Gendered Colors

I took this photo after playing some WII with friends one night. I noticed that one of the WII remotes was pink and the other was blue. One of my male friends refused to play with the pink remote because he claimed it was a girl remote. He insisted upon using the blue remote because he was a boy. These colors are also often used to distinguish between the two sexes. Girl babies are wrapped in pink blankets, whereas boy babies are wrapped in blue blankets. I think that separating boys and girls based on colors is like trying to categorize someone and leads to stereotypes regarding colors and gender. A stereotype is defined as “a generalization about am entire class of phenomena based on some knowledge of some members of the class” (Wood, 124). A stereotype of women in this culture is that they like pink. A stereotype of men is that they like the color blue. However, some girls don’t like pink, just as some boys don’t like blue. My male cousin likes pink and even sported a pink wrist brand for Breast Cancer Awareness. Stereotyping women and men based on colors is wrong. Growing up, I remember my sister and I were given presents that were mostly pink and yellow. My favorite color growing up was pink and her's was yellow. However, when my brother was born, most of his gifts were blue. I started to believe that certain colors were boy color and certain colors were girl colors. For a while I refused to wear anything blue because I thought blue was only for boys. However, as I got older, I realized it doesn’t matter if I wear pink or blue. Colors are just colors. Our culture uses colors to tell the difference between boy babies and girl babies. This doesn’t mean that I have to follow the norm. I don’t have to dress in pink to be a girl. Gender is society’s view of how the different sexes should behave. It is not static and can change over time. Maybe one day the colors for babies will change to a more gender neutral color for both sexes. Maybe one day all babies will be wrapped in green blankets.