4 ms·

> There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and to

> There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. > I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Yeah, that doesn't actually make any sense. Pink:blue::girl:boy is 100% artificial and one recent source has it the other way around: > For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. For centuries prior, both genders were dressed in white. Here's the article I've quoted from: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St... It sounds like marketing is more pervasive than you may realize.

LaGrange 13y ago
I usually also bring up these arguments, but there’s also one more possibility: she actually likes pink. Like, I like pink too, and pretty sure I’m not a girl. The problem isn’t that some girls pick pink, it’s that the pink is chosen for them. Even if 90% of girls preferred pink by default (which, as far as we can tell, they don’t), it would still be an issue if the 10% got it effectively forced upon them. While feminists often talk against false dichotomies and essentialism, the biggest point is that even if the differences were true, the amount of „exceptions” is high enough to care. But, finally, about the „power of marketing” thing: yes, marketing is quite terrifyingly powerful, and I’ve seen enough of it effectiveness of work to think so. That’s why I find people who think that they „ignore advertising” a bit on the ridiculous side. Maybe there’s a few cases where you noticed it and managed to overcome it, but there’s just no way you’re unaffected by it.
- minikites 13y ago
  That's true and a good point, I'm sure lots of people just enjoy pink. As you say, in most cases it is chosen for them, but even when it's not I would make the small tweak that it's not a "fair" choice. How many boys would like pink if not for its "girly" current association? Girls might end up liking pink even if their parents dress them in white, but everything else they see might tilt their opinion towards pink more than other colors.
rayiner 13y ago
It should be noted that for centuries in the western world, boys and girls also both wore dresses.
- rexreed 13y ago
  MUCH easier to change diapers that way.
  - bryanlarsen 13y ago
    Obviously your daughter is not old enough to pull off her own diaper. Once she reaches that stage some type of diaper cover is essential. It seems it takes them a lot longer to figure out how to pull pants down if there's a bulky diaper underneath...
- mc32 13y ago
  Note that they did have gender markers. people of the time would be able to distinguish a girl's dress from a boy's dress. Kind of how you can tell a boy's pair of pants from a girl's pair of pants today. Also, predominantly it was only the children of wealthy parents who could have 'children's' clothing. Children of the poor wore rags --anything available to them.
twoodfin 13y ago
Why ascribe this to "marketing"? If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable.
- alex_c 13y ago
  Huh? They do. There are new "in" colors every year.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. For children, they work more on subjects than colors right now, though for adult fashion, changes of "in" colors both annually and by season is normal, and largely driven by marketing. > Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable. It is controllable, but not perfectly so, and there are a lot of competing attempts to control it. There is not one hive-mind of marketing trying to drive aggregate demand, there are different marketers working for different producers trying to drive demand for their particular client's product, so, naturally, the results are chaotic and uncertain and often surprising, but they are still very much the product of deliberate marketing efforts.
- minikites 13y ago
  Children's clothes already have a built in treadmill to spur sales: kids change size rapidly.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable. But they do. And it is. They just don't need to do it for children, because they grow out of their clothes so fast. So it's actually a case in point that the "preferred" colours for children are somewhat more stable. But if you look at adult's clothing, colours change every year, and every season. Pink shirts for men drop in and out of fashion. Models change every few years from big to slim to long to low to skinny (seriously would anyone buy skinny jeans if they still offered a decent selection of boot-cuts at general clothing stores? ;) I'm kidding, I bet there's people that actually like the model) I don't have my bookmarks here (maybe someone else can provide a link?), but I once read there was some old French lady in the fashion industry that would actually just pick and decide the "in fashion" colours for the next season, some influential big brands would just follow her direction, cheaper brands would copy the style, and that was that then. I read about it because she passed away a few years ago, but I bet they found a replacement fashion colour oracle soon enough.
ajensen4 13y ago
Note that that is more or less an imaginary fact. See Del Giudice, Marco. "The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?." Archives of sexual behavior (2012): 1-3. http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_reversal_pink-blue_asb.pdf http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_r...
- mdisraeli 13y ago
  Note that your own source is more or less not a rebuttal, certainly not enough to call the 'PBR' an "imaginary fact". From it I would draw the following conclusions instead: 0. It is a Letter To The Editor in a scientific journal, rather than a paper. I believe that such letters are typically less thoroughly peer reviewed, which the tone of language used also supports. 1. "Paoletti herself never endorsed the PBR in her own articles and book" 2. she made the weaker claim that the gender coding of pink and blue was inconsistent —not reversed— at the beginning of the twentieth century and that the current pink-blue convention only became dominant in the 1950s 3. That we may not be able to establish any political motivations behind some quotes used to support PBR/inconsistency 4. That an automated review of a corpus of literature from 1800 to present for /a very specific form of wording/ may indicate that Pink and Blue historically over this period had the current meaning That final point is the weakest. Searching for a specific phrase would always carry with it a risk of excluding related phrases that are hard to automatically include. Languages change over time as well, so this may mean that the phrases themselves gained new meaning. There is also the question of the items that make up the caucus - do they accurately represent the popular culture of their publish date? And any given book may not have same weight in the culture of the time as any other. But perhaps more worryingly, the letter states the caucus consisted of over 5 million books. Yet the percentages that are then used, eg 0.000003%, are completely and utterly meaningless for any caucus under roughly 35 million (if I've got the maths right).

LaGrange 13y ago

I usually also bring up these arguments, but there’s also one more possibility: she actually likes pink. Like, I like pink too, and pretty sure I’m not a girl. The problem isn’t that some girls pick pink, it’s that the pink is chosen for them. Even if 90% of girls preferred pink by default (which, as far as we can tell, they don’t), it would still be an issue if the 10% got it effectively forced upon them. While feminists often talk against false dichotomies and essentialism, the biggest point is that even if the differences were true, the amount of „exceptions” is high enough to care. But, finally, about the „power of marketing” thing: yes, marketing is quite terrifyingly powerful, and I’ve seen enough of it effectiveness of work to think so. That’s why I find people who think that they „ignore advertising” a bit on the ridiculous side. Maybe there’s a few cases where you noticed it and managed to overcome it, but there’s just no way you’re unaffected by it.

minikites 13y ago
That's true and a good point, I'm sure lots of people just enjoy pink. As you say, in most cases it is chosen for them, but even when it's not I would make the small tweak that it's not a "fair" choice. How many boys would like pink if not for its "girly" current association? Girls might end up liking pink even if their parents dress them in white, but everything else they see might tilt their opinion towards pink more than other colors.

rayiner 13y ago

It should be noted that for centuries in the western world, boys and girls also both wore dresses.

rexreed 13y ago
MUCH easier to change diapers that way.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  Obviously your daughter is not old enough to pull off her own diaper. Once she reaches that stage some type of diaper cover is essential. It seems it takes them a lot longer to figure out how to pull pants down if there's a bulky diaper underneath...
mc32 13y ago
Note that they did have gender markers. people of the time would be able to distinguish a girl's dress from a boy's dress. Kind of how you can tell a boy's pair of pants from a girl's pair of pants today. Also, predominantly it was only the children of wealthy parents who could have 'children's' clothing. Children of the poor wore rags --anything available to them.

twoodfin 13y ago

Why ascribe this to "marketing"? If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable.

alex_c 13y ago
Huh? They do. There are new "in" colors every year.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. For children, they work more on subjects than colors right now, though for adult fashion, changes of "in" colors both annually and by season is normal, and largely driven by marketing. > Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable. It is controllable, but not perfectly so, and there are a lot of competing attempts to control it. There is not one hive-mind of marketing trying to drive aggregate demand, there are different marketers working for different producers trying to drive demand for their particular client's product, so, naturally, the results are chaotic and uncertain and often surprising, but they are still very much the product of deliberate marketing efforts.
minikites 13y ago
Children's clothes already have a built in treadmill to spur sales: kids change size rapidly.
tripzilch 13y ago
> If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable. But they do. And it is. They just don't need to do it for children, because they grow out of their clothes so fast. So it's actually a case in point that the "preferred" colours for children are somewhat more stable. But if you look at adult's clothing, colours change every year, and every season. Pink shirts for men drop in and out of fashion. Models change every few years from big to slim to long to low to skinny (seriously would anyone buy skinny jeans if they still offered a decent selection of boot-cuts at general clothing stores? ;) I'm kidding, I bet there's people that actually like the model) I don't have my bookmarks here (maybe someone else can provide a link?), but I once read there was some old French lady in the fashion industry that would actually just pick and decide the "in fashion" colours for the next season, some influential big brands would just follow her direction, cheaper brands would copy the style, and that was that then. I read about it because she passed away a few years ago, but I bet they found a replacement fashion colour oracle soon enough.

ajensen4 13y ago

Note that that is more or less an imaginary fact. See Del Giudice, Marco. "The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?." Archives of sexual behavior (2012): 1-3. http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_reversal_pink-blue_asb.pdf http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_r...

mdisraeli 13y ago
Note that your own source is more or less not a rebuttal, certainly not enough to call the 'PBR' an "imaginary fact". From it I would draw the following conclusions instead: 0. It is a Letter To The Editor in a scientific journal, rather than a paper. I believe that such letters are typically less thoroughly peer reviewed, which the tone of language used also supports. 1. "Paoletti herself never endorsed the PBR in her own articles and book" 2. she made the weaker claim that the gender coding of pink and blue was inconsistent —not reversed— at the beginning of the twentieth century and that the current pink-blue convention only became dominant in the 1950s 3. That we may not be able to establish any political motivations behind some quotes used to support PBR/inconsistency 4. That an automated review of a corpus of literature from 1800 to present for /a very specific form of wording/ may indicate that Pink and Blue historically over this period had the current meaning That final point is the weakest. Searching for a specific phrase would always carry with it a risk of excluding related phrases that are hard to automatically include. Languages change over time as well, so this may mean that the phrases themselves gained new meaning. There is also the question of the items that make up the caucus - do they accurately represent the popular culture of their publish date? And any given book may not have same weight in the culture of the time as any other. But perhaps more worryingly, the letter states the caucus consisted of over 5 million books. Yet the percentages that are then used, eg 0.000003%, are completely and utterly meaningless for any caucus under roughly 35 million (if I've got the maths right).