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.

I agree with hmm. Any modern study on colour preference would have to somehow control for the massive social conditioning of boys against pink. It's almost aversion therapy in some cases - I actually saw a father slap his little boy's hand away from the pink scooter in a shop

Some shades of pink are lovely. Boys often like it too.

OP carrots used to be purple

FWIW I think children should be allowed to wear/play with clothes/toys of their choice where possible and within reason. Regardless of the colour or the politics of their parents.

Its one of the things that's strange about living with a colour blind person, because things that stand out a mile to me are invisible to him. It's quite difficult to imagine. The other thig that perhaps people forget is that to someone who is red-green colour blind it's not just that red and green look the same, but also brown (if they are all the same depth of tone). If you can't see brown from green then hunting is also very hard, as many small animals and birds are shades of brown. So seeing red is just as important for hunting as it is for gathering. Of course it is thought that some animals (like dogs) might be colour blind, but this is compensated for by much better smell and the ability to see things in movement much better.

But I agree. All interesting stuff to ponder.

nooka Very interesting stuff to ponder. I live with someone who is colour blind (though for him, he can't see the difference in blues and greens at the same depths, and this bring in greys and purples as well). We were told and given research once that many types of colour blindness lead to better night vision, which is true in his case. It does seem to come down far more to compensation that benefit the group in that type of society rather than the push that 'berry research' is that one group did this, the other did that and they changed to fit those two binary roles, completely forgetting how many other roles and talents people can have to benefit a society.

Re. gathering berries - I think birds only see black and white, don't they? And they eat masses of berries and things, far more than humans ever would have done, I imagine.

LRD, no - birds probably have better colour vision than us (4 types of cones, versus our three and many mammals mere 2).

Here's the wiki.

LRD - Nope, I think birds see in colour (+UV) wikipedia link, but don't hold it against me.....why would plants bother to put the effort in to make the chemicals to signal that they have packaged their seeds in a delicious sugary capsule which is ready to eat right now, if their target seed carriers couldn't detect their signal?

NotJustKangstan- the thing is though evolution doesn't work through the roles and talents that organisms have that benefit the group/society, it just doesn't work like that.

I think all children like red/pink colours.

But if they go to nursery or school or meet other children then once they are old enough to know they are boys/girls they will tell each other this is for girls or this is for boys or you can't play with xxx because you're a yyyy.

Boys like blue because they traditionally hunted blue-bum baboons. Lol.

There was a fashion for pink because people believed it emphasised the health of your skin, and its true some shades do make your skin look good.
Then Coco Chanel started a fashion for black because it emphasises the eyes.

I tell men that pink makes them look good, but only those who are very confident in their masculinity can wear pink. (the next week they turn up in a pink shirt )

Hunter gatherers didn't eat carrots and potatoes..that was later with farmers who settled in one place

Oops, sorry, have been away - thanks grimma and himalaya, I dunno where I got that from!

HH - PMSL!

Blether - I can't tell if you're serious or joking. The latter?

Old article but I did remember correctly that seeing red is a primate thing not just a human thing. Wikipedia on the same.

hunter gatherers were before iron age settlements so didn't grow their own crops like vegetables just hunted and gathered.. and potatos were much later

Yes ... but carrots grow in the wild. So do potatoes. Crops happened because people learned to cultivate plants that had once been wild.

LRD - the first humans (and their primate ancestors) evolved in Africa. Agriculture was developed after humans had migrated out of Africa, by local populations in different places domesticating the wild animals and plants in their region.

So the theory is that if there are traits that are universal across different ethnic groups and locations (in this case the ability to see in colour and to view pink/red as a particularly interesting and attractive colour) then their evolutionary roots are likely to be in our common ancestors - I.e. Prehistoric hunter gathers in Africa.

Potatoes were domesticated in Peru, carrots in the middle east so they didn't come into the story till much later.

The article I linked said that the evolution of trichromatic colour vision in primates (ability to see red) was for picking out young tasty easily digestible leaves (and fruit becoming red when ripe was to take advantage of that).

This is something that we share with all apes and a lot of monkeys.

The only person who ever wears pink in this house is Dh with his numerous pink shirts.

Interesting article Trillian. So primates used a signal that plants were accidentally giving out to identify which leaves were best to eat (sweeter, pinker) and then the plants used the primate's ability to detect, and preference for, sweeter pinker things to encourage them to distribute their seeds for them.

(...and then a few millennia later some marketers used the same 'taste for pink' to sell some spangly junk to kids and parents....)

Isn't evolution amazing !?!?

Sorry, I'm more confused not less.

blether mentions the iron age - is that (snurk) a red herring? People were living in the Middle East yonks before the Iron Age so must have had access to these veg. from stone age on - were they farmers back then? I was reading it that she was saying cultivation happened in the Iron Age, and so obv. people would have figured out a bit before that that carrots and potatoes were edible if those people were then in the Middle East or Peru or whatever?

Sorry, this is off-topic but I'm really interested by it - I always wondered how we know what people did that gives us the things we take for granted now.

What I don't understand is how we can tell, given what we've presumably got are skeletal remains, when our ancestors developed these abilities? Presumably at some point we started developing differently from a bird seeing all those colours or a bull or whatever ... but how do we know when the eye-development happened?

If all of the animals who have a feature have a common ancestor (us, apes, old world monkeys) then you assume that the ability evolved in that common ancestor. New world monkeys have different sorts of eye pigment, so the kind we have must have evolved after old world and new world primates separated, but before African monkeys and apes diverged.

Ah, clever!

Thankyou.