« Stay Classy, Conservative Blogosphere | Main | Mixed Results » Code Pink17 Jun 2007 06:00 pm
Via Ann Friedman, Barbara Ellen makes the case against pink stuff (cell phones, clothes, etc.), which she says "infantilizes" women. To me, this seems a bit backwards; a feminist should object to the association of womanness with immaturity, not object to women associating themselves with a female-identified color. Comments (32)
Why should pinkness be associated with babies? Because Caucasian babies are pink? So are Caucasian grownups. Pinkness has an inherant association with flowers, which I suppose are associated in turn with femininity. But I wonder if the association of pinkness with femininity doesn't have more to do with the vagina than with anything else. (Flowers too--cf Georgia O'Keefe.) Seems a little stupid and arbitrary to me. 
One scale falls from Philosopher Yglesias' eyes. Stick to equity feminists, the gender feminists don't have any sort of consistent or equitable philosophy. If you actually wanted to do a service to both feminism and our leftosphere, there is a lot a philosopher could do in terms of peeking under feminism's skirts.
Stick to equity feminists, the gender feminists don't have any sort of consistent or equitable philosophy. (Apart from an apparent love of authoritarian speech policing tactics.) I might think there were evolutionary reasons for associating pink with women, i.e., biological signals of the vagina in much the same manner that the baboon facial colorization mimics a baboon's rump in heat, but opposing that armchair evolutionary theory is the claim (google it) that up until 100 - 150 years ago, blue was apparently the girl's color and pink the boy's color. Some weird stuff comes out from the google search for pink color boys. Like, pink is due to the Nazis!
Can men carry pink stuff without being infantilized?
My wife loves pink. I bought her a pink iPod and a pink digital camera and she loves them both. There's nothing wrong with a woman liking pink and if anyone says different, she'll kick their ass.
Someone needs to get Barbara Ellen on the right page. Otherwise, there's a whole warehouse of breast cancer awareness merch that's going to have to be '86ed. Really, this is trite stuff.
Call me culturally insensitive, but I just don't get it. As Matt observes, the issue isn't a woman's choice of pink, but rather the responses of those around her. Most of my clothes are blue and gray; should I care if fashionistas or even society has a whole adopts some arbitrary take on my personality because of it? I imagine some women wear pink clothes and carry pink accessories simply because they like the color or because it looks good on them. I used to wear pink shirts to work at a defense contractor and occasionally I'd get a humorous comment about my masculinity, for which the only reasonable response, I think, is WTF? You'd think Barbara Ellen would have many more interesting targets than pink--though I suppose these are attacked in other columns: high-heeled shoes, push-up bras, underarm razors, hair dye, make-up, and so forth.
Pink is a color associated with femininity, not with immaturity. That's because pink is a vaginal color. It is, subconsciously, associated with sexuality.
I share your puzzlement, but have a slightly different critique of Ellen. Love of liberty makes me wish that people be able to favor the color pink without anyone holding it against them. To advise against something that "infantalizes" women is to advise them to conform to a silly prejudice, indeed to second it (actually to first it as I never heard of anyone else with this pink infantalizes idea). I know personal styles always carry a social message (my sartorial stylings attempt (so far successfully) to communicate "I am not committing the crime of indecent exposure") but I wish people felt more free to dress as they please and I dream the day will come in which
"conniving Macbethian hag"
In Japan, pink literally means porno or prostitution. You don't even need letters on your sign, just the color. Some of my male Japanese co-workers thought it would be really funny to buy me a pink Swatch (I am a straight male American). They died laughing when I put it on. Actually, I knew what pink denoted, but...it was a nice watch! And I got a slightly perverse (and maybe slightly inappropriate) charge out of flaunting it everyday. Playing dumb is a guilty pleasure sometimes. BTW, why do we have such a stunted crabbed view of sex in this country? Maybe pink *is* slightly infantilizing - at least in a sublimated, and maybe sometimes sexy way. So? Maybe blue is the same for men sometimes. Wear those colors or don't. Who cares? Is there a problem with calling your lover 'baby'?
To me, this seems a bit backwards; a feminist should object to the association of womanness with immaturity, not object to women associating themselves with a female-identified color. No, I think Ellen has the causal direction of association it right. Pink did not first come to be associated with femaleness, and then only secondarily with female children through a further cultural association of femaleness with immaturity. Pinkness is associated almost univerally with childlike femininity. This is not just the case in the US or the West, but in Japan as well, where pink is a signifier of purity, innocense and virginity - even in Japanese pornography with its obsessions with transgressed youth and the defilement of virginity. There are several possible sources of this association, which runs pretty deep. One is the association of pinkness with flowers, especially blossoms, and the connection of the latter with freshness, youth, spring, earliness and immaturity. The other possibly has something to do, as others have suggested, with psychological associations of pink with genital coloration, an association which is dominant when applied to the young, but is overriden by the post-menstrual association with redness. Both associations are tied together in the metaphor of "deflowering". Fashion waves emphasizing pink, such as the post WWII movement, almost always seek to convey a feeling of springlike freshness and affected girlish naivete. Redness, on the other hand, is an extremely common symbol of a dangerous, post-mentsrual female sexual maturity.
in Japan... where pink is a signifier of purity, innocense and virginity - *even* in Japanese pornography with its obsessions with transgressed youth and the defilement of virginity. 'Even'? I would say 'especially'. Redness, on the other hand, is an extremely common symbol of a dangerous, post-mentsrual female sexual maturity. Yes indeed. And it can be explicitly political, eg 'Red Tide' anti-communist imagery in Germany before WW2.
You guys are fucking idiots (Pink=girl/woman b/c of vagina? WTF?). Pink used to be associated with boys and blue with girls (in our country. I don't know about other countries). It eventually switched. Look it up.
What about those of us straight guys who happen to LIKE pink? Jesus. This is as pathetic as claiming that missiles are the shape they are not because of, you know, physics and aerodynamics and stuff, but because they are substitute penises. (You know, in the same way most environmentalists are women, because a huge sphere the size of the earth is a substitute breast.) It's this sort of crap that has 50% of America voting Republican.
J is right, though unfortunately I can't remember the details. The color associations are not that old, and are purely cultural (although as always, people often come up with some kind of association and then attribute it as the origin, to make the link seem essential).
"Purely cultural"? It's a good thing culture doesn't mean anything. We can pretty much take it or leave it at our discretion, which is nice. Just like Colbert, I don't see color.
There's at least four distinct assertions being made here. The first is that pink is associated with females worldwide. The second is that pink is associated with females in the US. The third is that pink is associated with infant females in the US (and that drives the adult association). The "fourth" (it's really a group of variations) is that one of the above has or hasn't always been true. I seriously doubt the first assertion is true, Mr. Kervick notwithstanding. I'd like to see a real worldwide cross-cultural study before I accept this claim. The second assertion is probably true. The question is why. Because the first is true? Because the third? The third is certainly true. Does it follow from the first or the second? J's assertion is in that fourth (group of) assertions. This is a meme that has been moving around for a few years now. Its veracity is not indisputable. The web references I can find point to a defunk website on historical clothing that quoted two early 20th century magazines, both saying that blue is for girls and pink is for boys. However, the book Little Women, published a few years earlier in 1889 or so, mentions putting a blue ribbon on an infant boy's head and a pink ribbon on a girl's, "as is the fashion" (paraphrase). And I'm not finding links to scans of these two articles. One might wonder how someone might have gotten them wrong, but if that historical clothing website didn't refer to a primary source, then anything is possible. There's all sorts of false folkloric stuff that circulate with supposed citations. After making a case for overall doubt about any assertions on this matter, I'll mention that I find the idea that pink might be associated with femininity because of the labia minora and inner vagina to be slightly persuasive, but wouldn't be surprised if it's hogwash (among other things, it's arguable that this is the most obvious color match). I deeply doubt any other argument from nature for a universal male/female color association. Flowers come in many colors. And why are flowers feminine? I lean most heavily to "cultural and not universal", but will accept "naturally-inspired and semi-universal" when the latter is based upon an anatomical distinction. That'd only be if someone actually demonstrated true cross-cultural uniformity in this association.
Oh, note that if it's naturally-driven as some suppose, which would require a strong cross-cultural correlation for this association, then that would support MY's claim that it is primarily feminine, and only secondarily infantile. If it culturally varies, then it's up in the air which is prior, the femininity association or the infant association. It seems to me, though, that given that we are even having this discussion, both associations are independently strong that, given a cultural-only context for this, it doesn't matter whether femininity is prior--the other is still true enough for the purposes of Ellen's argument. You can't say that the association is primarily to femininity if it's purely democratic because enough people are certainly going to say that it's primarily associated with infantilism.
Matt: You're missing the point by trying to apply your powers of logic to feminist punditry. Feminism isn't about logic ...
No Steve Sailer, Feminism is about logic .. the logic of gender inequality. Mathematically speaking, inequality is a statement about the relative size or order of two objects. In feminism, it's about the ways in which society discriminates within the binary values of male and female, in the cultural, political and economic spheres. 8th graders, on some level, know this. Shall we draw a graph for you? Or was women's suffrage a lamentable aberration of American history?
It's the logic of oppression, much the way Marxists used to say that everything represents class struggle and oppression. Much like think tanks, they start with what they want to say and then find evidence to corroborate it.
I think that one needs to point out that spending one's time thinking on the deep significance about the observed preference of contemporary American women for stuff colored pink isn't something a 'grown up' would ever do.
I didn't read the piece because it seems like a silly issue to get irritated about, but I don't see much room for disputing that TODAY the color pink is associated with immature or shallow femininity. Paris Hilton, Legally Blonde, Disney princess stuff, powderpuff girls, etc. How that came to be and whether blue was associated with girls 100 years ago is sort of beside the point. I myself would have a different impression of a young female lawyer who whipped out a hot pink cell phone rather than a more standard color. But I'd probably have a similarly negative impression of a young male (or female) lawyer who had a Indianapolis Cotls themed cell phone (do they make those?). Making a fashion statement out of such a trivial item conveys the impression that you are, well, trivial. Like Matt Yglesias getting "BIG BLGGR" plates on his GEO Prism.
To me, pink is about the celebration of stupidity, especially pink kiddie bike, pink pony, pink phone, pink lunch box, pink Cadillac. Part of it is the very idea of having color-coded personality. Interestingly enough, the fashion for children ca. 100 years ago was fairly uni-sex. Boys could have long curls and even dressed like girls (I mean, at the age of 2-3), girls were dressed as "sailors", and in "male" tartan skirts. I think the idea was that sex categories were not to be rigidly applied to small children, while they were applied very rigidly afterwards. Little girls were not suppose to be seductive little pricnesses, but simply adorable in the same way as little boys.
This points out the ridiculousness of what's left of the feminist movement in America. There are women in Afghanistan, who can't even show their face, get beaten by strange men on the streets with sticks if they don't dress appropriately and "feminists" whine and rail against PINK. Most of these people have severe personality problems and wish they were born 40 years ago when all of the heavy lifting was done. All that's left for them now is the crumbs......so you get articles about PINK.
“This points out the ridiculousness of what's left of the feminist movement in America.” You idiot, this article was written by a Brit in a UK newspaper. A lot of this criticism of the article as if it were some sort of feminist theorist diatribe is just silly bullshit, too. I don't know anything about Barbara Ellen other than what I can glean from the article, but there's no indication she's writing specifically as a feminist. The article reads far more like a mildly puffy culture piece than it does serious cultural criticism. I don't know how many of you who are responding to this with little anti-feminist quips actually read the damn article, but I suspect it's few of you.
Keith Ellis: If you dig through the comments at the first link I have provided below, Dr. Daniel Chandler of the University of Wales says he has actually obtained a copy of the June 1918 Ladies' Home Journal and it contains no pink for boys/ blue for girls statement of the type claimed to be in there. Someone named Jessi makes a similar claim in the comments at the second link. I guess no one has tried to investigate the "Sunday Sentinel" claim because it is not even clear what city the paper came from (Milwaukee? Orlando? Some obscure small town?), but I would not be surprised to learn that the Sentinel citation is also bogus. You were right to be suspicious.
2. http://www.songdog.net/blog/archives/000994.html
This discussion about whether pink is a biologically or culturally derived signifier for femininity misses the point. It is a symbol of girliness, not womanliness. It's a predominant color in children's products marketed towards girls, long past the age when powder-blue acts as a signifier for boys. Where it shows in adult products, it is often associated with a sort of non-serious "cuteness" that does represent a form of infantilization.
I have recently started gardening, and I tend to like oranges, reds, and pinks. Pink comes in so many hues, that I really don't understand how the author associates the color solely with passivity or childishness. In my garden, as in my wardrobe, there are the pastel pinks that do give off a delicateness that obviously offends the author, but I frankly think of it as soothing to the eye. I also have plants in pink that are so striking in their richness and depth of color, that there is no way a viewer would associate those pinks with weakness or passivity. Pink as it relates to breast cancer awareness is about survival, that in itself is about strength, having the power to overcome. I think the author has a gripe with women and the many ways we cede our power in and out of the work place, but bitching about pink isn't an effective way to argue her point (IMO).
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I mostly quit wearing pink becasue its so frat-identified. This trend seems weirdly anachornistic.
Posted by yoyo | June 17, 2007 6:37 PM