Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
OMG Daughter is a little girl
Headline
: “My two-year-old daughter already knows that pink is for girls. And she loves it. Why does that make me see red?”
Because you live in a world of material comfort and abundance, work in a monoculture where truly divergent opinion is as rare and short-lived as an ice sculpture in the desert, and — in the absence of want or privation — you have constructed a series of issues and problems whose imaginary magnitude once seemed like a liberating way to view the world, but now feel like tiny wires that constrain your every move?
Just a thought. The page is titled “Should I let my daughter wear pink?” Help me out here! You almost suspect the author would be happier if she had a two-year-old boy who was into pink, because it would be Transgressive, and demonstrate a healthy disregard for gender norms.
Pink preference, of course, is a Social Construct, but the author notes: “just because our responses to colour are constructed, it doesn’t mean that they, or what they’re responding to, aren’t real.”
I cannot imagine going through life fretting over these things.
Published in General
James Lileks
I cannot imagine going through life fretting over these things.
You must have too much to do.
Wait, does the author suffer under the construct that it’s constraining for girls to prefer pink? Somebody better get the wrecking ball, there’s too many constructs going up in this one little neighborhood.
Pink shoelaces can be transgressively manly, but that depends on the color of your shoes.
Hurray! All of the real problems have been solved!
Because she doesn’t believe in Science.
Shouldn’t feminism be a celebration of our feminitiy? Of the amazing things that we can do and the influence we have because of our womanlyness (that is probably not a word but i’m going with it). It seems that feminists want us to become more like men, and men to become more like women so that someday we’ll all just meet in the middle and all be girly men.
I recall a few pink Izod and button down oxford shirts in my high school years (81 – 85). But since I went to an all boys Catholic high school, that was the only sort of rebellion we could get away with.
My oldest daughter hates pink – is very girly on some things, but doesn’t want to be perceived as girly.
My younger daughter loves pink, loves clothes, wants to be girly, and is a tremendous athlete.
With both of them, I have neither, endorsed or repudiated a pro-pink ascendancy. I’m more an advocate of free range pink selectivity. Pink wants to be free!
I very much enjoy how parenting actual, real-life children puts paid to all those liberal beliefs about how boys and girls really are the same.
Little girls really are more interested in girl things. Little boys really do tend to get more excited by trucks and trains and planes. And don’t even get me started on the rate of speech. O. M. G.
I prefer manly women to girly men, if it is all the same to you.
Yes, but can you imagine being raised by a mother who does? Pity the child.
It’s not only a first world problem it is most definitely a 20th Century one. Prior to the 1940s the color assignments were just the opposite. Red was the color of blood and royalty and therefore considered manly. Royal Blue was associated with the Virgin Mary and seen as feminine. Their diminutives – pink and light blue – were associated with the appropriate diminutive humans as well.
At one time even boys were called girls. The word “boy” evolved from the Middle English/Germanic word for servant. Up until the late 15th Century male children were referred to as “knave girls,” the word girl just meant a child.
Besides, the feminists and their corporate toadies have spent the better part of the last two decades convincing me that pink = boobies. Have a ribbon! Be aware of the breasts! And cancer!
What makes this so strange is that it was written by a flamingo.
James, you could have summed up your feelings much more succinctly, as one commenter on the article did:
You just use too many words, James!
With the collar up, of course.
Manly women is probably more accurate.
The pink ascendency started much earlier. In the 1950s, author Henry Gregor Felsen had one of his teenage heroes actually use pink in the color scheme for his street rod. This is where the derogatory term “pinko” came from.
I’ve looked into this idea that color preferences were switched prior to WWII and I really can’t find anything to support it. Not saying I’ve not seen the assertion made before, but there doesn’t seem to be much contemporary support for it. All I got was after the fact assertions that “that’s the way it was”. Prior to the baby boom, it appears that baby clothes were almost universally white, because we didn’t have color fast colors so white stood up to repeated washing.
It appears pastels used to be a common theme for children, and pink was common for all children, but that had less to do with sex selection and more to do with expense. Red is the commonest and least expensive dye, and after multiple washing, it becomes pink. So even families of the means to dress their children in colored clothing, pink was the likeliest color for small children.
Also, from what I’ve seen, dressing children younger than two in sexually differentiated clothing is a modern phenomenon.
Somehow the Pink Öyster Cult just doesn’t work.
From Smithsonian Magazine:
I tried to verify that but the ’27 article is behind Time’s paywall. In any case thoughts of sexually assigned clothing is still recent. Through the beginning of the 20th Century most babies wore dresses until they two or three. I guess that’s because they didn’t have onesies with snaps in the crotch for changing diapers.
I would be afraid to fret over something that trivial. If I did, I figure God might notice, and decide I need something real to fret over. Just to restore my sense of proportion.
Seawriter
Oh, james – I read the teaser before clicking “read more” and was really expecting a full-length rant. Now, this was good, it was good, but 3 short paragraphs of good (intro/outro don’t count)? You can do better than this. Take a deep breath and just let it flow.
Most girls grow out of their obsession with “pink”:
Source: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-ways-disney-princesses-created-modern-feminism
I am referring to feminine colors in sum (and indeed, sensitivity to color that boys, what with rods and cones and all, lack). Little girls and little boys are different. They play differently, they interact differently, they prefer different colors and ways of solving problems.
This is, of course, one of those things so hard to understand that 5 year-olds grasp it much better than do academicians.
And the same people who fret and worry over Disney princesses will go, “OMG, OMG! William! Kate! Harry! Diiiiii-annnnna!”
My wife never has.
Really? I thought that “pinko” was simply a reference to Reds who weren’t brave enough to go full-Commie. So they were merely “pink.”
I’ve been trying to track down a column I read about a year ago where some New Yorker Mom was fretting because her little boy was behaving . . . like a boy!
Specifically, though she forbid him from having any toys that might be somehow “male,” the kid was still making guns out of sticks.
I was trying to reference this in another post, and my Google-fu wasn’t cooperating.
“Really? I thought that “pinko” was simply a reference to Reds who weren’t brave enough to go full-Commie. So they were merely “pink.”
That’s what they want us to think.
Don’t they paint holding cells and jail interiors with some form of pink? Who says the color doesn’t have the same effect on young girls. Why not young boys??? You’re on the wrong website for that question.