Gender norms: Anything but normal
There’s a fantastic channel on YouTube called Minute Physics where artist Henry Reich explains, using time-lapse illustration, that pink is merely the combination of red and blue light. Henry jokes that pink should be called minus green, “because pink is just the leftovers of white light when you take out the green.” (Watch online at ofcnow.co/minusgreen.)
Henry didn’t mention anything in his video about gender of course, as there is nothing intrinsic to pink as a signifier for gender. But if you Google back-to-school clothes, you’ll find the color pink constantly equated to femininity. One advertisement I found featured a pile of folded shirts, most of them pink, next to a cup with pink pencils. Curiously the advertisement for boys’ clothing had the same setup, only with the familiar yellow pencils next to the pile of folded shirts — none of which were pink.
This trend of assigning colors to gender began in the early 20th century. Before then, both boys and girls were usually dressed in white. Then catalogues began associating specific colors to gender, but with a twist: They marketed pink for boys and blue for girls.
“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls,” reads this excerpt from the Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department publication in 1918. “The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
It’s a shocking reminder of how arbitrary the “rules” are regarding a color specified for a single gender. Fast forward to today, and that color trend has been completely inverted, due again to companies marketing specific colors to specific genders.
And this goes far beyond clothing. I remember looking for a birthday present for my niece, walking down the toy aisle and drowning in a sea of minus green: pink Lego castles, pink teddy bears, pink bikes — almost every toy sealed in pink packaging.
And of course gender norms are not just about color. There is the famous picture of America’s 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, taken when he was five years old. In it, the man who would one day take on the Nazis is wearing a white dress with long, curly locks of hair resting on his shoulders.
What surprised me most about that photograph wasn’t that, at first glance, I thought the child was a girl, but that I was surprised at all in the first place. It demonstrated how deeply embedded these manufactured ideas of gender norms are. Just like the color pink, there’s nothing intrinsic to a dress that signifies it as female.
So what can we do to advocate change? Perhaps take a page from 7-year-old Charlotte Benjamin, who wrote Lego a letter (which went viral) criticizing their use of colors and packaging.
“Today I went to the store and saw Legos in two sections,” she writes. “The pink, girls, and blue, boys. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and had no jobs, but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks.”
Thank you, Charlotte, for reminding us that gender norms are like minus green: merely the leftovers of marketing when you take out the truth.
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