gendered colors

gendered colors

I can’t stand it when people gender the spectrum, though I am mortified by exactly how much I care. For example, read this article from Science Magazine’s blog along with me and see how excessively furious I get over its every little idiocy.

It’s called “Blue and red” and it’s by a professor, at San Diego State University, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, named Thomas J. Impelluso. He writes:

The color blue is often associated with boys, while red (or pink) is associated with girls.

[Keep your eye on that “often.”]

Neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling demonstrated through a series of tests that women tend to prefer the red end of the spectrum. But is this a cultural phenomenon or is it biological? Chinese researchers demonstrated through another series of tests that this preference extends across cultures.

[Well, two cultures. Because let’s not get all fixated on the British Redcoats, Stalinist Russians, and Catholic cardinals. They obviously wore red, not to express their preference for it, but to attract warm-spectrum-loving girls. ]

Hurlbert and Ling conjectured natural selection as a cause: Women were assigned the role of foraging for food and had to distinguish the red berries and fruit in the green brush.

[Red berries in the bush! A bit of clitoral grotesquerie here, thrown in gratis… Because by this logic, wouldn’t men prefer tan and brown or whatever the heck they hunted for? And wouldn’t foragers have to work harder to distinguish gooseberries, nuts, tubers, and blueberries?]

Prior to 1910, red was the color deemed appropriate for boys and blue was the color for girls – the reverse. So why were these the colors associated with each gender, and why did they switch? And why at that time?

[Um, let me guess: Because such things are arbitrary or worse, used by societies to manipulate strata of status, power, and dominance? Couldn’t be.]

…Primitive man would sit by a fire, and respect the red flame: its heat, intensity, and energy.

[While women, presumably, fled the flames in fear, preferring to huddle disrespectfully in the cold, staring at their blue fingers with delight.]

Red was thus deemed a color that represented the traits needed for hunting and defending the tribe.

[THUS????!!!???!!!? See, I’m going ballistic here over something and someone who is obviously too intellectually inconsequential to even notice, let alone respond to. Yet I can’t control myself and keep reading…to see just how far this guy is going to reach to make blue “fit” boys and warm colors stick to girls. Obviously, by this time even I have to realize that I’m being a glutton for punishment..a glutton whose plate will be piled high with it. And sure enough:]

. . .In 1905 Albert Einstein began to publish his work. Scientists realized the nature of the red shift with regard to the Doppler effect on light waves. Blue light has a higher frequency than red light. Scientists discovered that blue stars are hotter than red ones. Blue is a more energetic color.

[Ask any Chinese baby boy, but not before 1910.]

Around 1920 several family magazines began presenting pictures of baby boys dressed in blue-colored clothes. By 1925 the switch was in.

And with no evidence whatsoever to connect the fashion preferences of family magazines and Einstein’s findings, we are invited to imagine a causal connection between them. And this in an otherwise peer-reviewed publication. I am not making this up.

This is just one of millions of examples of silly gendering one must endure. Why bother with it? This is the kind of picky feminism I normally despise; not because it isn’t accurate, but because it is wasting its time and breath on something strategically irrelevant. If Larry Summers wrote this piece, or E.O. Wilson, one of the big boys, it might be worth a go. But in this case I can only think that I must be suffering a bout of horrible self-loathing that I am trying to assuage by loathing this poor little fool of a professor’s blog entry even more.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PinkGirlBlueBoy