Pink toys lead to pestering and unnecessary unpleasantness in toy shops - discuss

[hunkermunker]

They're colourist, imo - ignoring orange, yellow, red, green, teal, indigo, brown, etc, etc

The pic of the pink in ToysRUs is foul!

the pink/blue preference is clearly culturally determined, not innate - back in ye olden days pink was seen as a boys' colour, as it was regarded as pale red therefore active and aggressive. And blue for girls - calm and passive.

So all those little girls who have lots of pink clothes and pink toys and ask for a pink duvet or pink colouring book are actually reacting to what they see around them, not demonstrating an individual preference.

My DD is three, and she loves pink, but I do have limits on what toys I allow her to have.

There is a post it on my mum and dads fridge called "Evelyns Forbidden Toys" which has a list of the toys I will not allow in my house. The list is:

• No Bratz (dress like hookers)
• No Barbie
• No Baby Anabelle / Baby Born / talking baby dolls
• No Hannah Montanna (she is too young)
• No High School Musical (she is too young)

DD does like pink. She had her room painted pink last week. She also likes purple. She has barbie type dolls but they are the disney princess types (mum got them from Woolies, she has Belle, Ariel, Cinderella, Snow White, Aurora, Jasime and a singing Ariel) but she plays with them as the films she has seen.

She does have dolls (baby type ones, and a pram) but they are typically soft dolls rather than the baby annabelle ones. She rarely plays with them.

I hate Bratz and will not allow them in my house.

DD's favourite toys are: her princess dolls, her peppa pig house and camper van, her dora laptop and some weebles stuff. Main colours are yellow, purple and green.

She is a Disney fan as well, she has loads of jigsaws which she loves to play with.

"'Men are more important that women, I don't want to talk about my feelings, so shut up, suck my dick and cook my dinner'."

That's the difference bewteen the sexes? lol

Who says? Really? Or it that a bit of a straw man? I have few John Grey books. Never read that in them, funnily enough.

Lookl, al the evidence points to the fact that men and women are different. Difference doesn't equal inferior by any stretch of the imagination. I know socisty was built on those kind of dichotomies, and women;s roles were proscribed. But things have changed a lot.

I just wonder when feminism can judge itself by it's successes rather than it's failures, becasie it's hardly a great pitch to young women to say, we've failed at everything when the chioces women have today, even if feminists don;t like them, are evidence of great success in many areas, especuialy equality issues which has a 80% success rate. What if that remaining 20% was women chosing.

I really think women are more vital and actiuve than feminism gives them credit for.

MT, men and women are not that different except in the few obvious areas of women not being able to produce sperm and men not having ovaries. If it were true that preferring, say, pink over blue, or football over 'pampering' was a genetically-programmed secondary sexual characteristic then women engineers, male nurses etc would all be sterile.
The obsession with labeling and reinforcing gender differences is really about reinforcing male privilege. If there's no hierarchy then there's no need to be so panic-stricken about human beings who don't fall into the stereotyped categories. It sets up the default human being as male, and females as 'other' ie a human being needs a basic toolkit for minor home repairs (you know, hammer, screwdriver, allen keys, spanner etc). So a human being goes to a shop to buy one. Nowadays, though, if that human being is a female, she has the, er, choice, to pay extra for a PINK toolkit, thus reinforcing the idea that women aren;t really people and that the idea of hanging a picture is frightening and strange to them so they have to have a pink dolly hammmer to do it with just till they find a nice Man to do it for them. Etc.

LOL @ men and women are not that different, look at the divorce rate.

Haven't read all the thread but I disagree that by choosing a pink toolkit (or a pink mobile phone, iPod or laptop, etc), it reinforces male privilege. If I choose to buy something pink, then it because that is my choice. My current car is black, my last car was bottle green and my next car will probably be black. However, I could equally choose that my next car should be pink.

I do think the 'pinkness' of toys has been overdone but then again, how many parents don't buy pink baby clothes for their daughters?! Manufacturers/marketers are just cashing in on age-old preferences; girls will generally choose/prefer 'girly' things whilst boys will generally choose/prefer 'boy' things. And more women than men choose to wear make-up.

The difference between any two individuals is far greater than any difference you might predict by saying 'that one's got a womb, that one's got a penis'. Saying 'men are like this, women are like that' reduces unique individuals to stereotypes. SOME women like knitting, I don't. SOME men like Top Gear, so do I, despite having breasts.

Women have, on average, more connections between the two halves of the brain. But that's an average, doesn't saying much about any one person's brain.

And women are more likely to suffer from migraine, which is thought to be at least partly to do with oestrogen and possibly other hormones. But plenty of women don't and plenty of men suffer from hormones. You can't reduce an individual to the sum of their bodily parts.

I meant plenty of men suffer from migraine, not hormones!

Although men do suffer from fluctuations in the level of male sex hormones.

Mr Inferior suffers from my hormones sometimes, I will freely admit.

The pink for adult women marketing craze is absolutely sickening.

I don't find it sickening, just unnecessary. But manufacturers are just cashing in on preferences that already exist, in that the majority of women want to appear different from men. Choosing a pink car/laptop, etc, is just another way of achieving this because not many men would choose to drive a pink car or to buy themselves a pink laptop.

It's got a lot more to do with gendered stereotyping than it has to do with choice.

I disagree. You could say that dolls for girls, cranes for boys and make-up for women is gender stereotyping but I think that gender differences and free choice play a bigger part.

Believer: the divorce rate has more to do with people having different expectations of what a marriage should be/marrying for the wrong reasons/getting bored with each other than any kind of essential difference between men and women. Lesbian and gay marriages break up as well, you know.

(And if anyone feels like trying to split hairs about how a civil partnership isn't 'really' a marriage, then why not just go and fuck yourself with a sharp stick instead?)

but men will refuse to have anything to do with pink because it's connected to women and in our sexist society that means inferior

but only if you choose to view it in that way. I don't. My dh has two pink shirts that he wears regularly and AFAIK, it doesn't make him feel inferior.

I don't think there is a gene for liking pink but there is a gene for being female. Jordan sells pink horse accessories and I don't think she's sexist, just somebody who is canny enough to know how to make a very fast buck out of young girls who want to dress their horses in something other than grey/blue. Most advertisers play to sterotypes, particularly cosmetics ads.

I see we made it into the Saturday telegraph with this discussion

LOL at my dh being posh!! Must tell him when he gets back later....

Of course I realise that pink for girls, blue for boys is a social constuct in the same way that make-up for women is a social construct. That much is obvious and it's a social construct that is currenlty serving manufacturers well.

Howeever, rather than viewing women as inferior beings to men because of their aversion to pink objects, I prefer to see men as the more restricted gender. The poor things have to stick with blue, green and grey and can't wear heels, skirts, make-up or dresses (excepting those men who choose otherwise of course).

I would say that any parent who frowns on their young son for wanting to wear pink, play with dolls, play with girls, etc, is no different from the sexist advertisers/manufacturers that you mentioned earlier but I'm guessing that most social constructs begin at home.

Sterile? Um, no, that doesn't follow. sorry.

To say male and female sexuality is different is not to reduce people down to anything. There are myriad individual charateristics within that schema. But there are statistical facts and pshychsexual difference is just that - a fact. It's not speculation. That difference is no threat to anyone, unless you secretly fear women are inferior. Gender inferiority doesnt occur in biology. I always wonder wehy it if faminists who have the hardest time believeing that.

I know lots of manoly men who were pink shirts. Pink is quite fashinable actually. I really object the idea that girls wear pink cos they are easily led, but men wear it cos they are somehow more liberated. Yoiu can't have it both ways. I have no idea why pink could be seen as sickening when a girl chooses it and tastful when a man does.

The only people obsessed with 'labels' are feminists, who insit the world is agaoinst them. It's not. It's them who are against the world. Our world anyway. There are many misogynous cultures on earth - ours is not longer one of them.

Men suffere from their hormones. Its why their life expectancy is lower than womens.

SExists still exsits of course, just as racists and plain old misanthrpoists. But our society isn't as it was. The cause for equality for 2nd wave feminism has been a success. Again, it's faminists who have the hardest time accepting that becasue it seems they wrote the script in the 70s and expect the outcme to follwo that scripot verbatim. Unsuprisingly, women have are writing their own scripts now. Another feminist triumph.

Fuck me, I'll shurrup

and I'm not sure if the word stereotype is accurate. There are many archrtypical female things.

I haven't read very deeply into feminist literature but I am puzzled by why one gender (female) would want to ape the other gender (male) - surely in doing so, the gender doing the apeing automatically stamps a label on itself that says, 'inferior'??!!

If women and femaleness aren't still percieved as lesser, inferior, 'other', why is it still seen as sort of reluctantly praiseworth for a woman to aspire to maleness, yet horrifying and ludicrous for a man to aspire to femaleness/ Just think of the semantic weighting and connotations of the word 'tomboy' versus the word 'sissy'.
Think of the number of people who would quite happily dress their DD in her older brother's cast-off clothing but would be fundamentally uneasy at dressing a DS in clothing labelled as 'girls'.

Whi says its horrifying and ludicrous for a man to aspire to femaleness? It's just meaningless hyperbole. There is a roaring trade in male to female trensexuals.

And I don't know anyone who would be 'happy' to dress theor DD in thei older brothers Ben Ten cast offs.