Clothing company J. Crew are apparently part of some kind of diabolical plot to pussify boys, as evidenced by this advertisement showing a mother (who also happens to be the president and creative director of the company, so there’s all the proof that I need for a conspiracy), painting her son’s toenails pink.
I can only say that I admire the patience it takes to keep this all a conspiracy, because one look at J. Crew’s current catalogue for kids shows a bunch of boys wearing pirate shirts, riding skateboards and carrying slingshots. At that rate it is going to take them a couple of centuries or more to “throw our species into real psychological turmoil”.
P.S. (Other stuff I have written on this topic: 1, 2, 3, 4).
P.P.S. (Big thanks to Taurus Rising for the article).
that Doc is one sick puppy!
I am so weird. It took me a couple minutes to figure out that the ‘problem’ in the ad is the pink-toenail-painting behavior. I was all, what, they’re freaking out that much about longish hair? (I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night …)
I’m so glad you’re blowing the top off this conspiracy thing. You’re right that it’s pretty damn subtle. As we all know masculinity is secretly so fragile that one picture with pink toenails is ALL IT TAKES to totally undermine 60 pictures of boys in blue and black (possibly with images that reference violence) doing very boy-ish things.
And it’s been going on for over a century! That’s the only explanation for this picture of Franklin Roosevelt as a toddler: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/photos/?c=y&articleID=119483704&page=1
All the proof we need!
(I wrote about this last night too: http://blog.birthcycle.com/2011/04/14/gender-toddlers-me-pontificating-testily/ )
Kenzie, thanks for the Smithsonian link, the article and accompanying photos are really interesting.
Seriously if I had a dollar for every time I painted my very boyish boy’s toenails pink I swear I would be a very wealthy woman and could probably afford to buy clothes at J.Crew.
My husband would often show up at the pool, rip my son’s socks off and see what new colour we had gotten into that day, laugh and send him off into the water.
My son is now almost 6 and still likes toenail polish occasionally. He tells me it feels cool when I brush it on and when he touches his toes they feel smooth and shiny. He does not have the concept of this is for boys and that is for girls yet. He likes the way it feels plain and simple. Our children have a whole lifetime to be manly and womanly when appropriate for now, just let them be kids!!!
Thanks for posting this,
Jennifer
I for one have never painted my son’s toenails for precisely this reason. Seriously, I read it in the Daily Mail, so it must be true (sorry, that’s my euro-centricity showing – I don’t know if Australia has an equivalent to the Daily Mail; personally, I like to think it’s a unique publication, so I’d hope for your sake you don’t).
Actually, I never did it because I thought it would turn him gay and that’s, like, a bad thing (thanks again, Daily Mail). I missed a frickin’ meeting again, didn’t I?
It’s called The Daily Telegraph or the Sun-Herald (not to be confused with the Sydney Morning Herald). Sorry. 😦
ofgs………….its just nail paint
Just discovered your Blue Milk Blog for the first time and am really enjoying the read. Thanks for writing most recently about the J. Crew ad. Crazy media response to a boy with pink toe nail polish hanging out with hims mom! It’s truly unbelievable what has happened in the last decade to our society around illeged gender ownership of colors and activities. I started an online clothes company several years ago called Handsome in Pink with this very issue in mind. My goal remains to create clothes that let kids be kids and wear clothes that represent THEIR favorite colors and favorite activities, not what our culture thinks they should like. Feel free to take a gander at http://www.handsomeinpink.com. Thanks! Jo Hadley
Oh yes, came by your site via a reader linking to it here and I’ve plugged your site before. Like your clothes lots.
From tigtog over at Hoyden About Town:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2831/was-pink-originally-the-color-for-boys-and-blue-for-girls
And also from her:
The thing that gets me about the pink-blue divide is that it’s just fucking consumerist marketing to ensure that we buy extra stuff if we have kids of different sexes instead of going with perfectly serviceable more unisex hand-me-downs.
Up until the industrial revolution and the roughly concurrent invention of consumerism, very small children all wore soft, pale, frilly skirts and had their hair curled in ringlets. It was considered important to emphasise their sweet fragility, not their different sexes, and if you were rich you covered them in lace. Older children wore serviceable dark coloured fabrics with touches of lace and ribbon of whatever colours the parents liked. Obviously this meant that it was easy, natural and common to have younger children wearing the same clothes that their older siblings once wore, the only difference for older children being whether they wore short trousers or short skirts that just covered the knee under the unisex short smock. For Sunday best the smock might be starched white or delicately patterned muslin for girls and a darker pattern for boys, but that’s about the extent of the variation. You can see it in family portraits of the time – all the kids wearing matching blouses and boxy jackets and skirts/trousers of the same material – but you can also see it in unposed shots of family groups promenading at the beach etc – unless you knew the family it would not be immediately obvious whether the youngest children were boys or girls.
It seems that while(because?) the adult gender roles were so segregated then, it wasn’t felt necessary to impose rigid visual gender segregation on infants and young children. Now that adult gender roles are less segregated, imposing the visual gender segregation from the day they come home from hospital has become the fashion. As I said, it’s a grand way to sell families more Stuff.
P.S. my comment obviously refers to Western societies – others had different childhood fashions. But from what I’ve read, the rigid visual gender code for very young children is a relatively recent innovation in most cultures. Traditionally, moving into gender differentiated fashions has been one of the rites of pubescence.
les sigh.
I, for one, am kind of pissed about this marketing propaganda that a. I did not receive, even though I am clearly the target audience and b. is an advertisement for clothing I couldn’t afford anyway. Insult on top of insult, I tell you!
*shakes fist*
I thought of you when I read the article on this too.
Just saw this on Facebook: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html?c=y&page=1
I met my husband when we worked at the same summer camp one year. I painted his toenails rainbow style. I painted lots of campers toes and fingers too – boys and girls. One of the most popular activities for the boys in particular was to make make extensive use of our Camp Wardrobe (a room filled with every type of outfit you’ve ever imagined and even more that you haven’t)… Camp was a safe and supportive environment and the boys often used it as a space to experiment with typical feminine clothing and different aspects of their personalities.
It made me so sad to know that these were the only 7 days per year they had the safety and freedom to do so.
One year when I was working retail, at literally the only department store in a small town that carried kids clothes at all, The Powers That Be decided the barcode for toddler socks would say GIRLS SOCK. No idea why. They came in 3 kinds – all white, all primary colors, all pastels.
Some woman cames in to buy socks for her grandson, picks up white and primary, checks out, and then notices that the receipt says “GIRLS SOCK PK @2”
So she says, this is wrong, I didn’t buy girl’s socks.
I explain about the random merchandising labels.
She insists I return them and ring them up again as boy’s socks.
I can’t. The computer continues to label them GIRLS SOCK
She insists.
She talks to my manager.
He offers to handwrite her a receipt.
She leaves and presumably drives 15 miles to the next town, where WalMart labels it’s socks correctly.
Wow, that’s like adults playing “girl germs” and “boy germs”.
I don’t understand how anyone could see this as a bad thing.
You might look at me weird for this, but I think it would do some little boys good to do some “girlish” things. It would help them to grow up learning that there aren’t strict rules to follow for being a boy or a girl.
Same goes for little girls doing “boyish” things.
http://fondlemyheart.blogspot.com/
I can assure you that we won’t look at you weird for saying that – we agree entirely.
That’s good to know. 🙂
[…] I know, all the baby doll stuff is still a sea of pink but this is one big step closer). Then there’s this over at Jezebel, where highly gendered toy commercials are reversed and […]