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The Lego Friends line may promote gender stereotyping. It may be an unnecessary segmenting off of would-be girl Lego builders into “girly” Legos and away from more basic brick sets that offer the complex challenges of creating your own models and worlds (although no more so than any branded Lego kit, all of which are too limiting in the eyes of many Lego fans). It might have provoked all sorts of debate, here and elsewhere when it was introduced, over whether the sets (designed for more role play and storytelling) exploit girls’ natural play patterns or embrace them.

But a contender for Worst Toy of the Year? Hardly. Yet it, along with two objects designed to turn smartphones into balls and stuffed animals, an app that allows a parent to insert a child’s image into a digital storybook, and a Slurpee maker, has been nominated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood as a candidate for its TOADY (Toys Oppressive and Destructive to Young Children) Award.

The TOADY awards are usually an amusing coda to the C.C.F.C.’s year of laudable efforts to curtail the astonishing quantity of marketing our children are exposed to on a daily basis. Last year, I missed the small voting window (voting is open this year until Dec. 6) but wrote that I would have supported the microphone that transformed a child’s voice into that of T-Pain (a rapper known for his misogynistic odes to mood-altering substances) over the ultimate victor, a tablet computer for babies. The award in 2010 went to Addicting Games, a Nickelodeon site that featured graphically violent and oddly sexualized games and which appeared, at the time, in highly clickable and intriguing ads on the NickJr. Web site.

But nominating Lego Friends for its gender stereotyping calls into question the premise of the TOADY. The Lego Friends Butterfly Beauty Shop may be, as the C.C.F.C. Web site describes it, “so jam-packed with condescending stereotypes it would even make Barbie blush.” But it remains a noncommercial building toy that promotes an understanding of spatial relationships and calls into play fine motor skills, problem solving and creativity. The fact that it does so by providing the material to build a beauty shop (and then, once that’s done, any number of small square houses that differ from the ordinary Lego house only in their color) shouldn’t be any more “destructive and oppressive” to youth of either sex than the boxes upon boxes of Legos offering more stereotypically masculine battleships and superheroes.

Do we worry that Captain America’s Avenging Cycle suggests to boys that all they want to do is ride around on vehicles flexing their muscles, waving a shield and firing missiles? No one has yet nominated the Hulk Helicarrier Breakout set for a TOADY award on the ground that it promotes a stereotypical view of American manhood.

There’s much to consider in the realm of gender-targeted marketing and products, and as I wrote earlier today, it’s all too easy to find yourself grabbing the pink Lego set for a girl without thinking about whether she’d rather just have the Volkswagon Camper Van. One of my girls loves the pink Legos. The other prefers the classic stuff. But they’re both sitting in there on the floor building and whispering stories to themselves, and that’s scarcely destructive to their childhoods.

In the past, the C.C.F.C. has done a great job of calling out entities from Scholastic to school districts when they failed to live up to the high standards the C.C.F.C. sets for protecting children from the influence of marketing and advertisements. This time, though, it’s the C.C.F.C. that has failed. Until we’re lining up every arguably gendered set in the Lego product line for examination, it’s condescending to assume that young girls are any less capable of realizing that their Lego Beauty Shop doesn’t mean they’re only good for curling eyelashes, any more than Captain America suggests that boys are in for a lifetime of muscle flexing.

Lego may have created and marketed its Friends line in the hope of selling more girls on its product, but that’s what toy companies do — and that product, no matter what color it is or what it can build, is still one of the least commercialized options out there, still without batteries or screens, and still, at its core, a building toy.

What’s destructive and oppressive is trying to put limits on what any kid, girl or boy, is allowed to build with it.