mother. The Perky One. The Demon. The film establishes very quickly that the idea of Lego is play and imagination. In a world where absolutely anything can be built, created, or established, why are women still relegated to these few (tired) roles? Where are the space women? The inventors? Explorers? Sage women? The female heroes who actually get to save the day?  

Women in the World
The four main worlds, Bricksburg, the Wild West, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and the Octan Corporation, of The Lego Movie did portray some women, but women still fail to make up half the population. In the Bricksburg community, just one female is named, Mrs Scratchen-Post. Her defining feature is her parade of cats, because older women without husbands around are OBVIOUSLY cat ladies! At the construction site, we hear many female voices (progression!), however only one is named, Gail the Construction Worker. Her defining feature is that she is “perky”. In the Wild West, females are heard, but not entirely visible. Denzil over at Medium states in her post that women were visible as performers or barmaids, but I missed that entirely. If this is the case, women exist in this world for the benefit of men to watch, or to serve them. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the Council of Master Builders is inhabited by a crowd of mostly men, and a grand total of three women - Wonder Woman, Princess Unikitty, and WyldStyle. One of these women is not human, but a unicorn/kitten, one is scantily clad and only around for comedic value (invisible space ship! LOLZ!). Women can become leaders, but their presence is the exception, rather than the rule, or even close to standard. Over at the Octan Corporation, the females are represented by the company computer, and Ma, BadCop/GoodCop’s suffering mother. In this evil-looking dark world, women are either subservient, or mothers. Women in leadership positions?! Forget about it. 

In the brief portrayal of the human world, women are off-screen voices, a mother and sister whose sole purpose is stop/destroy the fun of the boy’s playful and imaginative world.

Leading Ladies
The film boasts two central female characters. Princess UniKitty and WyldStyle. Women have two options here: fluffy sparkle rainbow girl, or punk-goth-angsty girl. The range of role models is overwhelming. We’re being generous if we throw in Wonder Woman, the busty, scantily clad, though mostly silent and absent in this film, cameo. Beyond two throwaway sentences, the women never interact. Princess Unikitty comes from the land of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. She is always positive, and when she’s not, she’s fierce and angry. Women can only have two sides: outrageously happy, or a demon.

We learn very quickly that WyldStyle is highly skilled and talented - she initially finds the Piece of Resistance, and rescues the protagonist, Emmett, in a daring and exciting high speed chase. Unfortunately, her skill and bravado ends there. Emmett’s only sees her as “beautiful” - face radiantly lit, hair swirling round her perfect yellow lego head, so beautiful that he cannot even focus on her words. The film reinforces the idea that woman can only be pretty, and it’s ok if a man doesn’t engage with her actual thoughts and words. Once in the Wild West, in order to “blend in”, WyldStyle changes into a busty costume, despite the fact that no other females are dressed in this way. Again, women can only be busty, pretty, and overtly sexualized, even when there is zero need for them to be do. 

The animators/story-tellers use these tropes so that audiences (at least adult ones) understand that this is itself a joke, set-up as tongue in cheek, but we never get to see any other side of WyldStyle. She is never given an authoritative voice. That privilege is given to Vitruvius, old man lego, (although voiced by Morgan Freeman, Vitruvius is a yellow/white lego. The presence of one or two black-skinned legos suggests the yellow “regular” legos are representative of caucasion people. Why can’t Vitruvius be black? Because in our world, ultimate status is given to old white men, reinforced in the film by the presence of Dumbledore, Shakespeare, and Gandalf. Which leads to another important question, where are the women of color in the Lego world?).

We discover that WyldStyle has undergone a series of name changes in order to “find” her current persona. The name WyldStyle in itself refers to the fact that she is not a regular female. By dressing in black, dying her hair, and being a rare female master builder, she is not a regular female, she is “wild”, and untamed. WyldStyle only becomes happy with her “real” name, Lucy, and “true self” (which apparently means no longer being an action hero) when a man tells her he likes it. In the end, despite establishing that Lucy and Batman genuinely care for each other, Lucy gives up gives up her love for the “flawed” Batman in order to be with Emmett, the “hero” of the film. Again we see the tired trope of women as objects, in this case a trophy that the male protagonist wins by saving the world. Although established as an exciting, gutsy, and capable women, WyldStyle becomes the object of Emmett’s affections (not for her skill, but her beauty), and once Batman arrives on the scene, fails to offer leadership, new ideas, or anything of substance. Girls can be independent, but once a boy arrives on the scene, their job is to look pretty. The end.  

Gail: Building Progress! The Lego Movie 2: Let's Try Again 
Women in the Lego world? Cat ladies, mothers, construction workers (only if you’re perky), girlfriends, perky v. demon, rainbow v. goth, and subservient. Not very imaginative. A sequel is already in the works. I only hope that the writers and story-tellers get the Bechdel Test memo and a crash course in feminism 101 before they start writing. In a world where anything is possible, I hope they can start imagining and building lands where women and men play equal roles, or at least where there are more than two female women, who speak to each other at length, about something other than a man. 

I believe you can build it, all you need is the imagination.