Blue or pink?

[radegund]

Further to last night's post, I'm remembering a children's party I went to when I was maybe four or five, and at the end they were handing out little presents wrapped in either pink or blue paper. We queued up, and the adult at the top of the queue asked each child, "blue or pink?". I very much preferred blue to pink, so I said "blue" - which was greeted with a degree of consternation. I can't remember whether they actually let me have a blue present, but I do remember this as the first time I realised that the colours were supposed to have a gender association.

When did you? Or is it something you've always known?

ETA: I'm only now realising what a peculiar little ritual that was: if they wanted to give us all the "right" colour present, then why didn't they just hand them out? The gender test was kind of freaky, in retrospect. I think I may have felt some of that at the time, too - it certainly made me uncomfortable.

Comments

[ailbhe]

I do remember knowing that pink meant GIRL in the scariest, cissiest way. Not in the lovely butterflies on my underwear way I approved of at all.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I always knew that red was for girls and blue was for boys. But I very specifically remember "finding out" about pink at the age of about six. Somewhere in the past few weeks, the correct answer to "what is your favourite colour" had shifted from "red" to "pink" if you were a girl, and I hadn't noticed. I had to ask what colour pink was.

The other thing that I was thinking about in the last post is that I was more or less brought up to believe I couldn't wear pink because of my red hair (which was much, much redder when I was little.) This was originally declared by my mother, who would actually remove pink clothes from piles of handmedowns and give them to someone else because they wouldn't suit me, and reinforced by the Anne of Green Gables books. I just started to wonder reading that thread yesterday whether this was a deliberate policy on my mum's part, but I don't think she was particularly millitantly gender-neutral because I had lots of beautiful dresses, long hair and dolls, and my brothers had guns and cars and Lego (though we also all played with each others toys and I had tons of pairs of cord trousers and tracksuits for climbing trees in.)

The "no pink with red hair" thing stuck until until two years ago, though, when I bought my pink shoes for rickynoe's wedding and then experimented with a couple of pale pink tops and discovered that the right shade of pink actually suits me perfectly well.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Interesting about the red-to-pink shift. I doubt that I would have noticed for ages that the "correct answer" had changed.

I've just remembered another detail of that party: the girl behind me, who was very small and young and pretty, shyly answered "bink" when asked which colour she wanted, and all the adults went awww! bink!, and I felt like a hulking, gangly outcast who had Said The Wrong Thing (in addition to being Not Cute because I could speak properly). Which is presumably why the incident has stuck in my memory for MORE THAN A QUARTER OF A CENTURY...

See, banning pink doesn't make much sense to me. Surely a small kid is likely to conclude that femaleness (at least in certain manifestations) is somehow shameful or undesirable? I know that I looked down on children who were allowed to do things I was not (e.g. read Enid Blyton) ... although I admit that this may have been because I was an enormous snob and a running-dog lackey of the parental oppressors.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

But I wasn't not allowed pink because it was girly: I wasn't allowed pink because it wasn't flattering! Totally different matter!

I remember conceiving a disgust for girls who would play the excessively sweet, yielding, sweet little thing at an extremely early age. Michelle T was in two years above me at school, but tiny and slim and light with extremely long blonde hair, and she would always hold hands with the older girls at dancing and ask to sit on their knee and suck her thumb and generally be nauseatingly cute. I have a very specific memory of just being disgusted by that kind of behaviour when I would have been about seven. I was all about being the smart, slightly bratty one who answered back and was obsessed with my own dignity.

[dovegrey.livejournal.com]

Hm, I don't know. I guess it was something I was always vaguely aware of, although I didn't personally take much notice - I was never a pinky-frilly kind of girl, and thankfully my parents didn't force pinkness onto me. In fact when I was a baby she deliberately dressed me in white and lemon and shunned the idea of pinkess and blueness. Which makes me wonder when, exactly, it was decreed that boys are blue and girls are pink.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

I don't think I always knew, but I don't remember the point at which I knew - perhaps it was more gradual - first realising that one person thought that, then more, then buying into it myself.

I do remember my favourite colour being lilac, though I'm not sure if I knew the name and probably said purple. But I changed my mind to pink, I think part through deciding if I said my favourite colour was purple I had to like all shades of it, which I didn't; and partly because I wanted to fit in and believed pink was the one I was supposed to like. IIRC, it would have been early primary school, after we learnt embroidery, because I think I made a concious decision while looking at some pink and purple embroidery thread.

Which brings up another question I wonder from time to time - why is pink it's own colour? Why isn't it a shade of red?

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I don't remember at all - as a child I absolutely refused to wear pink at all, though, not even a pink stripe on a sock. At the same time, I went through at least a year's phase of refusing to wear trousers because they were for boys and I was a girl.

Colours in my family were red for my sister and blue for me, and I was brought up very much a Clothkits child - dungarees and polo-necks all the way. As a small child, I was quite often mistaken for a boy, and I think that may have had to do with my later skirts-and-dresses thing.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

The illusion of choice?

I think I went through that ritual a number of times too. After a while I went for the blue each time because it was more likely to be a fun present. I think on at least one occasion I was asked if I was sure & it was explained that about the pink for girls, blue for boys, but I don't think there was consternation.

I probably really wanted a boy's present in pink paper.


I really don't have clear memories of childhood. My clearest memory is fake!

[ailbhe]

I have just remembered that I chose a boy's present at the bring and buy at scoil lorcain and had to exaplin that I wanted a boy's present because it would be more fun. It was the santa.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

My mum - being a good 60s feminist - used to buy red for my brother and blue for me (and yellow for my sister, when she came along). I must have learned at some point that "pink is for girls and blue is for boys" but it arrived as a cultural concept, not as something I was supposed to fit into, if you see what I mean.

Found this discussion via Yonmei

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

Pink and blue are accepted as girl vs. boy colors, but I realized sometime around age 10 or 11 that the colors that matched gender expectations for adults were *red* for men (intensity, anger, power) and *blue* for women (calm, cool, restrained). So the color-coding isn't really consistent past the pink-for-girls ultimatum your previous post has lamented.

Agree that clothes and styles for women are subtly (or not so subtly) tied into social gender training, largely to women's disadvantage. If I actually had a girl to raise, I'd name or nick-name her something gender neutral, dress her in gender-neutral clothes, and *let* everyone treat her as a boy with the greater level of attention that carries. If the kid starts out with the expectation of being a full human, I'd hope she'll never let it go.

Re: Found this discussion via Yonmei

[merryhouse.livejournal.com]

Someone told me once (quoting sources? wossat?) that originally the gender code *was* red for boys and blue for girls, and that it was only when the Baby=Pastel idea took hold that things changed.

I don't know how true this may be, or when it happened.

LBs

Julie paradox

[sshi.livejournal.com]

I don't remember any early colour coding in any detail, but from a little later on (from nine or ten to puberty) I remember being completely obsessed with pastel colours. I didn't matter what actual colour it was (pink, baby blue, green, yellow, lilac, etc.), but it had to be a pretty washed-out shade. I have a very clear memory of looking down at a drawer full of my clothes and think that it looked Just Like a Rainbow.

Then I hit puberty and it was black all the way...

[syredronning.livejournal.com]

Here via yonmei too, and I loved the previous posting . Made me think. I can't remember when I learned about pink and blue, but my parents certainly didn't follow it. I always was a tomboy, if not by action level, then by clothing - or a crossdresser, maybe ;)? Always pants, not barbie but Wild West Playmobil, barely pink, usually red, blue, and yellow maybe. People mistook me for a boy for a decade, and I loved it.

P.S. I think the worst thing for me would be a totally girly daughter, but, well, I'd have to live with that... :)

[kasku.livejournal.com]

How odd that they bothered to ask if there was only one acceptable answer.