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Speaker 1: From housetu works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Molly. I'm Kristen and Kristen UM. I was
Speaker 1: looking through some baby pictures recently, and here's the thing
Speaker 1: about me. I had no hair when I was born,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have any hair until I was about
Speaker 1: four years old. Oh my god. It was actually kind
Speaker 1: of worried my parents. Yeah, so I looked like this
Speaker 1: little bald child. And Um, as a result, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of confusion about if I was a little
Speaker 1: boy or a little girl to strangers in like the
Speaker 1: grocery store. I thought that was awkward for your mom.
Speaker 1: Apparently my mom fielded a lot of things like oh,
Speaker 1: what a cute little boy. And so as a result,
Speaker 1: I got put in a lot of pink, really a
Speaker 1: lot of pink, like pink headbands, pink shirts, pink pants,
Speaker 1: so that everyone would know immediately this is this is
Speaker 1: a girl. She has no hair yet, we might weird,
Speaker 1: but she's a girl, all right. So I mean that
Speaker 1: is just one way that I guess that people can
Speaker 1: quickly identify a sort of androgenous looking baby. Well, here's
Speaker 1: my question. Your mom puts you in a lot of
Speaker 1: pink when you were a kid. How did you once
Speaker 1: you started dressing yourself. Did you keep wearing a lot
Speaker 1: of pink or did you kind of discarded I kind
Speaker 1: of discarded pink. Um. I feel like I did not
Speaker 1: wear it very much at all, and not even dresses.
Speaker 1: I feel like, you know, most kids probably prefer being
Speaker 1: in like overalls, except for Sarry Cruise loves to wear
Speaker 1: a little dresses around. But because I feel like, as
Speaker 1: soon as I could dress myself, it was like jeans,
Speaker 1: maybe some purple. I did like purple. I did like
Speaker 1: purple too. Yeah, I kind of did the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: abandoned pink as soon as I as soon as I could,
Speaker 1: because I kind of wanted to be a boy. I
Speaker 1: thought it was cooler, not a weird you know. But
Speaker 1: why why do you think that? You know, as soon
Speaker 1: as we're born, we're like, oh, let's put a girl
Speaker 1: in pink. Well, uh, we can trace that back to
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, when in the United States girls started
Speaker 1: wearing pink and boys started wearing blue. But I thought
Speaker 1: it was kind of strange that um in the twenties,
Speaker 1: it was actually reversed. Way back in the day, all
Speaker 1: babies just wore white. And then for some reason in
Speaker 1: the twenties, boys started being dressed in pink and girls
Speaker 1: started being dressed in blue. And then a couple of
Speaker 1: decades later it flip flopped and it will stayed the same. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really hasn't. I don't think that I've seen much
Speaker 1: evidence as to why the switch happened, but I guess
Speaker 1: for a while pink was seen is more of a
Speaker 1: masculine color, and blue is more like the dainty, delicate,
Speaker 1: colorful all girls. And now it's definitely pink is I
Speaker 1: would say that pink, especially in like Western culture, is
Speaker 1: definitely the sign of femininity, you know, yeah, from from
Speaker 1: girlhood on, I mean even as an adult. There's so
Speaker 1: many pink products marketed towards us. Yeah, like you know,
Speaker 1: pink blackberries. That's one of the ways they say they
Speaker 1: got women interested in blackberries, which we're seen as you know,
Speaker 1: the men's ultimate gadget, when they started making them pink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they came out with a BlackBerry, a pink BlackBerry pearl
Speaker 1: for on Time's Day two thousand and eight, and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: boosted sales pretty well. So it follows you all through
Speaker 1: your life. Like it starts with like a pink Barbie
Speaker 1: box and then you go pink BlackBerry, buy maybe pink
Speaker 1: from Victoria's Secret. You buy pink ribbons to support breast cancer, right,
Speaker 1: And originally I was reading the color for that breast
Speaker 1: cancer campaign might have been peach, but they thought that
Speaker 1: pink was more identifiable with women's issues. And it seems like,
Speaker 1: you know, now this starts very young. There's a couple
Speaker 1: of researchers at Princeton University that refer to the phase
Speaker 1: that little girls go through where they have to have everything,
Speaker 1: you know, pink and purple as the pink, frilly dressed phase. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're saying that this phase occurs regardless of how
Speaker 1: you were dressed as an infant, right, like, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, no matter you know, if your parents were
Speaker 1: the most egalitarian dressed you in overall sort of parents,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're just like, I must have
Speaker 1: a pink relly dress. Yeah. So that brings up the
Speaker 1: question of, uh, you know, if if kids who were
Speaker 1: dressed let's say it was dressed in white or black, whatever,
Speaker 1: not dressed in pink, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: starts the girl starts stressing herself in pink. My question
Speaker 1: is is this a social construct or is it something
Speaker 1: that women are just biologically like attuned to being attracted
Speaker 1: to pink. Well, there are some people who are trying
Speaker 1: to figure this out with research. There was a study
Speaker 1: that was put out that basically said, you know that
Speaker 1: I guess they had about two hundred test subjects um
Speaker 1: and overall, everyone I think liked blue the best. But
Speaker 1: then when they really had to pick, then it divided down,
Speaker 1: you know, the social lines we think of our The
Speaker 1: boys picked blue and the girls picked more colors on
Speaker 1: the red spectrum. Right, And that original study included mostly
Speaker 1: uh like British Caucasians, but the researchers also pulled Chinese
Speaker 1: women to see if it the pink preference would cross
Speaker 1: cultural lines, and it did. It held. The Chinese women
Speaker 1: also ended up preferring colors from the red spectrum as well.
Speaker 1: Although something that was left out of that study is
Speaker 1: that in China red as a color of luck. So
Speaker 1: I mean they tried to pull these Chinese people in
Speaker 1: a sort of proof that across culture, across what you've
Speaker 1: been tie as a young child, you know we'll always
Speaker 1: pick red, but that it might have ignored the fact
Speaker 1: that that's sort of a lucky color and child. And
Speaker 1: I mean, Molly, I'll be honest with you, I think
Speaker 1: I would have skewed results too, because I don't yeah,
Speaker 1: I would have picked blue over pink. Although I'm wearing
Speaker 1: a red shirt right now, but but I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: in more of a blue face in my life to say, so,
Speaker 1: how do you feel like when you go shopping and
Speaker 1: you see a lot of pink things? Um, I keep
Speaker 1: walking really quickly. Yeah, see, I'll stop and look. At
Speaker 1: one point in my life, I almost bought a pair
Speaker 1: of pink glasses. And this is pretty recently, Like it's
Speaker 1: not like I was ten and was like, oh, pink glasses,
Speaker 1: They're so cute. I mean, I went as an adult
Speaker 1: to the to the optometris and had to be like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, the saleslayer is really trying to push
Speaker 1: these and I can see you in those, So that's
Speaker 1: the thing. They looked kind of cute, But did I
Speaker 1: feel that way about them? Because I've been trained to
Speaker 1: like pink things because I really liked them. Maybe it
Speaker 1: is evolution, Molly, Okay, these same researchers that did the
Speaker 1: you know, the color preference study, so that their theory
Speaker 1: is that we women are evolved to look for um
Speaker 1: to be attracted to pink because during hunter gatherer times,
Speaker 1: when women would go out foraging for for plants and
Speaker 1: other food, red would be the like signifier of right
Speaker 1: berries or um also a sign of illness, like a
Speaker 1: flushed cheeks when when you get sick. So if you're
Speaker 1: taking care of your child, you could see if they
Speaker 1: were sick and then give them berries. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: kind of reinforces like the nurturing side. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: reading one article in The Guardian that kind of took
Speaker 1: on that that theory, and it said basically that, you know,
Speaker 1: the study was just which color women preferred, not which
Speaker 1: color they are necessarily better at picking out right, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like they took everyone out in
Speaker 1: the forest and saw who could find the most red berries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so maybe they're a little a little more work needs
Speaker 1: to be done, but I thought I thought it was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. Um, And because there was also sort
Speaker 1: of a study that I thought kind of confirmed this
Speaker 1: evolutionary perspective. Uh. It tested male and female monkey toy
Speaker 1: preferences to see if sort of the same things applied
Speaker 1: as far as female monkeys going for more UM traditionally
Speaker 1: like female types of toys, different colors and UM, and
Speaker 1: it held up as well. So you know, so I guess,
Speaker 1: really what might need to happen. It's just more work
Speaker 1: with babies, you know, if they can figure out how
Speaker 1: to get you know, a small baby to indicate um,
Speaker 1: a color preference. Or in this article, someone posits maybe
Speaker 1: we should see if color blind children, if they have
Speaker 1: any sort of gender confusion or if you know, they say,
Speaker 1: by the time you're what to you can start to
Speaker 1: identify which gender you belong to, and you start picking
Speaker 1: things that are associated with that gender. Yeah, And that
Speaker 1: kind of reminded me of an article that I read
Speaker 1: in The Atlantic. Um it's in the November two calls
Speaker 1: an eight issue of Atlantic monthly about transgender boys, and
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that the main subject in
Speaker 1: the article it was UM, a boy who basically from birth,
Speaker 1: as soon as he could start kind of like self identifying,
Speaker 1: really felt like he was trapped in the wrong body
Speaker 1: wanted to be a girl, um like, wouldn't do anything
Speaker 1: associated with being a boy. And it was around the
Speaker 1: age of two and a half that he that his
Speaker 1: parents started noticing that he would consistently go for if
Speaker 1: given the choice, would consistently go for like pink toys.
Speaker 1: He would want to play with barbies like these very
Speaker 1: traditionally um female uh, female items. But you kind of wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder about someone in that situation. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: you and I both sort of had the luxury of
Speaker 1: being girls, knowing we were girls, and so we kind
Speaker 1: of had the right to reject that kind of pink thing.
Speaker 1: You know, you you clearly rejected pink. I mean, I
Speaker 1: got seduced by the pink glasses, but the all fair
Speaker 1: reason I rejected them was because I didn't want to
Speaker 1: wear them, and people think, oh, she's a girly girl, right,
Speaker 1: And so we both had sort of the opportunity to
Speaker 1: be kind of, you know, very you know, latantly female
Speaker 1: to the world, and so as a result, we had
Speaker 1: sort of the chance to reject pink, where someone who
Speaker 1: might have been trying to prove that to the world
Speaker 1: maybe over overreached it a little bit. Do you think
Speaker 1: that's possible. I think that is possible. I think that's
Speaker 1: another kind of indicator that this whole pink thing is
Speaker 1: sort of a social tool we can use to, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to tell, you know, other people you know
Speaker 1: exactly who you are, like identify with your specific gender.
Speaker 1: Although at the same time, you don't hear a lot
Speaker 1: about boys, you know, clamoring for blue toys. No, And
Speaker 1: you know, you think about if you walk through men's department,
Speaker 1: not you know, a baby boy department, but by the
Speaker 1: time you go the men's department, you see pink dress shirts,
Speaker 1: pink ties. Like I feel like pink follows women in
Speaker 1: a way that boy that blue does not follow boys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, I think that's another reason why now as
Speaker 1: an adult female, I'm I sort of shy away from,
Speaker 1: like you said, like going directly for the for the
Speaker 1: pink items, just because it seems a little I don't know,
Speaker 1: a little pandering it does. But you know, I can't
Speaker 1: help but think if I were my mother and I
Speaker 1: had a little baby that was spald I mean maybe
Speaker 1: I would fall back on that. I kind of wonder
Speaker 1: if this pink blue thing is less about what the
Speaker 1: children need and more about what you know, validation the
Speaker 1: parents need for their precious gift. Yeah, well, Molly, I'm
Speaker 1: glad you have a beautiful head of hair now it is,
Speaker 1: it has grown in now, thank god. Well, Molly, I
Speaker 1: think that it's going to take a little more research
Speaker 1: to actually answer this whole question of whether or not
Speaker 1: color is you know, social or biological nature nurture, nature, nurture,
Speaker 1: old debate, who knows? But until then, if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about why girls were pink and boys
Speaker 1: wear blue and other fascinating topics, you can go to
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com for more on this and
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