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 experien