Pretty in Pink vs. Boyish in Blue?

Have you ever tried finding a non-pink/purple item of clothing for a girl?

These days it is a challenge worthy of Indiana Jones.

My mum spent weeks last Christmas trying to track down some non-pink/purple pyjamas for my eldest daughter, who likes football and hates pink, so much so that she has set up her own website, anti-pink.com, for fellow non-aficionados.

She could not find a single pair of pyjamas which were not in the regulation colours and ended up buying some blue ones with stars on marked “boy” and cutting the label out.

I have recently had a boy after giving birth to three daughters and been informed that the colour code is even more regimented than I had heretofore imagined.

Apparently yellow, which I kind of thought was gender neutral, is a girl colour.

Boys can’t wear yellow.

Similarly, I have been informed that boys don’t do ducks.

This is, I assume, because there is something rather fluffy and feminine about a duck. Have they told the drakes?

I was also told by a fellow parent that boy babies should not, under any circumstances, be allowed out in public in sleepsuits bearing the legend “Hug me”. Boys do not do hugs.

I have lost count of the number of times since his birth that I have been asked if I have “noticed the difference yet” between him and his sisters.

If I say that he is waking up a lot, they say “Boys have more energy”.

This is despite the fact that all three girls had similar sleep patterns.

I tend to think that it is more an overactive mother thing than due to gender.

One mum of boys told me that he would sleep more because he was a boy. “Boys are just more lazy,” she intoned.

I have to say that very few of the comments puts boys in a particularly good light.

One relative told me boys were all “take, take, take”. “Girls are MUCH easier,” she said. “They give you something back.”

Little wonder that a recent report shows girls think they are cleverer than boys by age four and boys agree by age eight.

Little wonder too that girls are doing better than boys at school in general, although we are also told that the education system now favours “girl” skills.

The pink craze would all be fine if it was just about a colour, of course, but it’s what stereotyping the genders into fluffy pink females caked in make-up versus aggressive action heroes in blue leads to in the long run – miscommunication between the genders, domestic violence and pay inequality [girls are better at jobs which involve nurturing and “communication skills”; boys are better at “risk taking” and decision- making].

I am not saying that boys might not in some way be different from girls, but I do think that the culture they are growing up in nowadays terrifically exaggerates these differences.

Plus I prefer to take everyone as they come.

Some girls are very energetic and hate reading [I can think of one in particular in my house]. Some boys are born to be poets [if boys are so rubbish at reading how do we account for people like Shakespeare? Unless all those plays were written by Anne Hathaway...]

How do we counter the stereotypes, though?

After all, creating two simplistic stereotypes makes it easier to sell stuff.

Why sell a scooter for a boy so that he can hand it down to his sister when you can get the parents to buy two, one blue and one pink?

Well, I, for one, have resolved to dress only my son in yellow pyjamas covered in cuddling ducks.

Luckily, this month it’s Halloween. It’s probably the only time of the year when the shops are full of clothes for kids which do not follow the strict pink/blue divide.

Apparently, witch girls still wear black.

What do you think?

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