why do girls like pink? Ans - it's not because of blooming berries

[ziptoes]

This is my first thread in feminism, and I'm not sure this is the right place for it, but I want to get something off my chest.

So we all groan when the old chestnut often gets trotted out that girls like pink "because women were traditionally the gatherers in hunter gatherer societies". (Just so you know, the stats behind the original assertion have been thoroughly trashed). But it annoys me that to counter the argument the answer often is well, that's not true because the victorians thought pink was a boys colour.

BUT BUT BUT... the gatherers in hunter gatherer societies did not just gather bloody strawberries! Has no-one ever eaten blackberries, blueberries, or gooseberries? Did hunter gatherers only ever eat meat and berries? What about nuts, carrots, beetroot, potatoes etc.?

The whole pink = berries things is so stupid. Next time someone trots that one out, please start your retort with multicoloured food to point out the idiocy of the argument. Once you've demolished that, then you can bring up the victorians to emphasise that girly pink is purely cultural conditioning and marketing.

Also, as far as I know there's no evidence that men weren't also gatherers. Pre-farming it would have been a very labour intensive activity which probably would require all members of the community.

both my boys adored pink when they were under 3. My stupid ex nanny insisted it was because they were both 'softies' hmm, not true boy boys. Which I strongly believe to be bollocks. It was also my favourite colour as a child and I still like it.

I get annoyed with the grungy, dull colours my boys are forced into. ffs even all BRIGHT colours seem to be girl-coded these days. however I am relieved atm that they have been conditioned not to really care what they look like (which will NOT necessarily be such a good thing later, of course, imho....) as it also stops me having to care very much about their clothes- just throw on t and jeans every day.

allegrageller I find H&M good for bright boys stuff that's a bit different and quite cool. despite ds loving pink it so doesn't suit him as he's red hair, pale skin blue eyes.

Allegra, Next usually has bright clothes including pinks in the 'boys' aisles. I know because I look at everything when buying for DD - except pale or bubblegum pinks which she's detested since schoolage.

agree with notquitenormal and suzikettles. I actively have to steer ds1 away from the pink glittery disney princess clothes. I'd do it with a daughter too, but many parents don't.

A good half of ds1's wardrobe comes from the girl's section (although I do not shop in places that sell very extremely 'girly' stuff if I can avoid it, so it's mostly purple/with pink detailing rather than baby pink).

my nephew loves pink :) when he was a toddler i let him have a pink popsy and paint his nails and he loved DDs wee make up set DD and DNephew used to push their wee buggys to the shops when we lived down south the looks i got! my BIL hated it wanted his son to 'be a man' he was 3 yrs old not a strapping 20/30 yr old! hate stereotypying kids. my DS will wear pink if he likes it and has the right colouring :) just like DD sometimes wears a bit of pink so long as its not ghastly frilly flowery crap i had to get her jeans out the boys section for 3 yrs as all baby/toddler jeans for girls had flowers/frills/butterflies and fairies and were bloody disgusting.

I am sure 95% of the girls-like-pink thing is insidious marketing.

Still I don't think it is loopy to wonder about, or research how, human colour perception co-evolved with the organisms we eat. I think it's fascinating.

Ziptoes if you want to argue that the pink/berries thing is stupid don't bring up carrots, beetroots and especially not potatoes. Hunter gatherers in Africa weren't eating this stuff.

Hunting and gathering certainly involved different evolutionary pressures for all involved - and help to explain why fruit and berries and animals are generally quite different colors. Its not randomn.

berries and fruit evolved to be gathered (to spread their seed). So they advertise themselves with bright coloured pigments (and flavours) that are visible and attractive to the gatherers they 'want' to attract.

Animals don't 'want' to be hunted so they evolved to be brown, yellow or whatever it takes to blend into the background. Unless they are poisonous (or pretending to be) then they advertise that fact with a different set of colours and patterns from the good-to-eat stuff.

Animals (including humans) evolve different kinds of visual abilites that can help them get the food they need to to survive. So it's not at all weird to think hunter gatherers evolved the tendency to see 'rosy' colours (anthocyanins which colour berries and fruit from purple to red to pink..) as interesting, as well as the ability to pick out out camouflaged prey hiding in shadows. (Omirion meet is pink, but rarely when you are hunting it...)

If men tended to hunt more (not exclusively) and women to gather more (again not exclusively) their visual tendencies might have tended to specialise in different ways. It might explain why red-green colour blindness is more predominant in males, who knows.

None of it means we should have to dress our daughter in pink and sparkles. It is just interesting.

Meat I mean ..

in Kazakhstan where DS was born they have no nonsense abour ponk for a girl blue for a boy and form memory it only cam ein here post war. Pink is a nice colour lots of children like it and boys only start going off it when they are infomred by otehrs (often adults) that it is "for girls"

Boys in 1920s wore pink, a softer version of red and girls wore pale blue. In China boys wear pink, my ds3 loves pink. I think everything is pink for girls that's all.

Gainsboroughs famous "boy in blue" <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Thomas_Gainsborough_008.jpg/300px-Thomas_Gainsborough_008.jpg&imgrefurl=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy&usg=__LGx1zWUp6m4HpaioSn19uopihnQ=&h=452&w=300&sz=24&hl=en&start=1&zoom=1&tbnid=NYHIesqQkc-npM:&tbnh=127&tbnw=84&ei=A7QkTufbGcK58gOIo8jvCg&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dgainsborough%2Bboy%2Bblue%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3DYwH%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26biw%3D1024%26bih%3D630%26tbm%3Disch%26prmd%3Divns&itbs=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">blue had a pair "boy in pink" pink don;t hear much about it now do you!

OK himalaya on the potatoes thing - but what berries and vegetables in Africa are pink? What about leafy veg? Actually, have just looked out my copy of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and he says the staple african edible crops from early agriculture sites were:
Sorghum (not pink)
Millet (not pink)
African Rice (? couldn't see the colour on wikipedia)
Cowpea (not pink)
Groundnut (vaguely pinkish in cheap peanut butters, otherwise not pink)
Yams (pinkish)
Watermelon PINK!!!
Bottle gourd (not pink)

So out of the 8 early agriculture crops, which were presumably domesticated because hunter gatherers found them in the wild, only two are remotely pink.

Sorry to be so pedantic, but I think this kind of thinking is highly reductionist and so often reflects the prejudices of the prevailing culture of the period. Think about how black people were thought to be racially inferior back in the bad old days and how much scientific effort went in to "proving" that via skull size etc. In this case I think the evidence a) that females were the main gatherers and b) that they only gathered pink things, is so lacking that we are just seeing another example of the prevailing cultural norms being imposed on past cultures.

I agree that we will have evolved to be sensitive to colours that give us evolutionary advantage. We don't see in ultra violet like many insects because we don't need to. But evolution only works if sucess in a particular trait gives you sexual success. I don't see how there would be a strong sexual pressure to be able to see pink. I would have though that IF hunting and gathering was separated on gender lines, mate preference would have been more stroinghly controlled by reproductive success, "pack(?)" status etc. I am not an anthropologist though, so I could be wrong.

Oh and it's just ocurred to me that these hunting "males" (and, I like to think, probably their "tomboyish" female pals - it takes a lot of early humans to bring down a large mammal so why not use all the burliest members of your pack regardless of gender?) might need a snack or two while they are out hunting these mythical blue mammoths/widebeest etc. It'd be handy if they recognised berries on the way!

Sorry, essay over.

but Kewcumber, maybe the REASON why the boy in pink isn't as well known is because we're hard-wired to prefer images of boys in blue. And Gainsborough, being a genius, knew that at some level.

Oh, and I wasn't trying to have a go. I was just trying working out what I think as I typed, and haven't had very much sleep so am finding it a struggle. I can see how easy it is to get caught up in the arguments and come across as more grumpy than you sound. No wonder the feminism section has a scary reputation!

One other thing (I should be packing for a work trip tomorrow and am procrastinating). If it's the gathering wot done it, can we show that there's an actual increase in sensitivity to pink in women as opposed to men, rather than a mere culturally conditioned preference? I have no idea but am hoping some brain-type expert will join the thread and tell me!

If I remember rightly until recently pink was associated with baby boys, a toned down version of red which was seen as a strong colour, girls were dressed in the much softer pale blue. It was only when hitler forced homosexuals to wear a pink triangle that the colour started to be seen in a more feminine light.

The majority of toddlers if questioned make a preference for the colour pink, my 3 year old ds claims it is his favourite colour. It is only once they become aware of social norms that they change their minds. Although just today I was speaking to someone who said their 8 year old now wants to dress in pink, she thinks this is his way of rebelling.

ziptoes - I love Guns, Germs and Steel. One of my favourite books.

I have no real idea what hunter gatherers ate, I'm just guessing like you. ..But I think you may have going wrong in thinking 'it must have been a bit like farming but wild' - I think you are underestimating just how revolutionary agriculture was when it developed - think about how many more people it enabled the land to support and the surplus time and resources it made for other things (... Jared Diamond's story). Gathering would not have been the same-diet-as-farming- but-wild, it would have been something more like a primate diet - berries, nuts, insects, small mammals, fruit, fish, honey, etc...

If there is 'a pink effect' then it isn't big - the data that Ben Goldacre linked to is two overlapping bell curves of preference - women in that study were marginally more likely to like pinker/redder shades (and some of that may well be a nurture effect).

I don't think it follows therefore that for there to be 'a pink effect' women had to be main gatherers, or that what was gathered was only pink. As long as the diet depended in part on spotting the ripe fruit/berries then being able to distinguish red and green (not being colour blind) and seeing pink as attractive/interesting would have been adaptive. And as long as one sex had more to loose by going hunting (risk of rape, difficulty of leaving baby behind when BF) and the other had more to gain (chance to gain status by killing something big and sharing meat, impressing women, fathering more children) then there would have been a slightly stronger selection pressure for gatherer-vision skills amongst women and less for men, some of whom at least would chose to put less effort into this unsung hard work and more into the higher risk/higher return hunting business (which might leave you dead or hungry but might make you a 'rich')

Of course none of this need mean that boys would necessarily see rosey/ripe colours differently from girls - children can gather long before they can hunt. I think it is more likely that pinky colours are one of the first childhood preferences (just like a taste for sweet things) and that is partly why they have become over-associated with femaleness as part of the association between female attractiveness and youth.

I don't know how you'd assess colour preference in an adult, or how meaningful it would be. My children used to always be badgering me about my favourite colour, which as I don't have one was annoying. I like to wear colours that suit me and I like to decorate with colours that work in the room. I like all sorts of flowers too, and as far as I can tell from friends that's fairly representative of most adults. The need for a favourite colour is a child thing IMO.

Plus good colour sight does not mean you like pink. My dh is red-green colour blind - if I grow red geraniums he can't tell if they are flowering or not but he can see pink flowers because of the contrast with the leaves. It is true that he isn't good at picking berries (I had to teach him how to pick raspberries by tough instead of colour) however he doesn't have any other special sight advantage - I think he'd be a very poor hunter.

"allegrageller Mon 18-Jul-11 19:29:27
agree Lenin. 2 distinct markets have been created for children's clothing. The same with the bizarre reshaping of girls clothes: mini-bootcut jeans, even school shirts with little 'feminine details'. Everything smothered in hearts, flowers and sickly slogans"

Yes, when I went to buy DS some plain white polo shirts for schools, I was annoyed that the only ones in M&S seemed to be marketed at girls - which presumably are cut slightly differently and covered in frilly bits and hearts

All pre schoolers usually have pink as their favourite colour in my experience. They fight over pink and who can have the pink cup/bowl/plate every day at my setting.

Nooka - in the study I think they showed them lots of pairs of colours - like greys, browns, purples etc..where one option was bluer and one was pinker and had them choose which one they prefer - like that annoying thing at that they do at the opticians 'is it clearer now, or now?' , I suppose if you do it enough times you can get a meaningful result.

Yes I wondered if it was like that perhaps. But that's still got nothing to do with which one is easier to see, I imagine that you'd need to use something more akin to the colour blind tests for that to do an equivalent to can you spot the ripe fruit in the bushes type test.

Should point out the reason I emphasised the argument you gave in your op is I have never heard the argument that it to do with berries, only that it is because it was associated with homosexuals so non-homosexual men started to distance themselves from pink. It is less that pink was associated with girls and more that it became not associated with boys.

I have never heard the berries argument. However, I don't believe that girls are predisposed to like pink. I don't remember liking pink or having anything pink as a child. When I took my boys to get their first pairs of shoes, both of them headed straight for a pink sparkly pair from the girls' section. I think that it appeals to all small children but that boys get told they can't have it whilst girls are given it in abundance.

Having said that, ds1 does actually have a couple of pink t-shirts which he chose himself. (He's 6)

Nooka - yes I agree, the research study didn't really look at anything to do with berry picking ability at all, it is all just speculation...but not necessarily completely loopy speculation.

I wonder if the 'pink effect' is not so much about it being more visible but about it being more noticeable - its a look-at-me colour which pops out in the way that green or grey or beige while perfectly visible do not. I wonder if the berry-picking adaptation is to do with your eyes not 'getting bored' with looking for pink but instinctively finding it an 'interesting' colour - so the test would need to be something like the speed with which you do some boring repetitive task involving colour spotting when the colour is pink vs other colours? (and if there is a 'pink effect' in the test, whether it shows any differences between men and women)

Interesting what you say about your DH and not being able to spot the ripe berries because of colourblindness.