They exist, but it’s like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I’m committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. “Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?” There don’t seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it’s when you start saying that male-is-default or ‘people can be nerds but girls have to be girls’ that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called “females”; but I refer to another subgroup, “males”, about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them “women” and “males” but that’s because if you say “men”, males assume you’re talking about people.)
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) “Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.” Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colours for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink?
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
It’s less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think.
I’ve seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits—have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
They exist, but it’s like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I’m committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. “Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?” There don’t seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it’s when you start saying that male-is-default or ‘people can be nerds but girls have to be girls’ that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called “females”; but I refer to another subgroup, “males”, about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them “women” and “males” but that’s because if you say “men”, males assume you’re talking about people.)
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) “Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.” Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
It’s less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think.
I’ve seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
I’ve seen complaints about how much harder it is to find non-gendered clothing than it used to be.
I think the solution on clothes is that when the child is old enough to have opinions about how they want to dress, follow their lead.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits—have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
You don’t need to eradicate pink. Just reducing it to a reasonable level won’t spur any ‘Did you wish I was a boy’ ideas.
Mine loves pink. We make sure to let her interest in non-pink things run free too (dinosaurs, space, trains, etc).