I found out today that there is scientific proof that women like pink and men like blue. Apparently the most obvious explanation for these preferences is evolution! Biology! And it has nothing to do whatsoever with the way people are socialized from birth. Obviously, people buy pink things for girls and blue things for boys because we understand on a genetic level that these are the correct, biologically-determined color choices. It's nonsense to believe that the cultural association of a specific color to each gender might influence the preferences of people raised in that culture. I mean, it's not like color associations have ever been different. Men hate pink, and always have.
I think it's interesting to note that girls like pink and blue, but boys only like blue. The article, however, doesn't say anything about green or orange, which are the favorite colors of the male people in my house. I guess we can say that green is closer to blue, and orange is closer to red, which is close to pink, so one of my sons may actually be a daughter, if we're using this scientifically proven, biological indicator. I'll have to check on that and get back to you.
22 August 2007
maybe my kids are hermaphrodites
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2 comments:
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What kind of scientific experiment, I wonder, proves early humans' views on ripe fruit, or are they just pulling this stuff out of their asses? And what about non-western cultures who don't have the same associations - did their ancestors eat unripe fruit?
I've heard that the color designations used to be opposite as well - little boys were put in pink because it was close to the virile shade of red (think of those manly red-state Republicans) and girls wore blue (think the Virgin Mary in every single artistic representation of her, or of those effeminate blue-state Democrats).
lol. I just read the article - I'm surprised they even bothered publishing it! Maybe I'll print it out and distribute it to my friends at school so we can all laugh at how pointless and stupid it is! Thanks for the daily humor, Heidi! :0)
Seriously, though, I don't even know where to start. The study itself, while it may have been planned and executed well, doesn't necessarily indicate anything about women preferring pink to blue. They gravitate towards the "pinker end of the blue spectrum." Still blue-based then. And we all know that pink comes from RED, not blue. So maybe women prefer the purplish tones from blue and red combined, but where does the pink factor in???
On top of it, we get no actual data, do we? No demographics, no numbers, no samples of the colored rectangles... Personally, I'm not a huge fan of red. It's okay, but I prefer blues and greens and yellows - even purple - to red. BUT, if one rectangle was, say, puke green, and the other was red, I'd probably vote for liking red. And the experiment was probably set up much better than that, but I'm just sayin...we don't KNOW how it was set up and what they really found.
What's even better is that the researcher uses this study to formulate the whole hypothesis about "functional specialization in the evolutionary division of labor" blah blah blah. Hahaha - again, I've got more to say about THAT train of thought than I can reasonably fit here.
Aye me (*shaking head*) - awesome find, Heidi! I am SO emailing the link to some friends and profs - I'm sure it'll surface as an example of how NOT to conduct and report research :D
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