Pink is for Boys, Blue is for Girls?

Chris, who got me into podcasts, stumbled upon one he insisted I had to listen to - "What's the deal with pink and blue?" from the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You. Seriously, what is the deal with everything for girls having to be pink and everything for boys having to be blue? Do we not have more imagination than that?

The podcasters' research couldn't find definitive explanations for why we associate these colors with certain sexes, but they did reveal a surprise for me that in the 1920s, boys wore pink, which was considered a masculine color, and girls wore blue, which was considered a dainty and delicate color. Before that, boys and girls wore white dresses. For an unexplained reason, the colors flip-flopped in the 1940s and since then, pink has been a sign of femininity in Western culture. And pink isn't going away even as girls grow into adulthood. We wear pink (or buy pink) to support breast cancer research, marketers use pink to try to lure female customers (Blackberries, once used exclusively by male professionals, shot up in sales when pink was introduced to get interested in what was considered the ultimate male gadget), and stores like Victoria's Secret have a whole clothing line based around pink.

Is the pink/blue dichotomy a complete social construct or is it rooted in biology? There hasn't been a lot of research on the subject, but the podcasters did point out a study where different colors were shown to groups of British and Chinese women and the majority chose colors from the red spectrum, which suggests that a preference for pink (or red) is not a social construct, but a universal biological trait. However, the podcasters brought up the fact that red is associated with luck in China, and suggested that more research is needed. The few studies completed do suggest that women are biologically drawn to red and hypothesize that in hunter-gather times, women needed to evolve to see the red in ripe berries or recognize the flush cheeks of a sick child.

Regardless of any supposed biological roots in color preferences, we're no longer hunter gatherers and in my opinion, color preferences are now entirely social constructs. I wish the podcasters had been able to answer the question of why when babies were dressed in white dresses for so long, we suddenly switched to pink for boys and blue for girls (which is contrary to the studies about women being biologically attracted to reds) and then in the course of a generation completely reversed practices.

I've had a difficult relationship with the color pink. I don't know if it was the way my parents raised me, but I was never a girly-girl. I despised pink and dresses clear into young adulthood (I have since discovered that skirts can actually be quite practical and when the only petite extra small shirt left is in the color pink, I'm just excited to find something that fits.) When my mom decided she was going to paint all our bedrooms, she let me choose my bedroom color and I chose blue, which is still my favorite color. She thought my brother was too young to pick a color for himself, so he would be getting whatever color my mom choose for her and my dad's room. She called it peach, but as we all know, the paint color always looks different on the wall than it does on the card at the hardware store. My brother ended up with a pink bedroom.

With the need to be able to have hand-me-downs for my brother, I often didn't have a choice in things like bikes, where I always had to have a boys bike. In fifth grade, my mom finally let me choose any bike I wanted and immediately choose not only a girl's bike, but a pink one. (In actuality, there probably wasn't any other choice of color.) After having so many boys things, it was the only way I could reclaim any semblance of girlyness, even if that's not who I was.

It's not a surprise to me that everyone inevitably asks me whether I'm going to find out the sex of the baby. Chris hates surprises and really wants to know, while I think it takes the fun out of it. I look forward to the surprise. Regardless of what our society does with the information on the sex of the baby, I really just don't feel the need to find out.

When I joked with my boss that as a planner, I can't help get started early in planning for the baby, she exclaimed, "Except you don't want to know the sex the of the baby?!" How on earth does knowing the sex of the baby help us better plan? So we can repaint the dark grey future baby's room in Pepto-Bismol pink and give it a ballerina theme, or repaint in baby blue with a sports or race car theme. I find it an advantage to not knowing (or not telling if I do end up finding out), because it saves my kid from being born into a gender stereotype. Whether my son becomes a guy's guy or wants to wear a tutu, or my daughter loves the outdoors and getting dirty, or gasp, wants to be a cheerleader, that's for them to decide. Society will influence much of their taste in colors, activities or interests, but I'd rather try to give him or her a neutral start.