Strawberry Shortcake speaks to our deepest instinct for survival.
Published by Kyso Kisaen August 21st, 2007 in For the ladies, What Patriarchy?, "Science", Culture
They were right all along
A woman and a neuroscientist (same person) asks, why are all these little girl products pink? Do the girls really love the pink so much?
Answer, yes, yes they do and they can’t help it. They evolved that way.
As the mother of a newborn baby girl, Dr. Anya C. Hurlbert wondered why all the products aimed at her daughter tended to have a pinkish tint.
…In more formal terms, females in the study showed a preference for the reddish side of the red-green axis of colors, while males didn’t. There was no gender difference in preferences on the blue-yellow axis, with everyone tipping toward blue. The study included 208 participants, ranging in age from 20 to 26.
That bluish preference seems natural, Hurlbert said — blue skies and all that. The female tilt toward pink, she speculated, arose from evolutionary influences millions of years ago. “Females were the ones who gathered red fruit against a green background,” she said. “Red is healthy in faces and in fruits.”
Arguably, this woman couldn’t help herself- that iPod looks just like a strawberry
Cultural influences may have accentuated this natural female preference, she said.
Oh, really? Color me shocked.
Some Chinese people were included in the study along with native Britons, to get evidence that the results were true in more than one ethnic group.
While there has been speculation about a possible female preference for pink, “there has been very little hard evidence for sex differences,” Hurlbert said. “We now have provided pretty robust and reliable evidence.”
Some Chinese people? Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts. The important thing is that you took a bunch of data collected from a single test on adults and made an overreaching but media-friendly conclusion. Don’t let the obvious stand the way of your book deal:
Kathy Mullen, a professor of ophthalmology at McGill University in Montreal, said, “I wouldn’t be surprised at all that there is a gender difference. That’s not to say that it’s genetic. It might be a cultural thing.”
Color preferences are also known to change with age, Mullen said.
But at least she solved the mystery of why all her little girl’s things are pink, even if she failed to solve the mystery of why all the little boy’s things are blue when everyone likes blue equally.
What about Blueberry Muffin? The Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak? Oh, the gender confusion!
This is why I’m making a blue-and-white dress for my 1-year-old niece — ignore the paradigm.
Of course, among my people (Roman Catholics), blue is a traditional color for girls because it’s the Virgin Mary’s color. So the poor kid just can’t win.
True, and I’ve always felt that all pale hues were a bit girly so never saw the point in claiming that sky blue is a more masculine color than pale pink. It’s all a part and parcel of the feminine = childish belief that was even more prevalent back when these colors were being assigned their arbitrary meanings. I believe it was the book Pink Think that told me the pink/girl blue/boy association is less than 150 years old, and didn’t become popular in America until the mid-20th century.
And at least the Virgin Mary bit has an honestly arbitrary source - Mary is commonly pictured as wearing blue, so it’s her color. Even if they’re using the color to signal “girl! girl here!”, no one says the girls forced to dress like Mary are doing so because they have an evolutionary desire to emulate Christ’s mother. I mean honestly, we have pink Nintendo handheld gaming devices because it hearkens back to our hunter-gatherer days? Men never needed to spot berries for consumption while hunting, so they didn’t pick up this love of pink? Berries would have been a special treat, like dessert, back then - they’re extra sweet, hard to find, and you’ve got to compete with everything else that wants them and can eat them before their short ripe period. Seems like if we’re hunting and gathering, the ability to find berries would be a skill prized by both genders.
This woman is so clearly talking out of her ass, it boggles my mind.
Yep, I totally just wanna gnaw on that ipod. Yum.
God, people are stupid. You don’t develop an “evolutionary” preference for the blue of the sky just because it’s there and you look at it. The preference has to increase your reproductive fitness somehow. Are they saying that looking longingly into the sky makes more babies? I’d like to see the story they spin to make that work.
The question I always have about evo psych is this: by the time we were organized hunter-gatherers, weren’t we pretty much all ready evolved? I mean, if we REALLY wanted to look at evolutionary influence on brain structure, wouldn’t we really have to go back farther than that? The whole women gather/ men hunt thing can be traced back to the neolithic, at best. Even a lot of the so-called evidence for that is pretty sketchy. Before that, who even KNOWS what kind of labor division was going on, or even what kind of social structures our ancestors were living in.