Pink Everything! A Thread of Toys to Buy Daughters (and sons?) That Aren't Pink (or blue?)

I was so hurt as a lil girl when my madre y padre wouldn't let me buy a NInja Turtles shirt because "they're not for little girls." But I would have been equally upset if they didn't let me play w/Barbies bcz that enforced some or another gender worry!

my mother got my ears pierced when i was a baby, and after unsuccessfully trying to get two more piercings in each ear myselft many, many years, i am glad she did!

best thing about the book is that orenstein is a big bettelheim fan and so she's constantly like, "Cinderella disney blows. go back to Grimm's and find the version where the sisters chop their feet up and birds peck out their eyes cause that'll help children develop better"

Here's the thing is that my wife presented solid reasons for wanting to do it, but I just emotionally did not want her to do it.

my son wanted to watch the princess and the frog and i sort of made a crack like "how about a hockey game instead"...then i realized i was acting like an idiot.

ha I did like that Bettelheim book but he said something once that totally broke my <3 once, forget what it was. If my parents had tried to read me Women Who Run w/the Wolves or some shit it would have been zzzzz central tho.

Also, no offense Darin, but fuck mental illness stigmas. Fuck them in the fucking ass.

my parents gave me Bly's Iron John when i was 13 and it blew my mind xp

the clothing thing is weird. before we had our baby i was pretty dead-set on gender-neutral clothing (ie nothing too pink and frilly) though we did end up with some girly clothes via gifts. now i actually dress her in the girlier clothes more often because it's genuinely annoying to me when people assume she's a boy. not because i think it's bad for people to think she's a boy per se but because i feel like i should correct them, and then i feel like i'm being a dick by correcting them, so i usually don't correct people who are just strangers who i'm never going to see again, because who cares, but then it's like this itch i didn't scratch by not correcting them. and i've had people who assume she's a boy even when she's wearing pink! my theory is that people assume that it's safer to guess that a baby is a boy, because if you call a girl a boy it's ok but if you call a boy a girl you're implying they're less masculine, even though they're just babies.

Women Who Run blah blah is zzzzz central anyway. I vote for reading them the bloody versions of everything.

aw that last idea breaks my <3 too n/a (not you n/a, you seem like a p righteous dad)

My wife brought my son home from grandmas in a tutu the other day. And he was wearing it in a mood of "hey, let's be silly" but I'm really glad they let him do that.

ha - working in retail i have developed a shortcut to figuring out baby gender: immediately ask 'aww how old is your baby?' bc then you'll always get a 'he's [...] old' or 'she's [...] old'

haha Laurel my mom-in-law had me read that book when she first me me and I think it broke her <3 that I didn't totally embrace it and say like "yes I am the proud ugly duckling thx for opening my inner woman."

n/a, we tried to do the same gender-neutral clothing thing "what's all this pink shit? can't I find a girl's onsie in yellow or something?" but once she was born, we started dressing her in pink most of the time because we realized that she is inherently a princess and we were totally cool with that.

Wld you like me to knit future Lil Girl Mordy a nice gender-neutral baby hat, Mordy? I am itching to make a baby hat!

ALternately I could make a ridic Victorian lace bonnet, the choice is yours.

Def! That sounds awesome

Hmm prob the first one...

my son does love to wear costumes, he wore a tigger costume for two days once. fantastic.

hey I want a victorian lace bonnet too!

Send me an email abt yr choice of baby colors...idk if that's a thing. I just imagine ppl who have a baby picking out paint chips like "these are the ones for lil zygote here."

Ha Shakey I cld if you want! I just have a cool vintage pattern I want to make but no one I know likes fancy stuff for babies!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2136/2089488834_fef8be6375_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5054/5416672554_1d0c7f6e14.jpg

yeah i mean i know what you mean, the idea of gender policing children is horrible and gross to me but as a parent idk the idea of like gender neutral clothing and neutrally coded toys is really great and righ-on and everything but in the end these kids are gonna end up in some school w/ kids w/ shitty douchebags for parents and i can imagine all yr idealism is gonna get crushed just by the fact that you cant completely fabricate this righteous context for them at all times and the world is terrible and awful.

Abbotsville, that bonnet is heirloom material!! Anyone should be amazed and grateful to have it made for their bebe.

yeah thats beautiful. you should sell them.

Chrisv: when the "Halloween Store" opens every year, we always end up buying our guy two or three costumes, because he'll totally play with them for dress-up during the rest of the year.

Abbott current kid too old for a bonnet, but will get to work on making a new one so that I can ask you for one lol

yeah he was Buzz Lightyear for Halloween this year, that costume has got a ton of use. His favorite christmas present this year was Woody pajamas that resemble woodys outfit. We have to wash them daily so he can wear them daily.

my son does love to wear costumes, he wore a tigger costume for two days once. fantastic.

― Cultivating a manly musk puts your opponents on notice (chrisv2010), Friday, February 4, 2011 2:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

haha that's great. i should put the picture of my son in a giraffe costume last halloween on the 77 parenthood thread

yo before you go calling people who pierce baby ears "mentally ill" (oops too late) there is a cultural factor here. pretty sure there are other countries where piercing baby ears is just what's done and has been done for a long time. my sister was born in india and they wanted to pierce her ears right in the hospital.

Well, I was thinking of some friends of mine irl who pierced their baby's ears, posted the photos on Facebook with the mom in the background laughing. I wasn't really thinking about other cultures - just personal exp w/friends & relatives.

Also, no offense Darin, but fuck mental illness stigmas. Fuck them in the fucking ass.

point taken. pierce away everyone!

:)

yo before you go calling people who pierce baby ears "mentally ill" (oops too late) there is a cultural factor here.
...but isn't the heart of this particular cultural factor gender policing? Piercing ears to make sure that strangers know that this baby is a girl or isn't a girl, and can treat them appropriately. It seems to me that this practice is way more prevalent in cultures with very clear gender roles. Also, why can we not be critical of this, but we can criticize anti-homosexuality laws in africa and female circumcision(not that I'm trying to compare ear piercing to either...)? These are also cultural norms and "what's done and has been done for a long time". Cultures aren't static, they're changing all the time

kate otm. piercing babies ears is totally weird - in my wife's case it was primarily lol teenagers in action.

In my neighborhood, it was every girl's 7th birthday present.

yeah i remember it was like what little girls got when they made their communions but then that is not the only creepy imagery that has to do w/ first communions

guys you can't get offended by a comment that's preceded by the phrase "no offense." that's the rule.

my girlfriend got her ears pierced when she was about a month old. I'm pretty sure we're going to get into an argument about ear piercing if ever we have a daughter together.

my parents had my ears pierced when I was really little. wish they hadn't. stopped wearing earrings age 9 or 10 and the holes never properly closed over, they're still visible. I've always considered having them re-pierced professionally just to have something there other than tiny holes.

also I'd kind of be terrified to let a 16-year-old in a mall with a piercing gun shoot metal through my kid.

nb not that I have a kid or ever will, I was hypothetically speaking

I've noticed that these days "girly" consists less of princess and pink and more of designer high heels and handbags. I get the dreaded feeling that little girls and pre-teens are more inclined to play pretend designer couture dress-up than wanting to play with dolls and be cutesy these days.

I was thinking a lot about this thread while we were in sandbox, and on the re: Girls thread thread. I can't remember what I specifically wanted to update it with, but here's a link to a story about a little girl that decided she wanted to be a little boy named Calvin based on the comic strip:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/12/calvin-and-hobbes-2/

http://youtu.be/-CU040Hqbas

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-CU040Hqbas"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I mean

Oh fuck it, I give up

With a baby girl on her way I often think of the whole pink/purple thing. They have never been my favorite colors. I liked red a lot as a very little girl. I now see pink/purple as a part of childhood. Because our baby girl is due in the spring I like the idea of her wearing pale greens, yellows in addition to pink and purple. Doesn't bug me as much as I thought it would.

My mother had her ears pierced a week after she was born. It is a tradition in Mexico to get baby girl's ears pierced, it would seem, before they start cutting teeth. My paternal grandmother who is Native American was against it and put up a fight so it never happened. But she did take me to get them pierced at 16. Many of the Hispanic baby girls I see with tiny gold earrings, are wearing earrings that have been handed down. My mother still has her first pair. I go back and forth on it.

one of the most amazing things i learnt from the book i was talking about in the original post was that until a certain point in time blue was considered a girls color bc of virgin mary connotations and pink was considered a pastel version of the boy color red. at some point they flipped

my mom forwarded me some article recently discussing how the colors have shifted over time (it opened with a description of Teddy Roosevelt as an 8 yo - in a pink dress, with shoulder length hair, etc.) Pink didn't become a "girl's" color until sometime in the mid-20th century.