5 ms·

How did women get stuck with pink? Soldiers get yellow. Environment gets green. Anarchy gets black. Peace gets white. Coke gets red. Poor women. Have to share

• dqv 10y ago
  It's not exactly correct to call it pinkwashing, but it's the closest term that I could find to describe the art display.
• derrickdirge 10y ago
  In what sense is pink the worst color? I rather like it. I like purple better—more regal—but pink is a fine color. And pink is only the color of breast cancer, not all cancer, since it's seen as a 'women's issue'.
• speeder 10y ago
  That story is particularly curious. Originally people used to dress male babies in red, because it was the colour of blood, war, strength, etc... And female babies in blue, because it was the colour of peace, the sky, etc... Around the 1960s when the feminists started to push for gender neutral clothes among other things, some of them made a campaign asking major companies (for example Sears catalog) to instead use the colours inverted, red for girls, and blue for boys, just to force some 'equality' The campaign sort of worked, but flew way over people heads, they just started to assume red (and later pink as a softer tone of red for babies) and blue (and later light blue, for same reasons as pink) were the colours of female and male babies, without knowing why... The feminists that created the switch, wrote several articles and papers claiming these gendered baby clothes were oppressive and existed to control women... I wonder after the colours just switched, what they think.
  • Ygg2 10y ago
    > I wonder after the colours just switched, what they think That colors are oppressive, and exist to control women.
  • tveita 10y ago
    Do you have any source for this? I've heard about pink being considered masculine and blue feminine, but I've never heard about this feminist campaign, and frankly it sounds unlikely.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      Never mind that it was not uncommon to dress both genders the same virtually until school age. I seem to recall a (in)famous image of a certain president as a toddler, in what at first glance appears to be a dress.
  • RodericDay 10y ago
    This doesn't sound right to me. As I understood it, all kids used to wear grey/white dress gowns that were easily bleachable and reusable and able to be passed down. And then marketing companies decided that it was better if they imposed a cultural norm that if you have a boy and a girl, you need to buy two different outfits for each. Similar to the only raison d'etre of absolutely stupid gendered products like shaving razors and deodorant.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      I suspect that it was the clothing industry that figured they could sell more by hooking different product to genders earlier on, and marketing basically facilitated that push. Particularly after WW1 various industries that had massively scaled up to feed the war needed an outlet for their excess production capacity. This lead to a marketing push to get people to think in terms of desires rather than needs. Adam Curtis goes over this during his documentary series, The Century of the Self.
• coldtea 10y ago
  In what context do soldiers get "yellow"?
  • justinator 10y ago
    yellow ribbons
• dang 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125260 and marked it off-topic.
  • m-j-fox 10y ago
    Well then. Let's all remember to stay on-topic.
    • dang 10y ago
      Actually, off-topic tangents are usually fine as long as they aren't generic or inflammatory. Yours wasn't too bad but it did have elements of both.