Monday, 3 June 2013

Gender and colour

You know, this whole "pink is for girls blue is for boys" thing is annoying. I'm ok with pink, I even have a few items of clothing in pink, but some marketers think "Hey! We need to market this to women! We'll make it PINK!"

Take this for example:


Yep. That's terribly menacing, it is. A bright pink gun. Why would you want a bright pink gun? I personally would rather have matt black and brushed steel...which leads me to wonder if the bullets are painted pink as well. Bloody hell.

And if your baby is a boy and wears pink, people react as if he's going to be a pervert when he grows up. Dude. No. If that was honestly the case, then we're all perverted because it used to be that pink was a masculine colour and blue a feminine colour (click here for why).

Why limit a kid to one or two colours? Why can boys only wear blue, green and red? Why can girls only wear pink, yellow and purple? That's boring! And who's to say that only boys like Ben Ten and only girls like Hello Kitty?

I'll believe that the genders are equal when you can walk down the toy aisle and not think "Oh, that dolly is for a girl and that Lego is for a boy." If your little girl wants to play with Hot Wheels, let her. If your little boy chooses the little plastic kitchen as his favourite toy, let him! She could be a race driver when she grows up, and he could be a chef.

I suppose the fact that my parents gave me dolls and cars (and Lego) to play with as a kid probably helped. Little me could never understand why my female friends never wanted to play with my cars, only with the dolls.

You can't expect adults to treat each other as equals if you raise them to believe that they're not.

3 comments:

  1. That last sentence is brilliant :)

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  2. Well said fellow Lego player... I still have mine, and my boy is showing some signs of wanting to continue the legacy.... and he walks around with a spoon or cooking utensil quite a bit too.

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  3. Exactly. A friend of mine has a little boy who LOVES Hello Kitty. And she and her hubby have no problem buying him all the HK stuff he wants, which is awesome.

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