In breaking news, marketing drones continue to lack imagination, sticking to the apparently conventional wisdom that if you want women to buy things that both men and women tend to use and want, just run up a version in pink and do a fluffy/flowery/frilly ad campaign. Butterflies are good. In June last year (in an essay provoked by the launch of a special shopping flight from London to Paris named Fly Pink) the Guardian’s Vicky Frost summed up the extension of pinkification from childhood to adult women as follows:
It is now possible for women to experience their entire day in pink. You can work out with a pink yoga mat and weights; adorn your windscreen wipers with pink wiper wings; cook dinner on a pink George Foreman grill and style your hair with hot-pink hair straighteners. You can even see off would-be attackers with a powder-pink Taser gun.
My response to the whole Fly Pink concept was this photo-essay, Puking Up Pink. Documentations of the pink consumer ghetto on feminist blogs abound, especially the Pink Alley in toy departments, but it is the continued extension of pinkified marketing into the adult world which is being most keenly examined. Twisty anayses the latest version she’s found: women’s vodka.
Of course, this bottle is in hues of pinky-lavender rather than the far too common fluoro-candy-brothel pink, but that’s meant to be a nod towards sophistication; indicating that the potential consumers thereof aren’t quite as infantilised as those other pinkobots out there in girlyland. Of course you’re too grown up for candy-pink, sweetheart!
As usual, Twisty makes many excellent and provocatively phrased points.
The greater the sex-based dimorphism in commercial products, the easier it is to rationalize sex-based social discrimination. For it is upon the supposed enormous differences between men and women that our culture bases its wide approval of the concept that women’s essence justifies our ghettoization in the sex caste.
[...]
Behold the neat trick. First, you make women act like simpletons, broodmares, janitors, mannequins, and sex slaves before you grant them social approval. You call this behavior “femininity” and explain that it is their essential nature, and that any deviation from the program will be punished. Then you infantilize and ridicule the ones who get it right, and vilify and abuse the ones who get it wrong
[...]
With so much riding on it, whether femininity is performed right or wrong is an issue of enormous concern to women. That’s where the Empowerful Pink Marketing Juggernaut comes i[n].
[...]
Femininity, in fact, can’t even be practiced without stuff (which is one way of debunking the argument that it is an inherited sex trait).
That last quoted sentence is my own favourite take-home lesson from Twisty’s post. Women are naturally womanly whether they are wearing an evening gown, wearing army boots or wearing nothing. But it is impossible to be “feminine” without acquiring, using and displaying STUFF (datapoint: even naked women are oft-derided as “unfeminine” if they don’t display evidence of using depilatory products).
I now await the latest instalment of Eliot Ramsey’s tirades against all feminist theorising.
Actually, it just looks like a fairly standard piece of post-structuralist theorising. You know, the dopey, pliant masses have their consciousnesses “determined” for them by the semiotics of advertising, the “medium is the message”, blah, blah. The “death of the author” – but oddly enough not the “death of the advertising copy writer” who can imbue an advertsiement with un-ambiguous, yet largely un-conscious “meaning” that we “intellectuals” can “de-mystify” easily enough – but which the proletariat cannot, so they just “absorb” it in their funny, robotic way.
Let me guess – we are being “bombarded” by “discursive texts”, no? When instead we should have our “consciousnesses raised” by “theory”?
Look, I know you’ll get upset if I ask for any evidence to back up this:
- because “semioticians” don’t do evidence, do they?
Yesterday I went to buy my son some gumboots. Gumboots used to come in yellow or black or blue, or some combination of any two of those colours.
Now they come in Princess for girls, or The Wiggles, Bob the Builder, Dinosaurs, Black (with blue stripe) or Black (with green stripe) for boys.
The black options were clearly in the boys section, and the girls only got one option. The boys get a few options, but they’re crappy too. I went with the dinosaurs because the graphic-free gumboots didn’t come in his size. I just want to dress my kid (cheaply) without covering him in television characters from head to bloody toe.
Eliot, last year Target were selling ‘girls computers’ for kids. Please suggest any reason why they would do this if not to:
a) segregate the world into ‘boys’ things and ‘girls’ things
b) sell twice as much to families who have one girl and one boy
c) discover that it works and extend it to adult women
I’m really sick of seeing and hearing evidence that girls need to be dressed and surrounded totally by the colour pink for fear of anyone thinking they’re a boy. Why does my kid dress almost totally in hand-me-downs? Because my sister-in-law will buy all new clothes for her daughter, rather than dress her in any of the ‘boys’ clothes she acquired for the first kid. Even the plain jeans, plain navy, or grey, or pale blue, or green, or anything other than pink or white. Unless it’s got flowers on it. I’m also sick of the message this gives my son: that he can’t wear or play with ‘girls things’ because femininity is that bad, and that catching. His masculinity must be reinforced at every stage of the day so he doesn’t turn out queer.
I misjudged you Eliot – you pulled your other party trick out of the hat instead, going straight for constructing your own interpretation of the post and presenting that as if it was the point being argued instead. (What’s that called again? It’s a woefully overused term, but then it’s also a woefully overused tactic.)
Tigtog: ‘Missing the point’ aka ignoratio elenchi
I lol’d at this from the Twisty article:
Only, I think the label is around her belly button, but that’s beside the point.
The real trouble with the mass pinkification of the world is that it is so insidious you don’t even realise you aren’t getting a choice. Both of our daughters bedrooms ended up being pink (one is an eye-searing deep pink that I’m sure is doing permanent eyesight damage to everyone who enters the room). There’s a backlash coming at home though, middle daughter has rejected pink which will make things interesting if we ever want to buy her another bicycle.
It’s not just pinkification either, the actual construction of the clothes can vary greatly: boys clothes made for rough and tumble, dark colours to hide dirt, etc. Girls clothes are light coloured, stain easily, often delicate fabric, revealing when worn in a normal, play-filled situation. So we’re in effect training girls at a young age, not to do certain things, to sit a certain way etc. Yuck.
This all said, it was heartening for me to see when I worked in childcare that the vast majority of girls aged 6-12 rejected the skirt hegemony in favour of plain dark pants/jeans/shorts of various descriptions. I think pre-6 however, it’s a little more insidious.
Eliot, if parents and their children don’t buy into the pinkification clap trap, it’s not for want of trying on behalf of manufacturers. For the evidence you require, go to Target, Kmart, etc. and compare and contrast the difference in colours & materials for the boy and girl sections respectively.
FFS, who would ever think of buying a boy a toy iron? An iron!! Jesus, why anyone would want to ‘practice’ for that I have no idea.
Eliot: “Actually, it just looks like a fairly standard piece of post-structuralist theorising.”
How would you know? This remark implies that you’re sufficiently familiar with post-structuralist theorising to recognise a standard piece of it, and then you turn round and call a photo of a bottle of vodka a discursive text.
And your demands for ‘evidence’ completely ignore the fact that Tigtog’s is not making a hard-science type claim to material ‘truth’ (much less that not everyone regards that as the only kind of observation worth making) and that what we therefore have here is a generic misidentification. Yours, I mean. I know high-school debating is intoxicating, but some of us have moved on from its rules and precepts to more sophisticated methods, including some reflection on the nature of epistemology.
I was taught at my mamma’s knee not to theorise ahead of my data, and have always found it a useful warning. It’s very clear from your comments here and elsewhere that whatever the actual topic, you tend to beef up a line of argument after the fact in order to justify your knee-jerk anti-feminism, so it would be kind of hard to take your arguments seriously even if they were were better informed.
And the evidence isn’t reticent in coming forward. It jumps out at you… A couple of years ago a friend and I went to buy someone a pressie for her baby shower @ Myer, and being completely unable to find anything that didn’t scream “Your baby is its gender!” ended up getting her a bottle of scotch instead. On the assumption that parents need one sometimes.
Pink appeals to women because it is the colour of babies.
Kate:
This is pretty much it. It’s all about the money, what’s popular and what will sell more stuff.
I see a lot of girls dressed in pink, but I also see a lot of girls not dressed in pink so evidently I don’t see how the message is that girls need to be dressed in pink. Ultimately these products are available because the parents will buy them, and I think it’s fair to leave parents to raise their kids the way they see fit (short of damaging abuse). There is nothing inherently wrong with a gender dimorphic culture so long as it’s not enforced on those who chose not to conform.
FFS, who would ever think of buying a boy a toy iron?
Who would think of buying any kid a toy iron!
Is it a possibility some teenage or pre-teenage daughters chose pink because they’re subconsciously rebelling against their feminist mothers, well aware that pink will give said parent the shits? And the capos, crafty beings that they are, are consciously setting out to exploit this emblem of teenage rebellion. This is an entirely serious hypothesis, and I’m well aware it far from covers explanations for the whole gamut of pinkification.(which, incidentally, I hasn’t noticed til tigtog brought it to my attention. I just thought going back to pink for girls and blue for boys was part of the post-feminist society we all live in.
Also I thought purple was the colour of feminism.
Silky, please tell me you’re trolling, right? Right?
Just in case you’re not:
‘Pnk ppls t wmn bcs t s th clr f bbs.’
Which could be revowelled in a quite different and much more enticing way.
Yes, only white people have babies in silkworm-world?
lol! But it shouldn’t it appeal to men, too, being the colour of vaginas??
Huzzah! for biological determinism! Huzzah!
If only all guests at baby showers were as thoughtful and practical, Mark!
and
If only all comments were as deft and succinct as Pavlov’s.
My favourite bit from Twisty’s piece:
The horns of the dilemma (pink suedette-covered horns, no doubt).
It’s vintage Twisty! I was interested by the first comment on the thread, too:
I think that sums up what’s so fab about her writing.
Well, yes, that too. But it was the ‘Women are nothing more than baby-making machines and therefore all women love all babies’ subtext, not to mention the ‘But men don’t, and so of course it’s women’s work to look after them, QED’ subsubtext, that was freaking me out.
Shorter Dr Cat: all kinds of wrong in silkworm’s comment!
Agreed.
kate asks;
Well, kate, you hit the nail right on the head. Target do that because it sells computers. If it didn’t, they’d soon stop.
Irritating, isn’t it?
You might be “really sick of seeing and hearing evidence that girls need to be dressed and surrounded totally by the colour pink for fear of anyone thinking they’re a boy”, but my bet is that little girls don’t think the same way as you.
Contrary to feminist and semiotic theory, Target is not in the business of moulding the sexual identity and gender consciousness of little girls. Target are a pack of mercenary bastards who would sell little girls Home Napalm Kits or Testosterone Enhanced Steroid Popsicles on sticks if it added to the bottom line.
What? Girls’ germs? Well, obviously that idea didn’t exist before Target got a marketing division.
Look, everyone, I know this will come as a huge shock to those of you not with years of field experience in social anthropology and the clinical psychology of child development, but cultures prior to our own also had gendered cultural phenomena, including in areas like clothing, typical occupations and art.
Here’s a hint: “Women’s secret business.”
There. What was that? Forty thousand years ago?
On a more serious rebuttal though, the whole pink thing is way too new to speak of biological imperative.
In the 40s, Silks, the trend was reversed: pink for boys and blue for girls
But of course, until the 20th C, babies were almost always dressed in nowt but white.
But of course, women like white, because it’s the colour of teeth. Or Weddings. Or Kitchens. Or something.
Btw, I’m a guy (just), and I love pink clothing. I think it looks very sharp.
But men and women ARE different… so if you’re advertising a unisex product you’re of course going to sell it differently to men and women. And if that means colouring the female version pink then why not… most women I know love pink products, most men don’t. Not many men carry around a pink mobile phone, a number of women do.
Why get all angsty about ‘pinkification’ – it’s like getting all angsty that men have penises and women have vaginas. Or getting angsty that most men like sport, drinking beer and having sex, and most women would prefer to be shopping for clothes (often pink). Viva la difference!
Yes, I’m very fond of the pink shirts, myself. Wasn’t so fond in the 80s when “pooftah!” seemed to be shouted at me in public a lot when wearing same!
And infant boys wore dresses and their long hair in ringlets. I remember being confused by Renoir’s portrait of his son for that reason.
Let’s see.
I’m male.
I’m not interested in sport, like drinking beer (and wine and scotch), like having sex and like shopping for clothes (often pink). Not that you were stereotyping or anything like that.
See also photos of Winston Churchill as a young boy.
Lots of conservative ’suits’ now wear pink Mark. Pink business shirts and pink ties are very common. I’m not sure you’d see too many pink overalls on a building site tho!
I agree patrick. At the moment I am wearing a bright pink tie, which has funnily enough received many positive comments from females, but none from males, some of whom might feel that it’s not an appropriate colour for a man to be wearing…
Mark – I did say ‘most’ men….. and yes it’s a stereotype – but I’d say a pretty accurate one! The exception proves the rule and all that….
I was looking at the website of the Mothers Day Classic fun run yesterday, which I may or may not steel myself to enter. Its for breast cancer research so the merchandise is all pink, except for the blokes’ shirts which are blue. They obviously don’t think blokes want to wear it, even when it is the colour most associated with cause.
http://www.mothersdayclassic.org/home/merchandise/
patrickg wrote:
You just raised a very good point, Patrick. Design and fashion students might correct me, but if I’m not mistaken, pink was de rigeur for executive-style button-down collar shirts in the 1950s, typically worn with a light grey suit
Yup! Here it is!
And oh my God! Here’s Robert Wagoner wearing a pink cardy!!
And he still got to do it with Natalie Wood, also pictured here in pink!
Afraid of being confused with Natalie Wood, little boys across the world stopped wearing pink by 1960.
(I’m a guy, just, and would easily have done it with Natalie Wood)
Pink with black was a very popular two-tone combination in ’50s era cars.
Forgive me, Andrew, but that tells me more about you than it does about “women”.
I can see where you’re coming from Andrew, but see my previous post about how the clothing options for girls and boys promote a particular model of play which is very limiting indeed.
Crikey, Eliot, I would have thought the evidence is all around.
Everything is gendered when it comes to clothes and toys and whatever for kids. Everything. Indeed, as that perfume ad shows, the gendering never never stops.
I say this while wearing a pair of socks that have pink spots on them as well as pink lace with little bows on them.
Mark:
By engaging in the consumption of beverages that are something of an acquired taste, a taste generally acquired through sexist indoctrination of young males, you are actively engaging in behaviour that reinforces the gender dimorphic culture. Obviously you need to be re-educated … or something.
A large number of women of my acquaintance quite like drinking beer and having sex too, Desipis. Just sticking with Andrew’s list. And I know quite a few who dislike shopping with a vengeance.
My daughter (4.75) has been in a heavy pink phase since she was 2. I cannot explain it as entirely due to the choices she was offered. She actively seeks out and chooses the colour way too often and in too many different circumstances for it to be something that she has been conditioned to do by us her parents as dupes of the marketeers.
Marketeers heavily exploit the phenonemon to double their income, sure, but there is something else to it. Her strong desire to identify as female in opposition to male leads her to choose the color she has observed is most stereotypically female.
Her mother and father are both heartily sick of Target toys section pink. It could be another colour however and the marketing and consumption and identification would be the same. But there is something about this pink that seems to do the job better than others.
Hopefully once she has moved past this assertion of her identity so heavily thru her gender she will branch out a bit.
Pavlov’s cat – “Forgive me, Andrew, but that tells me more about you than it does about “women”.”
very funny PC. You know nothing about me at all! Ok – you’re forgiven.
I guess the other way to think about this is that if women didn’t generally like pink stuff (stereo-typing warning) then why would manufacturers bother making pink products and advertising them along gender specific grounds. Do avertisers and marketers dictate women’s colour preferences or do they follow them?
It’s called socialisation, Andrew.
I thought the pink for girls and blue for boys issues got sorted out with yellow, thirty or forty years ago. I am being a tad disingenuous btw, but I do recall yellow babysuits were a sort of FU message to anybody determined to judge junior on its gender.
Both!
Mark, of course there are examples of people going against the trend with beer culture just as there is with pink culture. It’s still very much one of the ways our culture is divisive when it comes to gender.
Darlene , says;
I know, Darlene. But this is neither new nor unique to our culture. As I mentioned earlier, all cultures going right back to the eraliest are gendered. It’s not like this was invented by the marketing arm of Target, despite what Roland Barthes and tigtog seem to think.
Though this is why people like Roland Barthes and Michele Foucault supported Mao Tse Tung’s cultural revolution – to crush out of existence the stupid bourgeois patriarchal delusions of the masses through torturing and killing vast numbers of them.
You know, because they didn’t like pink. But the bastard proles kept putting on pink undies and the like.
Actually now that I think about it, yellow baby suits were knitted ahead of time for the as yet to be determined gendered babies. Still, I can’t believe this discussion is taking place.
Womens’ shirts have buttons that do up from the other side to mens. I know this because i buy every decent chord shirt that i see in the op shop that fits. Just recently, i have begun to reject the female variety because they are harder to manage.
Hope that helps.
Word, Caroline.
Women’s clothes are often made without pockets. I think Twisty already pointed this out, but never mind.
kate says;
Kate, you’re not going to believe this, probably, but I can remember a time not that long ago when ‘progressives’ would have been more worried that you were buying a child a computer at all – not what colour it was.
Computers were an unalloyed evil which were going to drive countless girls and women typists, bank tellers and check-out chicks into permanent unemployment.
The bank employee unions were particularly hostile to word processors and ATMs – and most incredibly the most extreme left critic of the social and economic impact of computers in Australia was, wait for it, Keith Windschuttle who was thefounding editor of Data Trend, Australia’s first computer magazine
Then there was all the hysteria over computer games…
Yea, how silly is that! I keep telling my wife to stop buying clothes without pockets which otherwise forces me to carry all the coins and keys.
…And while we’re on the subject, what exactly is the *deal* with pencils, anyway? Have you ever noticed a pencil? I mean, they’re long, they’re stiff, they’re shaped almost like dicks! Am I right? So, what’s that all about? Are the patriarchs commanding us: we can only write with our dicks? I’d like to see how the internet would work with *that* regulation, wouldn’t you? Am I right? And plus, I heard that the internet is only “a system of tubes”. Is that, like, Fallopian tubes? Because THAT would be REALLY weird!
Elaine, this is great stuff, I hope you’re getting this all down. After all, you’re the girl, you have to be the one who takes notes.
The local computer/Jaycar shop sells pink toolkits and floral hammers. Personally I find the ordinary ones do the job just as well and often for half the price.
My daughter dresses in a lot of pink because often it is the easiest colour to buy any clothing in. I think of chain stores as a vomit of pink some seasons. When buying her jumpers the other day I could only get pink and lavender in the girls section, but the boys had red, blue and green. Of course if a boy wants to wear purple it is strictly forbidden. I spent ages looking for purple t-shirts and purple underpants for my son and could not find any. Apparently real men only wear red, blue black and grey. I couldn’t even find white in children’s sizes.
Serry Jeinfeld said;
That would be the most extreme example of pencil envy I’ve ever seen.
Except if he supports Fremantle or the Melbourne Storm
Or if he’s in the high-school production of “Godspell.”
The actual construction of the clothes can vary greatly: boys clothes made for rough and tumble, dark colours to hide dirt, etc. Girls clothes are light coloured, stain easily, often delicate fabric, revealing when worn in a normal, play-filled situation. So we’re in effect training girls at a young age, not to do certain things, to sit a certain way etc.
Add to that, Patrick, the way that high / stacked heels have been creeping into the little girls’ shoe section. No little girl should be wearing them. I first noticed this in the 90s, it’s been going on for a while: I saw some poor little girls in my kids’ local playground wearing about two-inch stacked rubber thongs>. Can I say “turned ankle”? Despite being clad in the equivalent of Tennessee Walkers’ Stacked shoes to teach them to behave ladylike, these poor kids were still making feeble attempts to run at times. The resulting unbalanced wear patterns on the abominable thongs were a testimony to the damage that was being done to their natural gait, never mind their propensity to do anything outdoorsy and Famous Five-ish. Since then I have seen little girls in heels regularly, although mostly in dress up shoes – but then again, the poor things are encouraged to want to wear “dress up” shoes in situations where play shoes would be the rational choice.
I’m very, very glad my one girl is 16 and I’m not about to have more.
At one of the local computer stores I noticed that the portable HD makers had two versions of the same product – one in silver, the other in hot pink. For some reason only the hot pink ones were left. Lots of them, and on special too.
I was taught to drink beer by gender and cultural studies academics. There’s really nothing like a seminar on feminist philosophy to work up a thirst for a schooner of Coopers.
wbb – when my eldest was about was about 3 – 5, and outgoing and confident, she went through a very very pink stage. At one point the ONLY thing she would wear, day and to bed at night, down the street and at the supermarket , was a very pale pink chiffon fairy costume with wings, tights, glitter and ballet shoes, all the pinkest of increasingly grubby pink. I don’t know ho was the more embarrassed me or her mother. She’d pinched it out of someone’s dress up box I think.
Thankfully she immediately moved onto a slighty less cringworthy <a href=”Punky Brewster“> stage. Then at 8 or 9 it went into a totally dark mainly black “bohemian” look.
I’ve no idea what happened to that link
PINK. This is my 4 year old daughter’s entire preference for everything. Frilly is a bonus. I remember trying to get her to wear a hand me down jumper that her brother wore:
Don’t get me started on calling me “Daddy”.
We respect her wishes and preferences if they don’t seem to impact on others negatively and it doesn’t turn her into a spoilt brat. So she wears alot of pink alot of the time. I honestly don’t know where the hell it comes from.
On reflection I guess the 19th century practice code of dress for infant boys was an example of how powerlessness is feminised.
I’m sorry I think this oversimplistic. Somehow this ‘pinkification’ is supposedly part of some marketing plot to disempower women as is femininity. But at the same tme let’s conveniently ignore the fact that the consumers, designers and marketers we’re talking about are often, well, women.
>
So what’s it to be? Are these people making choices they wish to? Are they all simply brainwashed? If this pink plot is what The Guardian is inferring it is then that seems to imply that women are mindless zombies being programmed by K-Marketers and the rest.
>
No doubt in the past to be feminine was to be weak. No doubt aesthetics associated with this idea persist. No doubt there are stereotypes of feminist which are both unreal and undesirable. But likewise true is that there are women who explicitly subscribe to ‘femininity’ who are smart, strong, talented and free. I know quite a few.
>
This sort of unsophisticated twaddle makes unsubstantiated assumptions. Something more interesting please. One thing that is certain, gender is a zone of taste differentiation. To what extent this is socialized and to what extent this is natural is an interesting question. It’s a shame that specualtions as to the answers aren’t quite so interesting.
“But at the same tme let’s conveniently ignore the fact that the consumers, designers and marketers we’re talking about are often, well, women.”
It’s true, Adrien, that I’ve been astonished more than once when talking to a very sensible pregnant woman who is wearing jeans and a t-shirt and on the subject of the forthcoming female baby, the mother-to-be says something like, “I can’t wait to dress her up in pink and frilly dresses.”
This just doesn’t compute with me. I can’t think of anything more unattractive and unappealing. I had a wonderful time dressing my son in lime green, orange, red, gold and at one point a shocking-pink [that's a colour, not a statement] handknitted cardy. I can’t recall ever wearing a pink garment as a girl in the late 50s/60s and I rarely wear pink as an adult (I do have one pink t-shirt.)
Undoubtedly many women are complict in the pinkification of little girls, but the girls themselves run with it [if they can still run: see Helen's point about high heels] until they reach their Oedipal moment at about age 4-5. After that they find other more subtle ways to differentiate themselves.
Yes gender existed before the commodification of children’s clothing and playthings but it has taken a particular path in line with that commodification in the past two decades.
Anyone who’s been around groups of girls lately will know that they are very keen on screaming when faced with ‘risky’ situations, in the surf, for example. I can’t recall ever doing that as a girl. I often wonder what this kind of behaviour portends…
The marketers aren’t plotting, at least not other to than to sell stuff, they are responding to the current construction of femininity. In a particularly hamfisted and stereotyped fashion, of course, but they are responding and refining rather than masterminding. The current intensification of pink (anecdote point – birthday parties in my childhood involved a rainbow of party dresses, these days I see almost wall to wall pink with occasional flashes of purple and white) is more likely part of a backlash phenomenon.
One comment at Twisty’s that I found fascinating pointed out that the higher a woman’s socioeconomic status, especially if it’s actually associated with decision-making roles, the stronger the pressure seems to be to perform femininity. Not to a professional beauty standard (that’s a whole different game), but certainly to make the effort to pull together an ever-varying designer wardrobe and be salon-groomed. Look at the derision poured over female politicians who very sensibly prefer to wear practical tailored trouser-suits – what is said if they dare to not wear kitten heels? Stott-Despoja’s Doc Martens were the only thing most Australians knew about her for years, while Hillary is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t (the infamous “thick ankles” and other critiques, especially Cleavagegate).
Note: all this debate on whether female politicians are feminine enough is to do with the stuff they are wearing, or the evidence that stuff has been applied to their hair etc. Analysis of male politicians’ masculinity does not have the same dependence on analysing the stuff around them.
Why are people puzzled by the idea that toddlers might have insistent and exaggerated preferences w/r/t the basic must-haves in their tool-kit for identity expression? As if there were no such thing as different stages in child development, or personality formation! I bet somebody could even write, like, almost a whole book about that stuff. Personally I always thought it was cool how so many city kids are inherently fascinated by different kinds of farm animals, which they’ve only ever seen represented cartoonishly on a See-’N-Say, without any real understanding of what or where an actual “farm” with its actual “animals” might really be.
Which only goes to show. The human mind is a dizzyingly complex thing, and assembling each individual consciousness requires developing an enormous number of moving parts, including a base-line understanding of one’s gender identity. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And plus… smoking, can ruin your health.
Oh, about the vodka bottle. In reality, most vodkas don’t differentiate too wildly in terms of essential flavor and quality (viz. they’re not like wines or single malts), so the way for you to make money in the vodka business has a lot to do with having a great bottle design, a cool name, and a brilliant ad campaign. (And making your sales reps hustle like crazy for premium shelf space in high-end bars.) So companies try to find the magic design keys that will unlock a particular niche market, like, say, affluent young urban women who watch “Sex and the City,” or used to. Some of these ideas work, some don’t. The vodka bottle wearing the skirt in the photo is one of many such efforts. There are lots and lots of others, trying just about everything. Whoever dreamed up the Absolut campaigns (remember those?) was quite brilliant. (People who get jokes about Magritte and Andy Warhol are educated, and educated people often have money, and maybe we can get them to spend some of it on vodka by implying that our vodka is just like them.)
Meantime, Twisty is hilarious as usual. Yes, it’s true, TEH PATRIARCHAL CAPITALSITS are having their weekly midnight coven meeting at Castle Evil out in Rutherford Cliffs, New Jersey, all wearing funny masks left over from that scene in “Eyes Wide Shut,” to discuss how to better “di-morphize” (LOVE it!) various consumer products, so as to further advance an abstract, thankless agenda of social discrimination, which activity wouldn’t make them a profit, as opposed to just selling stuff that people seem to want to buy, which would. Rather altruistic of them, I’d say. How on earth do these Capitalsists ever accumulate any Kapital to begin with, since they’re all so busy di-morphizin’ and oppressin’, and none of them are doing any market research? Maybe they get it all from Teh Patriarchy. I hear that guy is just loaded.
But Adrien, your criticisms don’t address my point that these clothing choices actually encourage and also inhibit certain modes and styles of play. Pink is just the tip of the iceberg, albeit a brightly coloured one. I don’t think anyone here is saying pink, in and of itself is a bad thing, it’s the things that go with it.
What do you say to that, and Helen’s example of high heels?
Is that what people are puzzled by, or are they more puzzled by how much the pink/blue dichotomy in the choices presented to toddlers has come to predominate in recent times?
I found that comment at Twisty’s fascinating too Tigtog, especially the speculation that the pressure to feminize served to undercut her perceived power, making it explicit that though powerful, she is still less so than an equivalent man.
I recall being fascinated by pictures of Hilary in the Arkansas governor’s residence and depressed that she had had to change her appearance so radically subsequently.
Your thesis JPZ does not account for the narrowing of the marketing to women. Far from the multitude of strategies that you talk about there is this avalanche of one marketing strategy.
It is funny that Adrien has a little tanty about oversimplistic twaddle and yet both he and JPZ present us with the Free choice/conspiracy dichotomy as if they were the only choices. I don’t remember ever having a fascination with pink as a toddler or small child. Here’s a thought; maybe it was because the choices were broader back then. My experience is that what is considered appropriate appearance for girls has narrowed dramatically in the last twenty years.
I’d really appreciate if you’d stop patronizing me Su. Or at the very least misrepresenting me.
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I didn’t have a ‘tanty’. I made a statement. This was in no way advocating a simplistic free- choice conspiracy dichotomy (please quote me if you think I’m wrong) I simply made a point that this notion that ‘pinkification’ is some kind of patriarchal marketing conspiracy is problematic because its oversimplified and boneheaded. Neither conspiracy nor ‘free choice’ are useful paradigms I’d wager in trying to understand the orchestrations of marketing and consumption patterns.
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Instead perhaps look at it this way. Think of ‘femininity’ as a collective noun for aesthetic and ethical notions of taste and behaviour, self-regard, and self-countenance attached to the female gender. A cursory look at, say, the history of costume or manners, will tell you that these change over time. If you look at this history from the emergence of feminism on you will see a marked change. You see this change not only in ‘gendered’ taste but in the application of taste everywhere. There is a multiplicity of views that’s potentially as large as the number of individuals in society. There are many forms of femininity, of masculinity. There are often disagreements as to what these constitute and how relevant they are.
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For example I once had a friend who didn’t dig lads who wore Doc Martens boots. She did however. She considered these boots ‘girly’. A shift in taste certainly. Twenty years beforehand you wouldn’t've seen many girls wearing Docs. But there you go. She was exercising her own taste prerogatives. Now she had a certain confidence in her own taste and opinions that most don’t. Most taste is guided by herd instinct I’d wager. So her ideas about the ‘feminine’ would’ve probably been considered unusual. However she was considered by all and sundry as ‘feminine’. She was never considered weak. So I guess the PMC failed with her.
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Is this ‘pinkification’ an aspect of this? Very probably. Does the demarcation of the ‘feminine’ in terms of ‘pink’ exclude dissenting ideas about the feminine – also likely. How do you resit this, evade this? Well the history of culture is stuffed to the brim with people who do just that. It’s called creativity.
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Discourse that boils down to ‘pink is a patriarchal conspiracy’ is not creative. It’s just dopey.
Sure I’ll quote you “Are these people making choices they wish to? Are they all simply brainwashed? ”
Nobody apart from you or JPZ has suggested a conspiracy instead we are marvelling at how patriarchy and capitalism combined seem to be intent on limiting constructions of gender.
I’ll stop patronising you when you stop issuing slap downs like “This sort of unsophisticated twaddle makes unsubstantiated assumptions. Something more interesting please.” I was simply rising to your level of jerkiness.
You’ll never get there su.
Interesting headline in SMH on the death of workchoices above a picture of Julia Gillard: Grey Suit for a Funeral. Somehow I don’t think the clothing would warrant a mention if a male politician was presiding over the end of workchoices.
So stating: “Are these people making choices they wish to? Are they all simply brainwashed?” is advocating a free choice/conspiracy dichotomy? Please note these sentences are punctuated thus – ?. Would I be mistaken in assuming you understand the function of that symbol. Hint: one doesn’t use it to advocate.
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But we will ignore that. And we will likewise ignore the fact that I also wrote: “To what extent this is socialized and to what extent this is natural is an interesting question.”. Won’t we? Inconvenient to one’s argument it is.
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And of course you are “marvelling at how patriarchy and capitalism combined seem to be intent on limiting constructions of gender.” But you’re not suggesting some kind of oversimplistic hegemonious de facto dictatorship in which women are mindless conduits doing the bidding of the cigar-chomping fat men hell bent on keeping ‘em subjugated.
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Let’s just ignore the steady progress toward gender (and other emancipations) enjoyed by modern society over the last little while. The thing is we’re still a hair’s breath away from Taliban-style tyranny. After all you don’t like pink and K-Mart sells it. After the revolution it will be orange all the way.
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FFS. Distorting, over-simplifying. Lying about what I say and then arrogantly refusing to even acknowledge it. Like your wonderful allusion to me confusing predation with hierarchies in species apart from our own when I did no such thing. Grow a little integrity wouldja.
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And Adrian luv. Still waiting for you to say something smart.
Oh upping the jerkometer, no fair. Despite your impeccable use of punctuation I was assuming those questions served a rhetorical function. But they were just questions. Ok NO (constrained choices being the issue here) and yet also NO.
No I am suggesting constraining the choices of women and men, especially, choices in regard to gender and sexuality serves a specific function in maintaining the hierarchies of dominance as they currently exist and that the apparent move to even greater constraints is therefore significant. Part of the backlash as Tigtog said but I wonder, like Suze what else this will mean in the future.
You seem to be holding a grudge. The way it works is that if I make a point you disagree with, then you make a counterpoint. Storing it up for another thread is kind of strange. The bar for arrogance in women is set unattainably low so I imagine this means that you don’t like that I just don’t back off when you say “boo”.
I’m not holding a grudge Su I just wish you respond to what I write and not assume that I’m saying something I’m not. The hierachy/predation thing was a clear example because I wasn’t and don’t confuse those things.
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Similarly I am not advocating a free choice/conspiracy dichotomy here. I have a little bit of experience in this field and it simply doesn’t work that way. Yes marketers try to constrain choices made by consumers in a way that suits them. For example most mobile phones have an inbuilt obsolescence caused by the transmitter frying the motherboard over time. This can be prevented by sticking a very cheap sheet of plastic between the motherboard and the transmitter. But you will not be able to purchase a mobile phone that has this because those who sell these phones want them to drop dead in a timely fashion. (This anecdote is old and may be out of date but it illustrates my point.)
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Now when it comes to the ‘construction of gender’ this gets complicated. There are all sorts of researches on brain function, emotion, psychology etc that marketers use to manipulate us. These can be effective but not entirely so. Consumers regularly find ways of evading, challenging, ignoring or foiling these strategems. To what extent these are used to reinforce sexist stereotypes is a matter of debate.
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I’m neither saying they are or they aren’t. In my experience marketers want to move the merch. However there are all sorts of sexist subtexts to things that are both deliberate and conscious and otherwise. But disentangling all this is not best achieved by some simplistic leviathan model in which the Capitalist Patriarchy programme the braindead women into buying pink stuff. Whether you realize it or not your language essentially backs up a notion that the myriad, complex and oft-contradictory patterns of advertising, marketing, consumption and identity can be boiled down to some propagandist somewhere.
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IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE.
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That’s what I was saying. That’s all I’m saying. I wasn’t advocating a simplistic free choice/conspiracy dichotomy. I was arguing against it. You appear to be advocating such and, excuse me, but you are misrepresenting me intentionally or not. Please don’t.
I haven’t seen anyone on this thread advocate that Marketing Pinkification is a paid-up cartel member of Conspiratorial Patriarchs Inc., Adrien. Not even Twisty said that. What she did say is that the cultural construction of femininity demands the performance of a whole range of behaviours which are labelled “femininity” and a population socialised to punish women who fail to adequately perform these behaviours. It’s only then that she brings in the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
The EPMJ is exploiting (and in the process exacerbating) already existing anxieties regarding femininity in order to generate profit. Like any other marketing that aims to exploit and exacerbate anxieties rather than offer real solutions, it’s pretty tawdry and cynical stuff. Why is it that people who have no problems critiquing such tawdry and cynical marketing in other fields suddenly defend the excesses of consumer-capitalism as soon as a feminist critique of the exploitation of gender anxieties is raised?
No disrespect intended here, but as a recent recipient, Su, I do think there is something in what Adrien says re: your tone. Whether intentional or not, I do think it’s easy to read it as fairly inflammatory and often patronising.
Adrien, you still haven’t responded to my question re: the inhibitory aspects of clothing (both as part of, and more than, ‘pinkification’.
Tigtog, the good news then is that this phase of pinkification will eventually reach its saturation point and then the EMPJ will decide on a new colour (white? orange? black? who knows? whatever sells) and start the whole cycle again based on that chosen new colour and the EMPJ will become the EM/W/O/B/Whatever/J and little girls all over the world will rush to spend money to change their wardrobes leaving the colour pink in the dust.
Such is the way and the power of marketing.
TicTog – I reckon that when you talk about gender/sexuality being constructed you’re not necesarilly advocating a conspiracy (almost no-one does) but talking about a phenomena as if it were designed by someone somewhere. I prefer the notion of orchestration. It’s more a self-organizing system.
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There’s a whole range of tastes and notion of what is gender-appropriate. A few years back I saw a girl call a European backpacker a ‘pouf’ ’cause he was wearing very short shorts. I found this amusing because the knee-length variety of shorts typical to men these days used to mark one as a ‘pouf’ and at the same time the ‘real men’ wore short short – stubbies actually. Costume codes re gender are pervasive altho’ they do change. But what is consistent is this idea that this or that item of clothing is gendered. It’s hard to know exactly how much commodification has contributed to the psychology of this because before the modern era we weren’t given to conducting psychological tests.
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Patrick – Sorry. There’s a marked phenomena observable in early childhood of gender behaviour and clothing codes. To what extent this is socialized and to what extent this is instinctive is a matter of debate. Given that gender identity seems to be very strong early in life (and also considering the experiences of the trans-gendered) I’d say that the indentity itself is instinctive. The mode in which this is expressed is social however.
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Now marketers have all sorts of input. There are conservative marketers who believe in foisting there views of appropriate behaviour/dress codes on society as a whole to be sure. Many advertising creatives are often stifled by stodgie clients who’re out of touch etc. The requirement of certain narrow definition of gender-appropriate clothing I think is a manifestation both of the need to sell merchandise in which they use the conventional as a sure fire strategy and also the conformist herd-instinct. Anyone who’s been to work in an office knows that there people who simply don’t like it when people express themselves as individuals and gender-appropriate clothing’s part of this. One of my early jobs was in a marketing until and my (female) colleagues used to hassle me because I don’t wear ties that often.
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I’d wager however that the high heel for little girls thing is a more insidious than simply some kind of gender dictatorial measure by ultra-conformist marketers. Marketing to children is a way of by-passing the logical and critical functions of the brain to get people ‘hooked’ into certain patterns of consumption. This is happening more and more and it’s fucked.
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I should also add that my personal tastes in ‘feminine’ clothing tend to reject certain staples of same. I mislike both high heels and nail polish.
Patrick G go back and reread that thread. Read the stuff about ‘holding a broom large enough’ and ’screaming shits’ and just reacting to your gender and telling everyone what feminism is and ask yourself if I was perhaps just responding in kind to someone who was being a bit jerky himself. Similarly go and read Adrien’s comment up there and ask if maybe he was being calculatedly insulting and I thought I would take a swipe back. It isn’t the first time someone has marched into a thread on feminism and told the poster that the whole thing is trite. Only seems to happen to the feminist threads though. If after that you still think I’m an asshole I will reconsider.
Now who’s misrepresenting. The effects of those complicated interactions is what I’m talking about. I have not said anything about how they are achieved, other than to note that the effect is to reinforce the status quo, one in which poor women of colour get shafted and the whiter and maler you are the better your situation. I don’t think it is coincidental that the kind of narrowing of the construction of femininity we are seeing is occurring simultaneously with the widening gap between the mega rich and the poor. Again I note you are very keen to tell me that I think all women are braindead whereas I don’t think I have said a single thing about women who choose these products. Not sure where you think I’ve lied either.
I am very interested in your ideas about hierarchies within species (I assume). I favour the trepang model myself. They just roll about on the ocean floor and absolutely noone gets in each other’s face.
Adrien all that you have said about gender in that previous comment assumes that gender identity falls naturally into two categories. The idea of ‘construction’ of gender is that is not an innate either/or ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. I know that I grew up thinking of myself as a person, not as a ‘girl’ and it wasn’t until 4 or 5 when people started pushing me to act in gendered ways that I realized this was not acceptable. Ever since, just about everything expected of me as someone in the category ‘woman’ has been a really bad fit. This is a completely different matter to sexuality.
I don’t want to get into an argument, Su, I was just stating my opinion (which, btw, was a result of more than one thread on LP). It’s cool if you disagree, it’s just I know that online sometimes it’s easy to lose the gentle tone or way of saying things that people can bring to their words in real life, and, you know, leaving people offended is not a great way to change minds or engender good debate.
“Lying about what I say and then arrogantly refusing to even acknowledge it.”
I think it’s time to drop this kind of language and accusation. Disagree by all means but let’s not impute negative qualities to each other.
Definitely, suz. It’s particularly unhelpful to bring up conflicts from separate threads, and makes for a spirit which discourages other commentors from contributing.
Well, I’ve got a contribution: I suggest that every woman here ask her physio about what high heels do to a person’s lower back.
Yes. So do I. They are crazy things that will hurt your back. Along with shoes that cramp your toes.
It just so happens, Pavlov’s Cat, that I posted a little list a while ago for that:
Postural Misalignment (spinal joint anomalies and disc damage)
Increased Forefoot Pressure
Increased Knee Joint Pressure (possible osteoarthritis)
Shortened Calf Muscle
Morton’s Neuroma
Shortened Achilles Tendon
Bunions
Hammertoes
Ankle Injuries
Metatarsalgia
The Washington Post has a great graphic tying all that together as well, and the accompanying article points out how high heels used to be a sign of high status for both genders, having
So why is it that only women express that particular message about what they don’t have to do today?
So you did — I even commented on it, I see! But hey, bears repeating. Repeatedly. I was gobsmacked when my physio explained exactly why I was feeling said back pain (an unexpectedly long walk in very modestly elevated heels the day before), and even more gobsmacked at how fast it went away once I’d done the exercises she’d showed and explained to me.
I didn’t really mean to derail pinkification, either, just to break the little deadlock that had developed up there.
Further thought on 79, your example makes it unclear whether you are talking about sexuality or gender. The girl seems to be reading him as a gay man. I don’t think it helps to mix sex,gender and sexuality in this way. If he was exhibiting behavior that was destabilizing her reading of his gender, she would not have said he was gay, she would have worried that she could not really tell if he was in the category ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ In cultures that don’t adhere to the gender binary, one does not have to be gay to be part of the third gender, one has to be performing other behaviours not appropriate to the other categories. eg a woman who is financially independent etc may acquire a wife. Not that three genders are really any less restrictive than two but the three gendered cultures help to illuminate how gender operates somewhat independently of sex and independently of sexuality.
Asking women to perform “gentleness” in a climate where others may be as forceful as they like when they are arguing is demanding gendered behavior, Patrick.
Su, hard as it may be to believe, not everything I say is an attack on women, or perpetuating the patriarchy. Take the advice or leave it dude, it’s just my perspective, nothing more and nothing less. I’ve said the same thing to men on LP as well.
#79 Adrien:
I understand and agree with your notion of Patriarchy as a self-organising system, but may I be horribly pedantic and point out that that is exactly the opposite of orchestration?
Oh c’mon, she didn’t say it was. And you are still ignoring her excellent argument about the expectations that women be gentle and non-threatening while blokes can be as, you know, masculine as they like.
And this despite the fact that — if we’re getting into ganging up on people about their tone — this whole rumble started in the first place over Adrien’s (habitual, incidentally) and gratuitously aggressive use of complex, sophisticated, grown-up words like ‘twaddle’, ‘boneheaded’ and ‘dopey’. I have got into brawls with Adrien over this myself in the past, and when I called him on gratuitously aggressive insults like this he seemed genuinely startled. Perhaps he spends too much time at Catallaxy (pace Jason and Helen) and thinks this is normal behaviour.
My apologies to all for falling down on the moderation with respect to those comments of Adrien’s which have been gratuitously aggressive, which is the sort of vexatious commentary which is explicitly listed as unacceptable in the LP Comments Policy.
The consequent stoush has certainly ended up derailing the thread, which is exactly why such comments are generally considered unacceptable here.
dreading the day i go shopping, and barrels of monkeys come in pink or blue barrels….brown being not part of any pre-packaged fantasy.
coming soon: pink and blue snakes and ladders, pink and blue cluedo, pink and blue junior scrabble, pink and blue junior monopoly, pink and blue chinese chequers, pink and blue mr potato head.
or worse, that many gender neutral toys/games just won’t be stocked, due to lack of interest, well, not in the malls, that is – there are specialty education/science/and quality toy/games shops filling the gap where, i suspect many a marketing genuis’s kiddie has had his/her xmas stocking filled.
“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”
above from a ny times piece, which is a bit all over the shop, but has some background on disney deciding to market their ‘princess range’ etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24princess.t.html?pagewanted=print
“Not that three genders are really any less restrictive than two but the three gendered cultures help to illuminate how gender operates somewhat independently of sex and independently of sexuality.”
The relationship between sex, sexuality and gender is an interesting one to come to terms with, because it seems that the collapse of these categories is a constant feature of everyday readings of each. Which is not really surprising, because the sex/gender distinction (for example) was deliberately taken up by feminists to limit the extent to which ‘Nature’ could be used politically as a trump card against efforts to empower women. Feminists recognised the political and intellectual need of taking up the sex/gender distinction.
Our culture tends to link sexuality and gender quite forcefully because we continue to understand sexuality as something essential to being. Gender tends to be read as a surface effect of sexuality. Thus gender that doesn’t seem to correlate with sex tends to be read as a sign of non-hetero sexuality – except within certain transient categories like ‘tomboy’ (age dependent) or ‘metrosexual’ (fashion/media dependent). Which also serves to highlight how much our ideas of sex (as in biological sex) are coloured by gender norms.
Speaking as the lifelong victim of a family setup where the youngest sister (ie not me) was encouraged and applauded in her Princess Fairy Mermaid Ballerina routine from a very young age (and usually at the expense of, ahem, the next sister up), I loudly condemn all products, of any colour, that encourage little girls to aspire to princessdom.
General observations of this kind of childhood indicate that it doesn’t make for a very happy adulthood, either.
I don’t know what the point of my previous comment was, but I think I was trying to say: sex/sexuality/gender is a tangled web, but worth teasing apart, and it is feminists who have initiated and continue to do that work, so I think we should take heed.
I agree with those here who are suggesting that pinkification is only the visible part of the problem: certain forms of dress have real consequences in terms of physical development, comportment, feelings of bodily security and confidence. To the extent that any form of dress discourages the widest range of different forms of play in young children it should be of concern to parents and educators.
I admire parents who successfully mediate the desires of their children to wear non-functional clothing: my personal favourite is the tutu/tights/heavy boots combo.
Klaus K — I think part of the problem is that it’s in the interests of various, erm, interest groups (say, everyone who wants to make money out of women, which includes other women, and everyone who wants to maintain power over them/us) to keep those categories confused. This was Twisty’s original point: that to keep your masters happy you must perform femininity, and you can’t perform femininity without Stuff.
And the only way to disentangle this cultural ganglion is to keep the gender/sex/sexuality distinctions firmly in view. Once again the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as your comment suggests.
Sorry, #99 was a response to #97.
Yahoo has just launched “Shine”, a portal for women aged 25 and 54.
It’s pink.
http://feministing.com/archives/008907.html
Is the predominance of pinkisms really a recent phenomenon? The pink=feminine cliche has been around for quite a while, and it’s such an obvious cliche that it would be a surprise if marketers and advertisers didn’t leap on it.
One interesting thing that strikes me about recent pinkisms is how their meaning seems to mutate depending on how they have been used. So the singer, Pink, who is perhaps not quite a traditional feminist, but who at least tries to appeal to a feminist market. (Not sure how successfully. Not even sure to what extent this off-the-cuff evaluation is accurrate). So you also get pink guns, perhaps not so disturbing in that they equate feminity with violence as in how the style and fashionability of guns are presented as being of equal importance as their traditional uses (ie, maiming, wounding, and killing.) “Does that gun match your skirt, girlfriend?!?”
tigtog:
Twisty:
I don’t know about anyone else but the quote from Twisty reads to me like an explanation of some form of orchestration by someone.
Mindy mentioned the floral hammers back a ways – has anyone else come across those? A range of basic tools that are enamelled in a foul all-over floral pattern. Just about died when I first saw them (next to the cash register in a bookshop.)
A pink portal, eh? Hmm.
I love the way that demographic grouping (men and women alike) gets cut off at 54. Perhaps they (rightly)assume that by 55 even the most credulous and gullible consumer will have had enough life experience not to be swayed by advertising campaigns.
Isn’t 55 what the retirement age used to be? Retirement means less money and more time to figure out how to spend it, hence less vulnerability to marketing.
Agreed, Dr Cat.
I think the particular difficulty here is that the collapse of those categories always goes beyond the specific interests under examination (which are nevertheless worth criticising) to the level of everyday language and understanding. Or when it is everyday language or understanding being examined, then patriarchy is in specific interests. Patriarchal power seems to rest on the imprecise evocation of the half-hidden, on the contradictions and ambivalences of ‘common sense’ and Nature. It can always move up or down a level, analytically or conceptually, because of this.
Part of the difficulty feminists face in articulating those important distinctions (paradoxically?) is that they themselves can be seen as ‘interested’ precisely because there is no widely agreed upon way of understanding the ‘interestedness’ of everyday accounts of sex/gender/sexuality. Patriarchy remains one step ahead because it is built on infinite deferral. Feminists find themselves repeating what they’ve said, again and again and again and begin to look dogmatic, whereas patriarchy is always slinking away before they’ve finished. Hence the particular importance of eloquent feminists in maintaining critique.
Desipis, I take ‘you’ to be a deliberate use of the second person to draw the reader in, and to make them aware of their own complicity, rather than a gesture to conspiracy or individual agency.
Word, Klaus.
“FFS, who would ever think of buying a boy a toy iron?”
Umm, me? My son when young played a lot with dolls and had a complete toy kitchen for them (he loved, and still loves, cooking). Of course all that ended when he went to school. The conformism imposed by the marketers is as nothing compared with that imposed in the schoolyard.
Su –
Well she wasn’t exactly what you’d call enlightened. Her labeling this fellow gay was entirely because he wore shorts that were very short. That was it. My example was just to illustrate that clothing codes denoting sexuality can change. I reckon sex, sexuality and gender are mixed. To be sure you can separate ‘em intellectually and to a certain extent they are separate but never entirely.
Not exactly. Sex generally speaking falls into two categories for obvious reasons. Gender denotes a social construction – rituals, codes of behaviour, division of labour etc – based on sex. According to the studies I’m familiar with and they are not conclusive, there is a strong tendency to identify with one or either polarity fairly early. I brought up the example of the trans-gendered as an example of where some, say, with male genetalia identifies as a woman for that reason. This phenomena seems to challenge the notion that gender identity is just a matter of convention.
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It is quite difficult to separate the socialization of gender from the natural attributes of sex. I tend to think that a lot of notions about sexual nature are manufactured for the specific purpose of perpetuating a certain kind of social hierarchy or because we think that’s the imagined right thing to do.
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However that’s not the whole story. We’re animals and I think it’s both arrogant and foolhardy to imagine that we’re greatly exceptional in having no natural dispositions re sex. Of course those who wish to, in Klaus’s words use “‘Nature’ ..politically as a trump card against efforts to empower women” should note that nature is a lot more flexible than most autocrats and that everything the human race has accomplished as been in defiance of it.
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For the record I think that gender, sexuality is better viewed as a spectrum than two discreet categories. ‘Feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes swim around in everyone. A cursory look beyond the standard dichotomy will reveal quite a variety but the m/f polarity is ever present. We are still quite a distance from understanding all of this but I reckon we’d be better served in this end if we abandon the notion that ’society’ and ‘biology’ are discreet and easily distinguishable.
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Are you sure you have a reliable memory of what happened when you were 4,5? I possess a very good long term memory and its pretty difficult for me to imagine my socialization as ‘boy’. The first time I remember a gender issue emerging was when I was teased at school (by a girl) for wearing a kilt. I was 6.
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Klaus –
Sexuality is essential to our being. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. In considering sex, gender and sexuality I’m reminded of the models of certain early 20th century sociologists and psychologists like Marcel Mauss. Could it be that these categories correspond with their categories of the physical, the social and the psychological respectively?
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TicTog –
Really? Please note I didn’t start it. I also don’t misrepresent what other people say and when I’m called on things I’m in error about I apologize. Asking questions about the extent to which this ‘pinkification’ is the result of consumer choice and market demand is pertinent; it is not a ‘tanty’. It takes two to tango, I didn’t start this fandango.
Well I see what you mean. By orchestration however I’m imagining more a jazz jam than a symphonic rehearsal. A sort of spontaneous interplay of different music united by a rhythm and a key. Perhaps I should get a better metaphor but that’s what I meant. Also I don’t think Patriarchy is entirely an orchestration – it’s also deliberate policy. For that reason I don’t think we live in a patriarchy. A sexist society yes, but patriarchy no.
On a lighter note, this discussion reminds of the 1950s Fred Astaire/Audrey Hepburn musical ‘Funny Face’, which simlultaneously parodies and celebrates the fashion industry.
It has the great song ‘Think Pink’ (George & Ira Gershwin), sung by the glorious Kay Thompson who plays a New York fashion maven and editor of ‘Look’ magazine. In a brainwave she decides that ‘pink’ is the colour for the season and that everything should be pink. There’s a musical number, using every shade of pink imaginable and culminating with her phalanx of assistants all dressed identically in pink. At the end, when Kay Thompson is asked why she isn’t wearing pink, she imperiously states ‘Pink? Darling, I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’
See, they were on to it in 1957.
I love cooking, too, Derrida, but come on, an iron! Who thinks that’s fun?!
Laura – if you actually try to use them the enamel flakes off. So it’s only a thin veneer of being capable of hammering in a nail yourself. If you attempt to use them you will damage the lovely finish.
I quite like ironing.
/runs away.
*Puts up hand*
I used to swap ironing for cleaning the bathroom, back in my house-sharing housework-roster days.
PC, the chore of ironing being less onerous than the chore of cleaning a shared bathroom is one thing, “liking” ironing is an abomination unto the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Not that I am biased by the monotony of creases.
“Sexuality is essential to our being. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Our existence as a species depends on sexual reproduction, sure, but what I mean is that sexuality – which is not reducible to reproduction anyway – is felt in our culture to be the ‘truth’ of us, often a repressed or hidden truth revealed by signs in another area of life.
Ironing! :O Ye gods. I wish we were neighbours Mark, I would make all your dreams* come true…
You’re off the hook PC. As Tigtog says, preferring it over cleaning the bathroom isn’t exactly rhapsody.
*Dreams featuring irons that is. No responsibility will be taken for other dreams.
#118 – Ah so you’re talking from the persepctive of The History of Sexuality v.I. Sorry ’bout that. Should’ve picked up on that but I’m old, tied and full of no coffee.
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That’s true. It’s also co-related with Romantic Personality. The cultivation of the self thru (among other things) consumer choices which leads me back to the topic. Two things occur to me in the correlation between marketing/consumerism and sexual identity -
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One is that marketers will utilize ’subconscious’ processes to manipulate us into thinking we want certain stuff that we might not. Or to aspire to aesthetic ideals that are unattainable. Marketing to children is a particularly pernicious instance of this. But this isn’t entirely a marketing thing. It’s also part of the culture generally. I wanted to be an androgyne like David Bowie when I was a teenager. But I just don’t have the attributes. Bowie wasn’t manipulating me deliberately the way advertisers attempt to. In fact he was cultivating a persona based on certain aspects of late 60s counter-culture.
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The other thing is that capitalism is not necessarily constraining. If you don’t like the pinkification thing you’re free to market your own stuff in competition. Unfortunately the market is not open. It’s a oligopoly which will try its hardest to marginalize you. So in that sense it is constraining. But it does offer more choices than other systems.
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I’m thinking here of an episode in Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance where a Czech ex-pat returns to Prague just after the fall of Communism. The weather’s unseasonally hot and she’s only brought winter clothes so she buys a summer dress. The economy is still a command one and she’s faced with a small range of very simple garments for which she’s charged ridiculous prices. She’s looking at herself in this dress in the mirror and thinking: “this isn’t me”.
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The point being that even in kitch-corporate oligopolous K-Marteria we still do have a wider range of choice by which to define ourselves. So I’m not certain it’s entirely accurate to say that Capitalism restricts us to narrowly defined gender roles. It gives us more choices than we’ve had before altho’ not many as it could.
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The answer to that is – make your own stuff and get it out there.
I do the lot. Ironing, cooking, cleaning. My missus is studying full time and I don’t want her being distracted by domestic stuff that either of us could do, anyway.
Now, this might sound odd, but I really like cleaning the bathroom. I take everything out that could get water-damaged – towels, medicines, everything – and then put a hose through the window, splash soap and light bleach solution around, and brush and scub everything with either a broom or a stiff brush till it sparkles. Then rinse it away.
Once it’s dried a bit, I start on the glass surfaces with Windex.
I stop excess water going out of the bathroom onto the rugs with a towel stopped under the door.
Don’t know why, but I’ve always thought cleaning things fun. Lends itself to contemplation and you can splash around in muck.
As a student I had a job cleaning the gaming room at Guildford Leagues Club – I used to love doing it till it was squeaky clean, loved using the big floor polishers, especially liked using meths to clean the glass surfaces. Doors, pokies, counter tops.
The job would start at four in the morning and the whole thing was finished by eight. Then shower and off to uni.
The only time I felt discouraged was the morning after a food fight involving prawns. had to use a shovel.
Yeah, it’s something that Foucault argues, but I could equally have cited Nabokov contra Freud. I don’t think you need to be Foucaultian to make the argument.
Yes or Freud. (or Camille Paglia or Anaïs Nin etc)Could’ve mentioned Freud but Freud’s a naughty word and starts endless shitfights. It’s a theme of the modern era – sexuality=identity. I tend to think sexuality is inherent and basic to identity. I don’t think it’s just the latest socialized fad I reckon it is the truth. Or a truth anyhow.
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We’re just getting stuck into now ’cause for the first time in history human beings are mostly worked into the ground by the time they’re twelve.
I was at an academic seminar last night – on musicology – and a (male) questioner began a comment by referring to phallic signifiers and then did the whole Lacanian schtick. Given that gender was one of the things under discussion, he couldn’t have been more oblivious to the irony. Look at moi! Phallus! High theory!
Well, I don’t think sexuality is a somehow truer or more fundamental aspect of our humanity than any other, and I’m suspicious of certain counter-cultural narratives of ’sexual liberation’.
Mark, as an aside, I’m inclined to think there is little of worth in Lacan that isn’t already in Freud.
I’m inclined to agree, Klaus K, but there’s a lot in Lacan that isn’t of worth. Sorry for the diversion!
I wonder how much Pinkification is just laziness on the part of marketers as well – ‘we want women to buy our product, let’s make it pink’ – job done.
It’s probably the same way that they use cars/beer/etc in order to target men. I don’t think it’s that they’re specifically trying to target women, more than there is a subset of women who go out of their way to buy pink things. Just like other people buy things that match things that they identify with (styles of particular celebrities, branding from music, tv or sports, etc) a significant portion of the population choses to identify with pink for either its aesthetics or symbolism. I don’t think its so much laziness as realising that while there may be limited gain from making a pink product, there’s a lot fewer people who will specifically avoid pink than will specifically seek it out.
Lacan is the most expesnive fishwrap money can buy.
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On reflection (and after two long blacks) Klaus I reckon it actually is Foucault that’s specifically arguing that we modern peoples are the ones obsessed with sex. Freud kinda says we’ve always been obsessed with sex and Nabokov’s investigating the prisons of desire thru fiction. But it’s Foucault who posits the scientia sexualis hypotheses.
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I kinda think sex is primary but I’m sure you don’t wanna play Freud vs Jung do ya.
Ding! Give Mindy a prize. I remember my first advertising lecture. By the bloke responsible for the old Breaka ads in which some blue collar dude’s co-workers turn into women a la FHM magazine. He was severely hassled for this and he defended himself by blaming the demographic. He had some fairly graphic anecdotes about episodes in focus grouops the most memorable of which was: in response to a question – how can we improve this ad, one reply was “why doncha say: buya milk and get a root?”
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The prime market for flavoured milk is blue-collar guys aged 17-25. But I thought he was lazy. After all there are other ways of speaking to the demographic. But it’s also the ‘no-one ever got fired for buying IBM’ factor. You’re safe if you go with the conventional. Sex sells. It’s the Ad industry mantra.
If you go into K-Mart or Toys R Us and walk through the boys’ and girls’ toy aisles, you will see, unfortunately, a sea of pink in the girls’ aisles (there is an air of gender apartheid in these places. For one, there is little scope for a little girl to “choose” any colour other than pink. For another, the message simply screams at said little girls that if you’re a girl, you’d better like pink; otherwise, what’s wrong with you?
TimT, if you read old illustrated children’s stories from the postwar twentieth century- think of the old “bumper books” and whatnot”, you’ll see that there wasn’t that much pink in girls’ clothing. It has definitely reached a crescendo in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Helen says;
I dunno, Helen. I have a little problem with women shopping at K-Mart equating themselves with the victims of apartheid because the girls toys and boys toys are in different aisles. But it is a revealing metaphor…
“On reflection (and after two long blacks) Klaus I reckon it actually is Foucault that’s specifically arguing that we modern peoples are the ones obsessed with sex.”
Foucault is suggesting that sex is, in the modern era, made to speak even when it was supposedly ‘repressed’, and I think this is true. Whether saying yes or no, you’re still talking about it. Most importantly, for me, Foucault is historicising the ’sexuality as truth’ phenomenon, which is the opposite of what Freud does. But Foucault doesn’t really offer an opinion on it, in fact his methodology tends to suspend judgement at that level, which is why my point isn’t really Foucaultian.
The reason I mentioned Nabokov is that he is consistently anti-Freudian, it gets mentioned all through his interviews and other writings, and in his fiction he makes fun of psychoanalysis, and also poses alternative ways of understanding the dreams of his characters. In this sense, Nabokov is historicising, but also rejecting the ’sex as truth’ idea, albeit by scapegoating Freud as the fashionable instance.
Well, somebody had to do it.
I like ironying, if that’s any help. And yes, I was indeed given a toy irony as a lad, which of course explains everything.
from Sesame Street…
BERT: (sings)
I love laundry!
It’s quiet and clean!
I think potato chips,
Ice cubes, and paper clips
Are perfectly keen!
I love paperweights
And popsicle sticks!
You oughta see my
Collection of bricks!
Gimme some cards, and I’ll
Show ya some tricks!
I’m square…
I’m squaaaare!
ie – Questioning our myths aboyut Victorian repression and modern liberalisation. The Victorian era simultaneously repressed sex as a topicof conversation for example whilst making it an object of inquiry and a factor of consideration where it hadn’t been before eg the architecture of schools.
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From the 20th century on we’ve thrown off this repression but continue to speak about sex as an object of inquiry. So we’re still in the Victorian mode, hence the ‘truth of sex’. Or sexuality as truth. Yeah?
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I reckon you can see a continuity of sexual imaguination (if you like) in western art. A la Sexual Personae.
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I think Freud’s interesting if you disregard psychoanalysis. Books like Civilization and its discontents are more interesting than his case studies.
I don’t think it’s about saying we’re still Victorian in that sense as much as suggesting that the apparent ‘break’ constituted by sexual liberation isn’t a break at all, just a shift. It’s been a little while since I read the thing to be honest. My favourite modern writer to demonstrate the ’sexuality as truth’ thing is DH Lawrence, because his work was so important to ’sexual liberation’. It’s probably no surprise that Nabokov didn’t like him one bit.
Freud’s very interesting, I agree, and definitely worth the time if only as a challenge. I love thinking about ‘parapraxes’ etc, I just don’t accept the broader framework of interpretation.
The reason I mentioned Nabokov is that he is consistently anti-Freudian, it gets mentioned all through his interviews and other writings, and in his fiction he makes fun of psychoanalysis, and also poses alternative ways of understanding the dreams of his characters. In this sense, Nabokov is historicising, but also rejecting the ’sex as truth’ idea, albeit by scapegoating Freud as the fashionable instance.
Arg, I’m getting struck down with a case of author dimorphism! D’y mean, like, Nabokov or, like, Nabokov?
Erm, I’m confused by your question, TimT…
Just a little blog joke about the denizen of the Aussie blogosphere who goes by the name Nabakov, Klaus!
Ah yes. Well, I’m a fan of both, but not up to speed on Nabs’ opinions of Freud (though I did get his opinion of the other Nabokov)
Just thinking about the use of irony in the “Puking up pink” photo essay, and the idea of “sophistication”, that clearly ties in with the linking of the status of cultural products with that of their audiences.
I’ve been somewhat interested in how the status of cultural products alters as they are dropped by one social status group and appropriated by another.
Do you think sometimes overt “irony” is used deliberately to rehabilitate a déclassé cultural form, moving it into the embrace of a higher status audience after it has been discarded by lower status audiences and consumers?
So “camp” stuff, for example 1960s-era “kitsch” – lava lamps, Vladimir Tretchikoff’s “Chinese Girl” prints, old DC Comics, Hawaiian shirts, etc – get “discovered” (and are consequently rehabilitated to a higher status) by higher status audiences – for example, young urban metrosexuals – as “ironic” statements about mainstream culture.
So let me see if I got this straight. Twisty sees a Moscow vodka ad that is addressed specifically to Russian women, but doesn’t ever once think, “Hey, right on! Young Russian women must be doing pretty OK these days and making some serious bank, since vodka peddlers have now noticed them as a hip new consumer market! Wow, they might even be independent enough to go buy their own vodka for themselves these days, instead of waiting for some gangster or middle-aged businessman at the bar to pay for their drink for them.” Instead it’s the same old dreary same old, dressed up with weird words like “dimorphism” (which used to just be known as “His ‘n Hers” on the eighth floor down at Abraham & Straus). Twisty’s kind of thinking is no more than a factory pre-set, but it’s being accepted around here as “analysis.”
Has anyone even considered alternative theoretical explanations for this “pinkification” thingumybob? No, that would be schismatic, and possibly even true! Here’s a crazy idea. What if consumer goods are being “pinkified” because the feminists have already won?
In a world of dizzyingly varied choices w/r/t the DIY mix-and-match (or mashup, pace David Rubie) assembly of one’s persona, maybe standardized “pink” feminine iconography is a comfort zone, or a kind of tiny mental vacation from the hard work of making endless pro-active choices, or even a kind of metaphysical clubhouse. Some women might even just like stuff that’s a little girly. We see a similar phenomenon amongst ethnic and racial groups who’ve had a genuinely tough time in years past, but have now “made it,” whose seat at the table is no longer questioned. They start to indulge in massively over-egged crap like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Riverdance” and that god-awful Maya Angelou poetry.
Maybe female toddlers clamor more loudly for pink/princessy stuff than they did in years past because, already at two years old, society and their feminist parents are presenting them with too baffling an array of alternatives, but what they really require at that very young age is simplicity, repetition, reassurance, and conceptual clarity. The rest will come later. When you buy a new computer, is the first thing you do a) email all your friends, or b) turn the computer on, install the software, and get the email program running?
Don’t know if any of the above thoughts are at all true, but a good social scientist could probably devise an experimental setup to check a few.
Bartender! Bring me something pink and fruity in a tall, girly glass… with a LOT of vodka! What brand? Oh, I don’t care, they’re all the same, really. Except for Smirnoff. No fucking Smirnoff.
– j_p_z, who loves drinking from a Krazy Straw
Pavlov’s cat;
I’m thinking of setting up a commercial practice as a consultant epistemologist to urban sophisicates. There’s strong, practical demand for such a thing in this city.
Kids marketing I’d imagine has to appeal in different ways to two audiences: to the kids obviously, but also to the parents or guardians who will be buying the products. I often get the feeling that while marketing to the kids can be a fairly superficial exercise, it’s the marketing to the adults that all the efforts goes into. I’d imagine the predominance of certain cliches – pinkitude, the ‘princess image’, the boy/girl split – has been greatly encouraged by certain parents* who like to see their little girls dress up as princesses, etc. (A lot of comments on this thread and on TigTog’s own website certainly seem to back this up.) It’s not necessarily a case of little children opting for pink; you’ve got to follow the money. The choice is usually that of the parents.
It’s another example of a fairly typical present-day phenomenon – adults accepting idealised stereotypes about childhood, rather than thinking back to what their own childhoods actually felt like.
*Obviously not all, just a particular sub-section of the parental buying demographic.
Adrien #120
Back when I and my schoolmates wore party dresses of all colours, that’s what was happening. Our mothers/aunts/grandmothers made them. For someone to have a store-bought party dress was a big thing when I was a kid.
Thus the colours of our party frocks reflected the genuine tastes of those dressmakers more than just choosing something off a rack – their favourite colour, or a colour that brought out the child’s eyes. Matching sibling outfits for brothers and sisters were very popular in our neighbourhood, with shorts for him and a skirt for her plus matching ribbons in the girl’s hair would be considered sufficient femme signifier to differentiate – the colours would be exactly the same.
The last time we discussed sewing skills on this
threadblog I think there was Laura and perhaps one or two others who had gained sufficient competence in their youth and continued through adulthood to practice sufficiently that they are still capable of making clothes. Buying store-bought became an essential marker of the middle-class, so sewing skills declined as families deliberately didn’t teach their daughters how to sew as a mark of social status.Yet again, commodifying a skillset and leaving supply to the markets results in less freedom of choice, not more.
Just a clarification (and maybe a repetition). When I say -
has been greatly encouraged by certain parents* who like to see their little girls dress up as princesses, etc. (A lot of comments on this thread and on TigTog’s own website certainly seem to back this up.)
I’m not referring to the comments by parents on this thread. I’m more referring to the reflections about childhood experience, for instance, this by Pavlov’s Cat.
Eliot, no-one except you would need to be told this, but I clearly wrote “gender apartheid”, so it was pretty clear I was not implying a one to one correlation with apartheid in De Klerk South Africa. Except maybe to someone who is mischeviously trying to read the most bad-faith interpretations into everyone anyone else writes.
Clear now?
Yes. No. Depends. I’m not going to go into the virtues of the division of labour. I wouldn’t say that ‘leaving supply to markets’ results in less choice not more. If that was always true than our choice of cuisine would be limited to what we could grow locally. Of course conversely one could argue that monoculture has resulted in much less variety in types of food. And around it goes.
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There’s a definite tendency toward monolithic concentration in corporate culture but it goes the other way too in ways that are too complex to chart given that I’m going to take your advice and keep these comments short. Consumer culture also helps create the mentality where , in the words of Douglass Coupland, we confuse shopping with creativity.
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But we don’t have to. We have agency. I just think we give it away. I tend not to blame markets but consumer passivity and marketing manipulation. Be an active, conscious and conscientious consumer. And yes be creative. We have more power and greater means to do this than ever we did. We just don’t use it.
What about Code Pink?This is a group of hard core gals not some fluffy girly types.They chose the colour pink.Wonder why?
Adrien, I’m not claiming that market forces always end up in a long term loss of choice rather than an increase. Just that it’s yet another counterexample to simplistic “the market knows best” mantras (which I am not accusing you personally of chanting).
Leigh, Code Pink has hardly any profile in Australia. Links help other readers understand what you are talking about.
You might like to examine the anthropological/sociological concept of reclamation/reappropriation of words, artifacts etc which have historically been used disparagingly.
The Breast Cancer awareness campain uses pink.I just don`t think it`s worth getting all worked up over a colour.
Just on the sewing thing, making your own won’t necessarily get you out of the pinkification cycle. Of the fabrics suitable for childrens clothes (lightweight flannelette for nighties, pjs, thinner fleece than is suitable for adults clothes, fine corduroy etc), most are either pink lacy & flowery for the girls or have a licensed print of some sort (spiderman, spongebob etc). Of course you can use some adult – aimed fabrics for childrens clothing, but you really have ot use kid weight stuff for most of it. Standard cord and denimetc is too stiff for kids especially little babies. I made a layette recently for a relative’s baby and ended up importing the fabrics from Finland.
“Just that it’s yet another counterexample to simplistic “the market knows best” mantras…”
No it isn’t. The ‘market’ here could be viewed as the market for use of one’s time, or life; the market of being, if you will. If people thought it was somehow ‘valuable’ to make and wear individually-styled homemade clothes, then they should ’spend’ the time to learn how to sew. And if they don’t, then they don’t get to enjoy that particular ‘value’. Once again, the market ‘knows’– whoa, stop, too many levels, my head is spinning around…
So maybe the ‘pinkification’ thing can actually be read as the ‘convenience-store’ commodification of what used to be the slow, patient, skillful work of learning to be ‘womanly’ in its historical fullness: buying the ‘pink’ stuff provides instant womanliness, or femininity-in-a-can, if you like. Instead of taking lots of time to learn the detailed arts of things like sewing and canning and other kinds of traditionally-feminine homecraft, today’s modern feminist lawyer-on-the-go buys a pink yoga mat and feels all “Sisterhood is Powerful!” within. The same way some yuppie bloke might read a car magazine and feel all instant-macho instead of learning how to fix cars, or a kid plays that rock-n-roll computer vidgame instead of learning to play guitar, or baby boomers con themselves into thinking they’re being patriotic by getting misty over the ‘Greatest Generation,’ now that they’re no longer at risk of having to sacrifice for their society. Huh. Kind of makes ya see the whole thing in a fresh new light, eh.
Naaah, what the hell am I saying, let’s just stick with the ’spit on the patriarchy’ meme.
The Breast Cancer awareness campain uses pink.I just don`t think it`s worth getting all worked up over a colour.
Obviously you haven’t read Barbara Ehrenreich’s superb article on that topic. She, and other cancer sufferers who have written on the web, feel quite put down and put off by the pinkification. Ehrenreich felt infantilised, especially when she received a “showbag” of pink products which included …drumroll… crayons.
Crayons!
For a grown woman going through chemo.
Lymphopo, Twisty and others have also experienced cancer personally and they have a definite knowledge of the territory.
Helen when I went through my cancr treatment colour was the last thing on my mind.Crayons of any colour for an adult is patronising I agree.
Given the amount of feminist critique of the pink-plastic corporate Breast Cancer Awareness bandwagon, it doesn’t seem a really convincing argument in defence of pinkification.
Well bugger my Action Man doll buggering my GI Joe doll, this thread’s still going. In the pink you might say.
Time for some musical interludes I feel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaffpKAYcw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qNEkJ6MAyI
and bringing the thesis and antithesis together…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEjkPRp60bU
I’d like to think this was the last word on the matter but somehow I doubt it.
StrongTimT says:
Don’t underestimate the “badger and nag” potential of children’s taste preferences. Most cereal advertising, for example, is aimed at children and teens because their preferences drive their parents’ decisions about what to take off the super-market shelf. Parents aren’t that interested in Toby the Tiger or Coco the Monkey, let alone being a 15 year old “Iron Man”.
Oh fer cryin’ out… says:
Oh? So, there’s some other “apartheid”? I mean, it was your choice of word, not mine. Your “correlation”, as you say.
StrongLeigh asks;
Well, it’s better than ‘Code Stupid’. I mean, aren’t they the idiots who argue the USA shouldn’t have entered World War Two because it “had no right being in Hawaii” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.
Effing retards…
Elliot I used Code Pink as an example,I don`t agree with them.
Without getting judgmental about them either way, I think ‘Code Pink’ is probably just a goof on the phrase ‘code red’.
When I was in the emergency room in NY recently (don’t ask!) they had a ‘Code Grey”. A bit drab and uninspiring I thought, but it sure got the place moving.
What do you make of that, Sluggo?
We should make a law that colours are public property and that they off limits.
Opps ‘that they ARE off limits”.Sorry
Sluggo says:
Yeah, we got that. But why ‘Pink’? Is it because they’re women, perchance?
Leigh says:
And it’s a terrific example, I wish I’d thought of it. And of course you don’t agree with them. They probably couldn’t have even convinced Tojo with the “why were the Americans in Hawaii anyway” line.
They’re a fantastic example of what utter depths of risible stupidity the logic of really “out there” political theories can take a person.
Don’t look now Vladimir but GI Joe’s cheating with Steve Austin. He didn’t mean for it to happen it was just one of those things. Their eyes met across a crowded toy-box.
Adrien says:
Who remembers that freaky ’80s era action-hero toy with the really buffed, but transparent chest cavity which had visible arteries and lungs and stuff, and you pumped “blood” through it by squeezing the stomach?
Effing ugliest thing I ever saw.