The color of gender
This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.
I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.
I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.
One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.
My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.
I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.
One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”
I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.
In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.
It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.
Actually, the western world is bringing the pink=girl blue=boy thing down a little bit at a time, in the name of breast cancer research. Wrangler clothing company has an entire line (for men and women) that they call “Tough Enough To Wear Pink”… a percentage of the profits go to breast cancer research.
The National Finals Rodeo has an entire night called Tough Enough To Wear Pink night (well, they’re sponsored by Wrangler…) and a portion of the gate for that night goes to breast cancer research as well as all of the competing athletes wearing pink. As a result, people in the western world have stopped boggling at something that is viewed by many to be an absolute reversal of “how things should be” : A bull rider in all over pink, including hot pink chaps.
The one thing that hasn’t quite made the jump seems to be hats… men are still pretty much sticking to their black or grey felt hats… but then, there’s a lot of cultural conditioning and tradition behind those hats, too, so we can forgive them :)
@FarmGirl That’s awesome. People flouting gender norms is cool, but using the attention you get from that to highlight a great cause is, like, super cool.
I dunno, man, I’m tough enough to wear pink all the goddamn time, I must be the toughest person ever to endure such humiliation. A bull rider in pink doesn’t impress me until he’s in pink because he just likes the color, not because it’s a whole deal that a man is (temporarily, self-consciously, and humorously) doing the girl thing.
Sorry, attack of the grouchies, supporting cancer research is a good thing. But the idea that men doing woman things is totally exceptional always gets to me. I s’pose it’s better than bull riders just going around refusing to wear pink under any circumstances.
Also, I don’t know how it is in Africa, but in North America a lot of the red berries are the ones you don’t want to put in your mouth. A conditioned preference for… well, for no one color, but for an extensive cultural knowledge of the forest and of each individual type of fruit, as modern hunter-gatherers have, would be a lot more useful.
Did they control for the percentage of women who can see more colors than men? Because that might be causing the slight shift towards red if the preference was concentrated within that subset.
@Holly Pervocracy I think I see your point, and agree with it. Part of me asks right away, “why does pink represent breast cancer anyway?” Of course, breast cancer can strike either sex, but women are way more likely to get it. So breast cancer=pink is just reinforcing pink=girl. And it’s kind of lame that we as human beings can’t just share all the colors.
But cancer research wins that mental battle for me. Also, cowboys in pink at a rodeo breaking down gender barriers and raising money for a good cause makes me smile.
@ravenshrike I didn’t think of that. I highly doubt that they did, though I don’t know for sure. I think that it was mostly a “which do you prefer?” survey done with computer images. They had about 200 subjects, if I recall correctly.
I agree with you 100% on the high sex drive/no maternal drive thing…I never played with dolls/played house and never ever wanted to have a family. I have never felt anything other than detached “I guess people DO do that sort of thing” towards other people’s pregnancies and childbearing but yeah, my worst nightmare as well. However, I loathe pink (I look awful in it) and I hate the ubiquitous “girliness” it’s taken on) :) And evolutional psychology is a crock of mostly men making up “just so” stories to shore up the social norms they’ve been raised with/agree with. Evolutionary BIOLOGY is a real science, but ev psych is bunk!
I was much like you about the whole “kid thing”. Never wanted them and didn’t particularly care for spawn of other people. I’m now a stay at home mom with 3 kids and, most days, I enjoy it LOL. Maybe one day down the line you’ll decide kids you spawn are ok but other’s aren’t. Maybe you’ll never change your mind and will want to live child-free forever. Hey, whatev, it’s your uterus. I’ve seen this discussion frequently and it always seems like one sie is saying to the other “You’ll regret it”. It’s like one person can’t be happy unless they convince having, or not having, a child is the best option. My feeling is, you stay out of my uterus and I’ll stay out of your’s.
On raising kids gender neutral…I have 3 kids, some of each sex thrown in there. We don’t separate toys in girl’s or boy’s toys. My husband and I are both pretty damn accepting when it comes to whatever the kids want to play with. For example, taking the kids to the toy store and telling them they can pick a small toy and both kids (there was only 2 at the time, a boy and girl) leave with dress up high heels. But, as they get a little older, they have definite preferences for “girl toys” or “boy toys”. Both will, at times, play with toys that are typically for the opposite gender but it’s less and elss requent. It’s actually been kind of interesting to watch, since I was always very “tomboyish” and can’t ever remember voluntarily playing with a Barbie. Again, whatever works for them.
and my 2 cents on pink and blue….well, actually my Father’s 2 cents. My Dad was a big “manly-man” who regularly wore pink. He didn’t go for mauvy-dark pink or anything that could be described in any way other than just Pink. He didn’t give a damn what people said about it. His theory was that it took a real man to wear pink.
Holly- The women competitors (team roping and barrel racing, in spite of the fact that as far as I’m aware the PRCA has no rules *against* women in rough stock sports, you just don’t see them) wear pink on tough enough to wear pink night, as well as the men. It’s less a “hey look at me I can wear pink for a good cause” thing than you might think.
Plenty of bull riders have pink or purple chaps, anyway. They pick the colors they like but the flashier the color the better, because the motion of the chaps draws attention to their leg work and can get them a better score.
My thought is that Wrangler started the “Tough Enough To Wear Pink” thing in order to appeal to those manly men who think pink is a girly color, and raise money for breast cancer research, but now, more pink and purple are finding their way into men’s western wear all the time… Purple being a color that has seemed more for the girls than the guys in western wear.
@Kaija Good point! Evolutionary biology vs. psychology is an important distinction. The fact is, the latter might even have some good points, but it can never be anything more than speculation, for obvious reasons.
@June Clever Moms are rad! Mine is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I just know it’s not for me. If it seemed like I was judging people for breeding, that was totally unintentional. It’s more just the fact that I find it hard to get excited about things that I can’t relate to at all (e.g. pregnancy, ice fishing), so I have to give my breeder friends sympathetic enthusiasm rather than drawing on a lot of actual glee.
Peers and just general “living in society” and who knows, maybe some innate drive, are unavoidably going to influence many children’s preferences toward one gender or another, I’m sure. I have mad respect for parents who provide support for either direction no matter what their kids choose, and that includes support for, say, a little girl to wear pretty pink dresses and wear tiaras. I always hear that as a parent you have to “pick your battles” and it makes me sad when gender roles are so rigid that they even qualify as a battle at all.