gender and colors

[derien]

Stumbled across this TimesOnline article this morning, "Girls will be boys", in which a mother writes about her tomboy daughter. She seems to feel that marketing is encouraging children to become even more gender dichotomized than they used to be. I was particularly struck by one respondant to the article who wrote: I'm seventeen-female, and my thoughts, my personality, my likes and dislikes have little to do with what sex, race, or nationality I am. If I like rap, should I conform to racial stereotypes, hate the color I was born, and wish I were black? That's absurd.


Another article, which I found through the same source (theladiesloos) points out that less than a hundred years ago the conventional colors for babies by gender were exactly the opposite of what they are today - it was blue for girls, pink for boys. (Seriously, what the hell was up with that hypothesis that women are attracted to pink because it helps in identifying ripe berries? How many berries are pink when they're ripe? Raspberries and that's about it, right? Normally it would be a color to avoid eating. Do these so-called scientists know anything about foraging?)

Sounds almost as though things have become more dichotomized since I was a kid. Maybe just because it's easier for marketers to focus on niches if they stereotype them? Or is it a perception because people are becoming more aware of the stereotyping? I remember watching a little boy on his father's shoulders at a parade a couple of years ago. His dad was going on to his friends about how much his kid loved cars "without any encouraging." Meanwhile Eor and I could see that the kid was incredibly tuned in to what his father was saying about him - as long as his father was talking about him his face glowed. So playing to what his father approved of - the love of cars - seemed to us to be his way of getting positive attention from Dad. Dad may not have realized he was encouraging it, but he was. One of the above stories (I think the first one) mentioned that when adults are put into a room with a small child which they don't know and a bunch of toys they will most often offer the child the toys that go with the gender of the clothing the child is wearing. So it might well be that the adult thinks the child is going for the gender appropriate toy, when in fact the child is not of the gender they think it is.

So maybe when I joke about having had all little blue clothes when I was a baby and say "It didn't hurt me," maybe it did actually affect me. Strangers thought I was a boy, so they may have bounced me more and been more "Oh, look how big and strong!" and such.

Like I saw an elderly lady do to a baby in the dr's office a couple of weeks ago. "Oh, he's a big, strong boy!" I think she was confused by the green headband on the baby.

"She," the parents corrected, almost in unison. And then Dad said, "She's a big, strong girl."

BTW all you guessers on the stalker meme - I was rather tickled to see that nobody knows my favorite color. Two guesses for blue and one for purple. In fact purple was my favorite color until I was about 5, and then I suddenly one day flip-flopped to the opposite side of the color wheel, and it's been green all the way ever since.


(PS - if you want answers on the stalker meme you need to say who you are. I suspect that anonymous poster is You, Looks To Alaska?)

Comments

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

I'm the purple-guesser!

[derien.livejournal.com]

Oh good, that makes me feel better. Looks To Alaska has been my best friend for 13 years or something like that - it would be distressing to think of her not remembering my last name at all. Although she has nearly as bad a memory as I do, so I guess it would be possible. Although it confused me that whoever it was had referred to themselves as an LJ friend, because she's an RL friend, but what made me think it was her was the middle name guess - your middle name is the same as her first name!

[mamaslyth.livejournal.com]

Did you get my email and are you going to post people's scores?

[derien.livejournal.com]

I did get your email, so I can send the answers back. :) And I thought I might wait until this evening to post people's scores because... well, really because I've pooped around too much this morning already and I need to get moving on doing laundry and other errands.

[(Anonymous)]

Nope not me- I don't even know what you are talking about.
Been busy dog/house sitting.
LTA