I don't know who stipulated it. It seems that pink must belong to the little girl and blue must belong to the little boy. Dig deeper, you will find that this seemingly reasonable tradition has little to do with the baby's preferences.
In 2007, a survey on color showed that contemporary women are more inclined to regard red as their favorite color. This conclusion is widely reported and used to prove that women prefer pink.
One explanation is that women's preference for red originated from primitive society, and women in charge of collection need to identify red fruits quickly and accurately. This sensitivity to red has been maintained to this day.
Although it sounds reasonable, it is untenable to infer from the research results that women naturally like red. As a woman who has grown up in society, it is inevitable that she will be influenced by many things. For example, women often touch red lipstick, while men are useless.
More evidence of slapping comes from publications in the early 20th century. For example, 19 18, a baby clothing manufacturer magazine quoted a housewife's family diary: people have different opinions on this issue, but the generally accepted rule is that boys use pink and girls use blue. The reason is that pink is more eye-catching, warm and suitable for boys, while blue is more exquisite and more suitable for girls.
We don't care what color boys and girls should choose. The history of shaping gender stereotypes through color is not long. The Italian scholar Kyle del Guidice searched the electronic files of books published in the United States through Google, and found that the phenomenon of color and gender matching only began to appear in the1880s.
Here is a famous photo, which verifies the above conclusion well. In the photo taken by President franklin roosevelt in 1884, he looks like a delicate little girl with long hair and a little skirt. He was only two and a half years old that year.
This is not Roosevelt's gender reversal, but the normal state of that era. In fact, before World War II, the mainstream in the United States was to wear white dresses for children, regardless of gender. Skirts are easy to change diapers, and white is easy to bleach after soiling.
Of course, there will be other colors of clothes, but basically regardless of gender, families with many children, it is normal for a brother to wear a suit for his sister. It is also for this reason that merchants have come up with a set of rules, that is, boys should wear pants, girls should wear skirts, and it doesn't matter what color boys and girls wear. As long as there are differences between men and women, parents should spend more money on clothes.
Therefore, today we can boldly say that distinguishing gender by color is definitely the result imposed by society and the result of commercial behavior leading the market. Children are influenced by this concept since childhood and will have the same prejudice when they grow up. As long as we think that the boy in pink is a girl, the businessman's goal has been achieved.
The same thing happened in the choice of toys. Girls want to play with dolls, dress up dolls and play house, while boys want to play with cars and guns, and simulate battles with models.
Thinking along the logic of color and gender, it is obviously a good thing for toy manufacturers that boys and girls play with different toys. Families with many children may need to buy more toys instead of sharing a set. Could this also be a stereotype deliberately created by toy manufacturers for the benefit?
If you ask some enlightened parents, most of them will give a positive answer, thinking that the sex of toys is also a stereotype imposed on children by society and parents, and even give a real case of my daughter (son) playing with cars (dolls), and finally come to the conclusion that children's nature should not be bound.
This problem is actually far more complicated than color. It is a prejudice or stereotype that toys are divided into men and women, but this cannot prove that this phenomenon is deliberately shaped.
Before discussing this issue, we must first find out what the so-called boys' toys and girls' toys are. In the study of toy preference, meta-analysis counts a lot of data. Cars, tools, guns and building blocks are considered as boys' toys, while dolls, tableware, kitchen utensils, artworks and clothes are considered as girls' toys, among which cars and dolls are the most representative. In addition, books and educational toys are considered neutral.
A study on American preschool children aged 2-5 investigated their Christmas gifts. The results show that the gifts that children ask for are more in line with gender stereotypes, while the gifts that parents choose are more neutral. It seems that children's preference for toys is not imposed by their parents.
But it is also possible that children are influenced by social customs. For example, boys playing feminine toys will be laughed at by their peers, and we need to eliminate more interference.
In fact, a simple experiment can prove that we can find some 3-4-month-old babies, put the most representative cars and dolls in front of them and observe their behavior. Because they are too young to play with these toys directly, we use eye tracker to estimate the gaze time to show our preference.
In 2009, psychology professor Jerian Alexander and his colleagues did such an experiment. The results show that male babies spend more time watching cars, while female babies spend more time watching dolls, indicating that there have been different tendencies between men and women before accepting social constraints.
If this is not convincing enough, it is understandable. After all, three or four-month-old babies are also influenced by their parents and may have memories of some toys. Don't worry, there are more unique experiments. After all, human beings are social animals. Where are the monkeys?
As early as 2002, it was Professor Jerian Alexander above, and he and Melissa Haines from City University of London made an experiment with black-faced monkeys that shocked the academic community.
They selected 44 males and 44 females, and provided the monkeys with 6 kinds of toys, namely, male toy police cars and balls, female dolls and toy pots, neutral books and plush toy dogs.
As a result, male vervet monkeys showed great interest in male toys. Similarly, female long-tailed monkeys also show great interest in feminine toys, and there is no difference in their preference for neutral toys. These conclusions are based on the statistics of the time that monkeys spend on each toy.
In 2008, Janice Hassett and her colleagues designed a similar experiment for rhesus monkeys, and the conclusion was basically consistent with vervet monkeys' experiment. Two toy preference experiments aimed at non-human primates illustrate at least one problem. In the world of monkeys, there is no culture and stereotype related to toys, but they still show a strong gender orientation.
Why is this? More reliably, it is caused by hormones, specifically androgens. We know that the difference between men and women is largely controlled by hormones. Men have more muscles and deeper voices, while women have smoother skin and fuller breasts. If we think that intervention can also change this rule, such as medicine niang.
Hormones can change people's physiological characteristics and psychology, and this change comes earlier than some physiological changes, even before birth.
When the fetus is in the mother's body, it will undergo the transformation of testosterone. When exposed to higher concentrations of testosterone, the fetus will show more masculine psychology in the future, including lower emotional ability and risk-taking tendency. On the contrary, it will show a "feminine" psychology.
For newborn babies, they obviously have certain psychological differences, so they have different preferences for toys. Note that this difference is not absolute, but relative. Of course, there will be children who both men and women like toys, but the gender difference is significant in probability.
In vervet monkeys's experiment, males play with cars in a way similar to that of human boys. They push the toy car back and forth, and the females are a little rough. They will examine the genitals of dolls and try to judge their sex, but the internal logic of this behavior is similar to that of human girls, who tend to regard dolls as companions and try to establish emotional connections.
From an evolutionary point of view, female primates need to take care of their families and establish more contacts with family members, while males need to be more combative and attract the attention of females. This difference even began to appear from the birth of the embryo.
So, back to the original question, is it a stereotype that boys love to play with cars and girls love to play with dolls? Yes, but this stereotype has an objective physiological basis and is not artificially created out of thin air.
However, this does not mean that it is reasonable to ask children with stereotypes. As we said above, hormone determines a person's psychology and physiology, but it is not binary, and there are countless possibilities between the two extremes.
Girls who love to play with cars and boys who love to play with dolls are different in the eyes of adults, but only because they are caught in the trap of stereotypes. Someone dug this trap, and someone asked for it.
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