Last weekend, I went birthday gift shopping for a four year
old girl. I had decided that this was the perfect opportunity for me to
purchase those cool, pink Legos. Yes, until writing this post, I liked those
pink Legos. It was refreshing to add pinks and purples to the existing primary
color landscape. I especially liked the set titled “Olivia’s Invention
Workshop” which prominently displays a chalkboard with mathematical
calculations scribbled on it. It screamed: Smart and feminine in what is still
very much a man’s world.
As I re-read my first draft of this post, though, I got
stuck on the word “feminine” in the statement above. Everything else I had
written in the post was supposed to suggest that pink did not have to be a
girl’s color, but, clearly, I had bought into it as such. “Olivia’s Invention
Workshop” was feminine because the color of the packaging was pink.
In 2007, a study concluded that adult women seemed to favor
pink. It was theorized that this preference might be genetically built in, so
our women gatherer ancestors could easily spot colorful fruits (Choi). In 2011,
other researchers studied babies and found that girls’ preference for pink and
boys’ dislike of it do not begin until about age 2 ½ (Jarrett). Whether nature,
nurture, or both, there is no doubt that in 2012 America , a boy swinging a purple
bat will be teased. Boys come to know, almost instinctually, that pink is a
“girl’s” color because they only ever see it in two places: the Crayola box and
girls clothing (Ralph Lauren notwithstanding).
Why can’t we open up the entire color palette to both boys
and girls? Why is it that Lego decided whole sets of pink and purple bricks
marketed in pink boxes were better than just adding some pink and purple bricks
to existing sets? Do we need the so-called girls’ version of a baseball bat?
Why can’t baseball bats just have some colorful designs in a variety of colors—where
pink and blue co-exist on the same bat? For toy manufacturers, dividing the
genders along color lines is more lucrative (Maglaty). After all, the family
with a boy and a girl will need a blue bat and a pink bat, instead of one
colorful bat. But, as a society, we are limiting our boys’ imaginations when we
put everything that is supposed to be interesting to them in black, brown,
green, and blue. And, so long as we are separating gender by color, then girls
are limited by perception. After all, when you head into a business meeting do
you put on the pink suit or the blue one?
Of course, color combinations
extend beyond gender. As I perused the Legos, thinking I had it right with the
boyish toy in the girlish color, I realized that I’d have to select an
ethnicity! At first I only saw the brown-black skin-hair combination. But the
birthday girl is not visually African-American. Was it racist to think that I
shouldn’t purchase the brown-black option for a girl who appears white?
Ah, but, then I saw the white-blonde skin-hair option and
quickly realized that my thoughts about the brown-black option were not racist.
It was just that neither of these skin-hair combinations looked like the
birthday girl. In truth, I don’t know what the four year old’s ethnicity is,
but her mom appeared, possibly, Hispanic.
Probably, at this point, I should have moved on to a
different gift idea. But isn’t the purpose of these ethnic options not only to
see our own image represented and thus know we belong, but also to see the
other images as belonging as well? If that was true, then it would make sense
to select one of these two options. But is this too much of a social statement
to make at a four-year old’s birthday party? Ugh!
What’s this? I missed one: white-brown! There she was; the
four-year old’s image on a box of pink Legos! Mission accomplished…sort of.
In all my analysis over gender and ethnicity, I barely
considered price and fit. Was this Lego set worth the cost? Were Legos a good
gift for this little girl that I knew almost nothing about? How fun is it,
really, to build a Lego room—invention workshop or not? It’s so hard for
little, four-year old hands to snap the invention tools into those clips that
Lego passes for hands! This mental debate went quickly: I left the Lego aisle
and headed for that mostly gender- and ethnicity-neutral safety zone: board
games.
Sources:
Choi, Charles Q. “Women Hardwired to Like Pink, Study
Suggests.” LiveScience. LiveScience,
20 Aug. 2007. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. http://www.livescience.com/1820-women-hardwired-pink-study-suggests.html
Jarrett, Christian. “At What Age Do Girls Prefer Pink?” The British Psychological Society Research
Digest. BPS Research Digest, 5 Sept. 2011. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2011/09/at-what-age-do-girls-prefer-pink.html
Maglaty, Jeanne. “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?” Smithsonian. Smithsonian, 8 Apr. 2011.
Web. 10 Nov. 2012. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html?c=y&page=2
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