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How did he know what guns and swords are? Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO P
by frossie 16y ago
How did he know what guns and swords are?
Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO PINK MUST BE HARD-WIRED!" argument. I am pretty sure if we took a human child to a planet where boys wore pastels and girls wore primary colours and that is what the shops had, that is what the characters on TV advertised, that is what the kids in the playground wore - the girl wouldn't turn around and say "You know what someone should invent? A pink dress!".
You only have to look at historical non-western cultures - if you look at some of the African Tribes, men and women dress in bright primary colours. In India, gold, green and red dominate. If you look at historical Japanese kimonos, you see black and red and purple and gold and so on.
So, if pink for girls is cultural, and you didn't promote it to your kids, somebody else did. And they are passing all sorts of other messages too. You can't raise a kid in a box.
- gyardley 16y agoIf you liked, you could look at historical Western culture as well. In the 1800s, both boys and girls wore white, and gender differentiation in clothing style was quite subtle for the first few years of life. Styles only began to diverge around 1900 and the pink / blue dichotomy only became really prevalent after WWII. That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
- billswift 16y agoI was browsing a book on etiquette published in 1905 a while back and stumbled across an interesting mention that "a parent couldn't go far wrong following the standard conventions and dressing a girl baby in blue and a boy in pink"; it stuck with me and I have been wondering when the conventions changed the other way around. [The quote is from memory and probably not exact, and I can't check it, because I can't remember the book's title.]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]