It’s a boy/girl! Blue for boys, pink for girls and don’t name your boy bundle Sue.
We boys got the toy cars, footballs, and oh yes the guns. Girls of course get Barbie, plastic kitchen sets and other assorted soft animals. Oddly these trends in gender stereotypes last all the way through college and beyond. For instance more women will be nurses and flight attendants, while the boys grow up to be more engineers and mechanics.
Fortunately the pink and blue trends are becoming much less distinguished as in the past. I’m not sure what pink and blue looks like when mixed, but if it were a crayon I’d call it “Proper Evolution”.
Humans can distinguish themselves as male or female around age three then will instinctively judge the other sex and favor their own before puberty. Back to the toys.
A few weeks ago I walked into a Toys ‘R Us for a quick Christmas present for a friend’s little girl. The simple motive for this article if you will. I noticed the boys toys were mostly boxed in black and darker colors, while the girls toys were mostly pinks, reds, and lighter colors. Though we all have seen this all our lives, I never gave much thought as per the true “whys”.
On the way home I flashed back to how much I loved the stuffed animal toys my father would always bring me back after a business trip. Fairly duel gender for the most part, and I’d usually carry at least one around when we’d go to the grocery store and whatnot. I recall carrying a horse under my arm and an older lad said “That’s a girls toy!” and mocked me like I was some kind of fruity freak of nature. I couldn’t decipher the difference between my duck, goofy bear, or Mickey Mouse. One thing is for sure though….I HATED that fucking horse after that and never touched it again. Thanks to marketing and society a perfectly good horse went to waste because of bias.
I’ve read that when surveyed the parents of newborn babies viewed the girls as softer, smaller and more “dainty”. The infant boys were looked upon as larger, more alert and aggressive. The reality is infants whether male are female are complete clones other than sexual organs dynamically. Can parents see something we can’t? Nope. They also played a video tape, half were told the baby in the video was a girl, while the other half were told it was a boy to test adults perception of gender. At one point the baby was put in front of a Jack In The Box, and when the psycho clown of of the Cubic Hell popped out the baby burst into tears. When the adults were asked their views, in a nutshell, it was either “He was angry” or “She was frightened”.
Scuse me a moment but…what the fuck? What message will parents assume in raising children then? These subtle messages will go on for most of their youth. For instance let’s assume a parent sees their child climbing some playground equipment incorrectly, in a dangerous manner. The boys will probably be encouraged, while the girls are viewed as more likely getting hurt. Is it any wonder boys get hurt more in their youth?
Yet, somehow the items I mention seem to oddly have truths. The problem is the over simplified context of gender roles. As adults women that have had many lovers are labeled as sluts, while the men are stud pieces. I guess illusory correlations, biased attributions, confirmation biases and self fulfilling prophecies all apply to how we see gender. Let’s just all get along and accept they are prescriptive rather than descriptive. It all depends on what a culture believes what men and women SHOULD be.
