In the pink
posted in Uncategorized |I have previously bemoaned the gender-stereotype-reinforcing nature of the U.S.A.’s commercial giants, who ensure that all girls’ toys and clothes are varying shades of purple and pink, and boys’ toys are primary colors and their clothes are earth tones.
Today comes reportage of a study that proclaims that women just durn naturally prefer pink. It’s inherent. It’s in the genes, gals! It’s an evolutionary advantage–female gatherers being able to hone in on ripe fruits, etc.
Boy howdy! How’d they figger that one out?
Well, let’s see. They flashed 1000 different colored rectangles on a screen and had the men and women being studied pick (quickly) the ones they preferred.
Does this strike anyone else as…um…well, not proving the idea that the preference is inherently gender-linked?
I mean…how’d they ensure that all the men and women studied haven’t been previously influenced by all the gender-specific coloring that they’re exposed to from day one for the past 30 or 40 years? (It’s either Granny J or Great-Grandma who says that, in her day, the preferred “girly” color was powder blue.)
Really. It’s a serious question. The only way I can figure that they would be able to really determine this is if they grabbed men and women from the deepest, darkest, most isolated depths of the Amazon jungle for their experiment. Any grown man or woman in the U.S. or England or other westernized country has been bombarded with culturally determined “right” colors for their sex from the day they were born, via TV ads, newspaper ads, clothing and toy selections in stores, etc.
You can, I guess, test babies’ preferences by that old standard, “which one does the baby pay more attention to?”, like they do with questions of whether babies prefer their parents’ faces to strangers’ faces, or the scents of familiar people versus strangers.
But to claim that testing adults who have been conditioned from birth to gravitate towards certain color schemes will prove that this tendency is inherent is just a bunch of hooey in OmegaMom’s well-considered and expert opinion.
