Please recall that in the 1950s, that stuffy, stultifying era of conformity, when men were not given to adopting any feminine traits, nevertheless it was considered normal for the man in the gray flannel suit to wear pink shirts to the office. Things usually aren’t as simplistic as they’re imagined to be.
Maybe pink is meant to accentuate a female’s genitals, but that sounds like a rather Freudian answer to me (e.g. Women wear fur coats in order to mimic pubic hair). It could also be that caucasian babies tend to be very pink, which may explain why pink isn’t considered feminine in the parts of the world where not everyone is white. For instance, I’m fairly certain pink is a gender-neutral color in India. Elsewhere, I really don’t know.
I know very little about psychology, but it seems likely that wearing a certain color helps children indentify with their gender group. I’m just curious why it happens to be pink.
I was but a mere child in the '50s, but it’s my impression that in those days men never wore pink. Ever. I believe you may be thinking of a decade later.
We did this more than once before but I offered that, in the US in the teens, pink was a color for boys, blue for girls. When it flipped, I didn’t try to find.
I can remember the 1960s personally, though I was just a kid then (too young to smoke ganja, which is probably why I can remember the 60s, ha ha). The 60s was when guys wore multicolored paisely psychedelic shirts, and solid pink by then was vieux jeu.
P.S. I bought a retro men’s pink dress shirt at Target just the other week.
As for my 1.5 cents…I think that ‘masculine’ colors are usually darker… There are grey areas (pun intended), of course, such as purple. But purple is really more of neutral color, imo.
An essay on the color pink by David Byrne in the recent issue of “Cabinet” magazine (11, Summer 2003) touches upon this.
Byrne then goes on to propose these three ideas: that in the late 40s, when women were forced to became more active due to the damaging effects of WW2 on men, they took on the color pink because it was more “energizing”; that in the 60s, pink was an appropriate color to represent feminism; and that since pink triangles were used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals, men chose to distance themselves from the color.
One story I heard when I was very young ( sorry no cite but my fuzzy memory), was that blue was thought to drive off evil spirits. Boys were more valuable than girls in a patriarcal society like ancient greece, and so boys were surrounded by blue things. Girls were given pink things because it’s sorta opposite.
Sounds like a whole lot of hooey to me, but I thought I’d share.
I’ve always liked blue and green myself, and disliked red, but whether I’d have the same preferences even if pink/red was the color for males I cannot say. However, blue is the favorite color of both my mother and my father, and if there is is even the tiniest bit of heredity involved, I think my color preferences would be the same.
When I was a kid I remember seeing more than one house with paired reproductions of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Pinkie (a girl in pink painted by some lesser-known artist).
I don’t know whether the color scheme in these two originally unrelated paintings reflected actual gender associations in 18th-century England, or if the colors were just a coincidence, and 20th-century Americans decided to pair them up after noticing that they coincided with conventional 20th-century gender colors.
But, as I posted above, further research into newspaper articles from the late 1800’s-the early 1900’s convinces me that it was not very clear cut. I can find you plenty of cites both ways. Boys blue or pink, and girls blue/pink.
I can’t recall off-hand where, but I’ve read in a couple of sources that it’s all linked to ancient color symbolism. Blue stood for health, vitality, and protection from evil spirits, so male infants were given blue things. Nobody wanted to waste blue stuff on little girls (ahh, patriarchy), so girls got pink, which symbolized cleanliness.