For the first several years of her life, I would not buy anything pink for my daughter. Her baby clothes were white and yellow and powder blue ( a great color for a red headed girl with blue eyes). Then when she got older it became harder to avoid pink in new clothes shops, so we went to second hand shops instead and found wonderful things like a dark purple dress with a metallic green waistband. We also always check the boys section for clothes that are not blatant marketing stuff and buy a few items for her, mostly darker colors.
No Girls Allowed
211–220 of 240 posts
Re: No Girls Allowed
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. > I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Yeah, that doesn't actually make any sense. Pink:blue::girl:boy is 100% artificial and one recent source has it the other way around: > For example, a June 1918 art…
Note that that is more or less an imaginary fact. See Del Giudice, Marco. "The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?." Archives of sexual behavior (2012): 1-3. http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_r...
Note that your own source is more or less not a rebuttal, certainly not enough to call the 'PBR' an "imaginary fact". From it I would draw the following conclusions instead:
0. It is a Letter To The Editor in a scientific journal, rather than a paper. I believe that such letters are typically less thoroughly peer reviewed, which the tone of language used also supports.
1. "Paoletti herself never endorsed the PBR in her own articles and book"
2. she made the weaker claim that the gender coding of pink and blue was inconsistent —not reversed— at the beginning of the twentieth century and that the current pink-blue convention only became dominant in the 1950s
3. That we may not be able to establish any political motivations behind some quotes used to support PBR/inconsistency
4. That an automated review of a corpus of literature from 1800 to present for /a very specific form of wording/ may indicate that Pink and Blue historically over this period had the current meaning
That final point is the weakest. Searching for a specific phrase would always carry with it a risk of excluding related phrases that are hard to automatically include. Languages change over time as well, so this may mean that the phrases themselves gained new meaning. There is also the question of the items that make up the caucus - do they accurately represent the popular culture of their publish date? And any given book may not have same weight in the culture of the time as any other.
But perhaps more worryingly, the letter states the caucus consisted of over 5 million books. Yet the percentages that are then used, eg 0.000003%, are completely and utterly meaningless for any caucus under roughly 35 million (if I've got the maths right).
Re: No Girls Allowed
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same logic could be applied other way around: "If one of her friends does not wear pink, she now has someone to copy from." Not saying it is likelyhood. And I agree, that majority can influence minority, especially in youngster social circles.
Well, in your example it would not be a potential explanation for her preference for pink. But peer influence is probably a likely explanation. For the second, part of what I was getting at was that there doesn't need to be a majority if she only really identifies with a few members. The members that she thinks of as her friends are likely to have much more influence over her than the overall group.
Yah, totally agreed with you. I might have expressed it wrong. Using term 'majority', I meant the majority of friends around her.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diamonds have a slightly more complex role than just being conjured from thin air by marketing. Premarital sex is not, popular opinion to the contrary, a new discovery. In most societies we know of, however, men prefer to marry women who have never slept with anyone else. This creates a problem. Unmarried women are reluctant to have sex for fear that it will lower their ability to find a suitable husband, and as a re…
> That is, you can plausibly make me want a BigMac over a Whopper, but you can't make be want a burger if I'm already full. But that's all the power in the world because it's what allows you to sell something not as good for more money instead of selling something better at razor-thin margins. Go back to the diamonds. If the purpose you state is correct then anything of similar value could substitute instead. It coul…
"All the power in the world" is overstating the case a bit.
> because it's what allows you to sell something not as good for more money instead of selling something better at razor-thin margins
Competition isn't turned off because of marketing. Any company that has a poor product with a large margin is subject to a competitor selling a better product at the same price or a similar quality product at a lower price. McDonald's and Burger King sell competitive (to each other) products at razor thin margins for this reason, and, by the way, not generally at higher prices than smaller competitor with much smaller marketing budgets.
The diamond case is tricky because it has to convey solid honesty on the top of a many-layered set of explicitly un-stated expectations - so any attempt to "get out of it" would be viewed with suspicion, voiding the entire purpose. De Beers definitely and cleverly cornered that market and yes, that gave them some power. That said, it would be silly to expect that there did not exist substitutes in the market. Emerald jewelry goes way back.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#215I dunno if it's just me, but I usually skip an article that starts with something like "Four-year-old Riley Maida stands in a toy aisle of a department ...." and then there's a mile of scrolling to do. At least tell me what your central thesis is going to be if you're asking me to invest so much time and emotion into a story.
The underlying thesis is literally expressed in the subtitle, even above the beginning of the article: > Unraveling the story behind the stereotype of video games being for boys. This tells you that there exists a stereotype. This stereotype suggests that video games are for boys. It also suggests that an unravelling is intended, i.e. a disentanglement of multiple connected strands related to the persistence of a ste…
Thanks for all the condescension. That a gender stereotype exists in gaming is hardly new information. I would've liked something like "Shaky marketing in the 80's helped establish the current stereotype" and then I would've known that the article presents arguments to support this.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of downvotes, I will still speak up. I agree with you, that visual observable complements, over sound-only channels are pointless and frustrating to hear. But, does it hurt you, that women want to look pretty? Would you like your daughter to be indistinguishable from a boy? I certainly would feel this world being a crappy place if women were as awful with their appearence men.
Sometimes I want to look competent, strong, eloquent, sturdy (good for martial arts training), etc. Sometimes I'm ok with pretty or cute. No, it's not the same. Don't reduce us to just pretty, please. Look beyond. (Some don't, which is why too pretty can be a problem if one wants to be a kick-ass hacker or such.)
Apologies made, I have not intended to mean that having to be pretty is women's destiny.
My comment was controversial opinion, to the "girls shall not be encouraged to look pretty".
Re: No Girls Allowed
#217That was really freaking long. I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry fr…
What articles like this completely ignore is that toy stores are not divided into a blue boy's section and a pink girl's section. There's the "girl's section", and then there's "everything else".
They are taking the fact that some things are marketed explicitly to women as evidence that everything else is marketed to men. It's absurd, but that's feminist navelgazing for you. Same reason they blame men for women's beauty standards, even though it's women and women's magazines who enforce them. Things marketed to women by women as being for women.
And then something like Goldieblox comes around that's like shitty pink meccano with dumb girlie stories attached to each box set, and behold! It's somehow going to set girls free of the pink tyranny... by being stereotypically aimed at girls.
Or you could just buy them ordinary gender-neutral LEGO. The one that boys and girls alike can enjoy.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…
My eldest was identical - gender neutral toys when she was small, a yellow-painted bedroom, no particular bias for or against pink (she had some pink clothes, but not all), then... Bam! Pink! She turned 4 or 5 (I forget) and suddenly her life was a pink tinged fantasy of Disney Princesses, Barbie etc. No idea why.
School... they copy from their peer group. Some of the girls have been dressed in pink from head to toe since birth.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, I'm a lady. Have you noticed that pretty much all "hardcore" games have male protagonists? These games tell players that they are fantasies for guys to have; women are relegated to the roles of support or prizes in most of these games. It sucks to try to be the hero when the shape of the fantasy is constantly telling you that you're not one. And then we have the advertising campaigns mentioned in the article that…
Edit: TL;DR I think you make the mistake to assume that games and ads targeted at men imply that there are no ads or games for women. It is OK to target games at men or women imo. I seem to recall a lot of ads for gender neutral Wii games, too. -- It's probably true that a lot of games are targeted at men. Presumably because more men are into buying them than women. So what? There are enough games with female protago…
> So what? There are enough games with female protagonists.
I'm speaking to my own experience here. And my experience as a woman who prefers to play games as a female character is that there are not enough games with female protagonists that are not explicitly coded as "girly pink games about girly pink things". Which are generally not the kinds of games I like to play - I like the fast action reflex loops.
That's what. There are not enough games with female protagonists. And even most of the games that offer an option downplay the female option in all the advertising, make it an extra unlockable, etc. Yes, there are exceptions. I cherish them.
I think I'm gonna go pull out Bayonetta again and sigh wistfully.
edit: Oh yeah. And again, I can't speak for all women - but there are exactly three FPS games I've played to completion. They are System Shock 2, which stars a female AI and a completely ungendered protagonist, and Portal 1/2, which star a female AI and a female protagonist. If there were more manshoots that were not about being a man wandering around shooting other men, maybe I would play more of them. Or maybe not; due to my lack of interest in their narratives, I have little to no of the basic "put cursor on target, compensating for travel time" skill at the heart of manshoots, so they're pretty frustrating for me.
Re: No Girls Allowed
#220That was really freaking long. I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry fr…
What articles like this completely ignore is that toy stores are not divided into a blue boy's section and a pink girl's section. There's the "girl's section", and then there's "everything else". They are taking the fact that some things are marketed explicitly to women as evidence that everything else is marketed to men. It's absurd, but that's feminist navelgazing for you. Same reason they blame men for women's bea…
Lego now makes a tonne of girly product, actually, starting with Disney Princess branded Duplo, and following into Lego Friends for the older girls. They do seem to avoid just slathering everything in pink, though, so that's something.