I believe you, on 26 December 2012 - 01:54 PM, said:
Ms. Pope's brother should be able to play with a pink Easy-Bake or wear a pink shirt, so this is a mixed-blessing in that while they succeeded in getting a new color for the Easy-Bake they still upheld the color code of gender conformity.
Purplos, on 30 December 2012 - 01:11 AM, said:
Ya know, if people really wanted gender neutral whatever, they would just stop caring about what color it is. Why is pink for girls? Why can't a boy play with a pink easy-bake oven? It doesn't seem like they're looking for gender neutrality. It looks like they're looking for stereotypically boy friendly colors on traditionally girl toys.
I pretty much said the same thing, so while you probably did not read all the content on this thread I am glad you brought this point up again.
There is a whole history of when the color pink began to be associated with girls and blue with boys and it begins with clothes. One hundred years ago most babies wore white, all white, since it was easier to bleach.
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The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.
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.
In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.
So the baby boomers were raised in gender-specific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers, girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and tomboy play clothes were acceptable.
Color-assignment based on gender is not a steady phenomenon either, it comes and goes in waves. In the 1960's the strict gender roles of society were questioned and gender-neutral clothing became popular again, remaining so up until as little as 30 years ago. The change according to this article is one of marketing, the popularity of ultrasound, and shifting attitudes.
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Gender-neutral clothing remained popular until about 1985. Paoletti remembers that year distinctly because it was between the births of her children, a girl in ’82 and a boy in ’86. “All of a sudden it wasn’t just a blue overall; it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding a football,” she says. Disposable diapers were manufactured in pink and blue.
Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change. Expectant parents learned the sex of their unborn baby and then went shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise. (“The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” Paoletti says.) The pink fad spread from sleepers and crib sheets to big-ticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys. Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when the next child was a boy.
Some young mothers who grew up in the 1980s deprived of pinks, lace, long hair and Barbies, Paoletti suggests, rejected the unisex look for their own daughters. “Even if they are still feminists, they are perceiving those things in a different light than the baby boomer feminists did,” she says. “They think even if they want their girl to be a surgeon, there’s nothing wrong if she is a very feminine surgeon.”
There are more reasons for the cultural shift. In the 1970s look at the way NBA players dressed, very short shorts, something most men just two decades later would consider feminine and not masculine at all.
Michael Jordan in the 1980s would introduce the baggy look of over-sized shorts and jerseys. From there it spread into every sector even with the introduction of Dockers and other comort-fit clothes.
Rap itself went from entertainers wearing form-fitting fashionable clothes as in
Grandmaster Flash's The Message to the sagging pants, huge shirts and jackets introduced in the era of gangster rap that began less than a decade later.
Also in the 1970s we had disco which promoted social equality, looser attitudes on sexuality, and was a more feminine genre overall. As soon as John Travolta made Saturday Night Live, that not only signaled the height of popularity for disco, it also meant the marketeers got a hold of it and disco had no where to go but downhill.
Just a few years later this shift was solidified when John Travolta made Urban Cowboy. Disco was indeed declared dead and punk rock and hard core were now being marketed to the masses. Out with feminine expressions of love and relationship and in with masculine displays of anger.
Tom Ford also said this, during frightening times, of war, and economic recession, people tend to use bulkier shoes, vehicles like SUVs, so fashion overall begins to act as some sort of armor. When times got better out came Tom's shoes, skinny jeans, smart cars, and softer emo music.
The past three decades saw a huge shift into uber-masculinity and femininity before we began to reverse course in the mid- to late 2000s.
Before one could be masculine or feminine but not both at the same time, even the homosexuals of the era would decide to be more masculine or feminine. This is why modern youth to a degree reject labels such as straight-gay-bi because they are all based on the gender binary. To them it doesn't matter, the lines between genders are breaking once again.
So mostly all the choices we make regarding color, cut, and style are not just personal preference but choices which are also informed by current political environment and market conditions and forces.
Pink or blue?
Pink and blue as the most popular colors is not the way we have always done things and it can change again. We are going through a cycle where there will be another backlash against these colors as there was in the 1960s.
As is it is understood that it is socially acceptable by many for girls to play with both male and female toys but not as much for boys to do the same.
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In general the toys most associated with boys were related to fighting or aggression (wrestlers, soldiers, guns, etc.), and the toys most associated with girls were related to appearance (Barbie dolls and accessories, ballerina costumes, makeup, jewelry, etc.).
<snip>
We found that girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous. The toys rated as most likely to be educational and to develop children’s physical, cognitive, artistic, and other skills were typically categorized as neutral or moderately masculine. We concluded that strongly gender-typed toys appear to be less supportive of optimal development than neutral or moderately gender-typed toys.
This translates into girls being allowed to develop more skills while boys are being limited. Notice how "girl's toys" are associated with nurturing.
We have been raising whole generations of boys that simply do not understand how to nurture, that if they exhibit signs of doing so, they will be harassed for gender non-conformity, by their peers and even adults.
Is there a reason why more mass shooters are male? Why do most mass shooters, at least stereotypically do not look very masculine if we define it as rigid jaw, solid frame, pro-social and friendly attitude, basically All-American, yet the shooters who do not fit this look, some even having longer hair, more lankier, not as social, go out and commit an ultimate expression of masculinity? There is a discord.
Does it begin with how we treat and limit our boys? I have seen no studies to this effect but am interested if there is a connection.
We need to eliminate disgusting attitudes by adults who frown on a boy asking to go shopping or desiring to be a hair dresser. There is nothing wrong with these children but there is much that needs to be changed among adults who would reinforce their bigoted view of the world onto our children.
Edited by I believe you, 30 December 2012 - 11:13 AM.
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..... women with a tan and long, black hair and dark eyes. So many were (part) SE Asian, Hindu women from Surinam, I almost married a mestiza in south Peru, a part native American from the Dutch Antilles, and, and , and....
