Conversation with a waitreess (or pink is for girls, blue is for boys)

[Alicia_lynn419]

OK.. this is not the one I wanted to report. Earlier this evening, I went to the corner pub for a few beers (in boy mode). One of the waitresses came over and started talking to me. The subject was cooking.

She mentioned her 5 yr. old son wanted a "play kitchen", but she didn't want to get him one because it was all "pink and flowers". I suggested she not worry about the motif.. if her son, at 5, likes to cook, go for it. I said the color and motif should not matter. Her response was,"It matter's to me".

That got me thinking about myself at that age. When I was very young (2 or 3) my mom got me a "Dressy Bessy" doll... a stuffed baby doll with a pull chord that talked. I remember that doll (vaguely), and my mom said I loved it. So obviously, my mom was not concerned about her young son with a baby doll, let alone a pink kiddie kitchen set. Of course, Mom does not know about Allie (though I suspect she is suspicious). Needless to say, after that conversation, I figured the waitress would not be T-friendly, so I left it at that. Kind of disappointing, but I guess there are still many here in the south that subscribe to "boys will be boys, girls will be girls..."

[DameErrant]

Reminds me of a friend of mine whose son wanted a bike. They had a perfectly good bike in the garage, but it was a "girl's bike," so he would not let his son ride it. He was a handyman and could have welded a bar across it if it was that important to him, but his son simply could not ride a girl's bike.

Now having girl's bikes and boys bikes may have made sense when girls wore long dresses, but personally, I slipped off my bike seat and landed on the bar when I was a kid, and I would have greatly appreciated not having a bar there!

Do they still even make girl's bikes? Or is it all unisex now?

[Lesley Ann]

I have two Daughters, both grown with their own family. When they were small, me and my wife tried to be gender neutral with regards to toys and games so they had a selection of Barbie dolls and boy toys. Our eldest gravitated to wards dolls and home making, whereas the younger liked racing cars, cowboys and Indians. The eldest grew up very feminine, the younger a tom boy, although both are now beautiful young ladies (Well I would say that, I am their Father) What is the point I am making? Pink is not always for girls and blue for boys, infact this colour code was unheard of until the Victorians came along. I played with both as a young lad, going out particularly after seeing Roy Rodgers & Trigger films, and playing cowboys and Indians, but also played with my sister's dolls and dolls house, and I grew up to be a pillar of society!
Lesley Ann

[Sally2005]

Gee whiz... doesn't the waitress know that boys are born experts with power tools and drywall ...the little kid would just remodel it to suit anyways.

[Salene]

I had a pink kitchen set and I turned out normal. :D
My Dad hated me having the kitchen set. but, he was also opposed to shorts. He would say: "Might as well be wearing a skirt!" heh, if only he knew.

[JennyII23]

I like pink ,never though bout ,or just winged it,got some things today ,GF may not be receptive as she aint crazy aout P....low and slow :doh::sad:,,

[Babette]

I would have told her how I was cooking with my grandmother at age five. Due to that influence, I thoroughly enjoy cooking today and IMHO I am a good cook. Also, some of my first toys were dolls. Despite all of this, I would like to think of myself as a really good person.

Babette

[Marshchild]

This reminds me of a trivial, but nonetheless annoying, incident that happened to me at work recently. I work somewhere where I need to keep my hair covered with a bouffant cap for hygiene purposes (the kitchen of an aged care facility), and after getting sick of the fact that the kitchen only ever seemed to have white ones for its workers' use (how drab), I found somewhere where I could buy my own, and got a bunch in blue, green and pink. Anyway, I was wearing one of the pink ones one day when an agency nurse asked me why I was wearing a pink cap, given pink was a "girls'" colour. I said that I simply liked the colour, only to have her respond with some snide comment that seemed to imply I must be gay. I was so pissed off by her remark (and stunned that anyone could still cling to such a silly, outdated notion) that I didn't say anything more to her. (I should have fired back with a retort of my own, but unfortunately couldn't think of anything to say at the time.) Of course, the fact she was dressed all in blue was perfectly all right!

[janie2261]

Most people simply reflect their cultural upbringing and have probably never had a good chance -- or even wanted a chance -- to examine their lifelong beliefs. CDs will continually run into this, as will any minority that adopts a lifestyle or belief system that is at odds with the mainstream culture.

However, things can change, although often slowly. For example, we now have a black president.

As a CD, have you taken the time to re-examine some of your beliefs? Since you are asking for understanding and acceptance from others with rigid views?

For example, I am a vegetarian. I do not eat meat or fish because I believe that animals have a right to live without being raised as food for humans. I do not believe that humans have a right to kill animals for food, especially since it is unnecessary. For those of you that are interested in learning more, there are dozens of compelling reasons to not eat meat, and there is not even one good reason to eat meat. Want to learn more? Or are you stuck in your inherited cultural beliefs, like the waitress?

I'll bet that most of you eat meat and think nothing of it. You were raised that way. You may look at my vegetarianism the same way that waitress looks at boys cooking in a pink kitchen.

I think the way toward change, whether you ae looking for greater acceptance of crossdressing or the rights of animals, is through patient and pesistence discussion with people, to help them gain some insight. It takes time, but reacting with annoyance or irritation will not accomplish anything.

Change will come about only when people are invited to re-examine their lifelong beliefs.

[SexxxyDJ]

It is a shame that the waitress is possibly prohibiting her child from becoming one of the next great American Chefs just becouse of her own gender misconceptions.

[Cristi]

Reminds me of a friend of mine whose son wanted a bike. They had a perfectly good bike in the garage, but it was a "girl's bike," so he would not let his son ride it.

With two older sisters, the first bike I had when I was a kid was a 'girl's bike'. So my father took a can of fire engine red paint to it to make it look 'cool' then told me that red bikes go faster. :)

I wish I'd gotten more 'hand me down' things... like perhaps clothes. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I'd gotten a FEW handed down clothes when I was really young since we didn't have much money, but just things like shirts, nothing fun like dresses or nightgowns. :(

[linnea]

Oh my, the whole set of gender-related generalizations will probably never go away entirely. It's absurd, but people are much more likely to hold onto irrational ideas than to rational ones. We've made some progress, but people still tend to assume that nurses are female, doctors are male, police and firefighters are male, etc.--despite the great deal of evidence against these stereotypes.
Good for you for offering advice that counters some of the misguided thinking.
I enjoyed playing "house" with my girl cousins, not as the man but as one of the people (we didn't have any agenda about it; we were just the people in the house). I wore an apron sometimes, held the (doll)babies and fed them sometimes, cleaned, washed the dishes, etc., right along with the other girls. I never really thought about there being gender-roles involved.
Oh, so it goes.

[sandra-leigh]

Do they still even make girl's bikes? Or is it all unisex now?

They still make them. Useful for when I want to bicycle in a skirt :battingeyelashes:

[Teri Jean]

I grew up in a home with four boys and one sister. The boundries were clear to a point but we boys spent a lot of time in the kitchen, doing clothes and cleaning. It was expected but if my mother or father (deceased) seen their eldest son in a mini skirt and blouse, it wouldn't be pretty.
Colors and toys of children growing up should not be a factor in whether they are "boy" or "girl" items but if the child wants to play with a doll or has a fasination with a color of an item, let them. Keli

[Robertacd]

Now having girl's bikes and boys bikes may have made sense when girls wore long dresses, but personally, I slipped off my bike seat and landed on the bar when I was a kid, and I would have greatly appreciated not having a bar there!

Do they still even make girl's bikes? Or is it all unisex now?

They do and they don't:doh:

You can still find traditional girls and boy bikes at department stores.

Comfort and cruiser bikes still come in traditional mens and womens designs.

Once you get into "serious" bikes the only real difference is paint, size, and maybe some subtle geometry changes.

[jennifer41356]

Reminds me of a friend of mine whose son wanted a bike. They had a perfectly good bike in the garage, but it was a "girl's bike," so he would not let his son ride it. He was a handyman and could have welded a bar across it if it was that important to him, but his son simply could not ride a girl's bike.

Now having girl's bikes and boys bikes may have made sense when girls wore long dresses, but personally, I slipped off my bike seat and landed on the bar when I was a kid, and I would have greatly appreciated not having a bar there!

Do they still even make girl's bikes? Or is it all unisex now?
when I was living in Japan, all bikes were the "girl " style, no bar unless they were the 10speed race bikes and I think they had the bar on em..no one there seemed to mind, it was a cheap and reliable mode of transportation:drink:

[SarahLynn]

.... it was a cheap and reliable mode of transportation:drink:


And this is the only factor which should be considered when a item is being purschased. But.... you know the rest.

SarahLynn

[jessielee]

I had a pink kitchen set and I turned out normal. :D

you are so cool!
but, Alicia, the deep west is much like the south. my kids know i thrive in the kitchen. but i had a major twinge of regret, remembering playing with my mother's dolls when i had no male role model, and now my 6-year old boy wants an American Girl doll like his sister and the girls down the street have. my impulse is, "of course!" except for peace in the home and his Wyoming native mom who would never allow it.
torn,

[crystal99]

For me it was the reverse. I was always told (input strong male stereotype voiceover) "your the man of the house now" but my younger brother just carried on the way he wanted, playing with my sisters more than i did, playing with dolls and what not. He's now quite manly, into sports ... the stereotype kinda guy (sort of, i love him). and i'm me.

But then i do have a tendancy to rebel x

[Lori A]

As a kid I always wanted an Easy Bake Oven, but never got one. My dad and step monster said I didn't need one as I had the real thing in the kitchen. I was chief cook and bottle washer and general all around maid without the uniform. I am now a better cook than most of the women I know given a well stocked pantry and refrigerator and spice rack. I love to cook, and rarely get any complaints. Before mom left, she taught me to clean and started teaching me to cook, where I could help her out and burn off some of my extra energy.

[battybattybats]

The pink/blue thing is really recent. The blue is older.

This is all from memory so I might get some details wrong but anyways:

It used to be that blue was a girls colour! Pink being a watered down red was considered a boys colour! A famous painter was painting a protrait of a powerful persons son but becuase apparently of a war iirc the pigment for the clothing he was wearing was in short supply so he painted the clothes blue instead. The father was outraged and there was a lot of controversy about it. The infamous painting slowly became famous: The Blue Boy.

Eventually Blue become slowly acceptable for boys.

Now in the 40's there was a company making posters of famous paintings. There were two that most people thought were meant as a set but they weren't.

These were The Blue Boy and the less famous The Pink Lady.
The two since became quite the collectors set.

The cultural impact of these two images set side by side was that the colour code got fully reversed.

Pink, the boys colour became a girls colour while blue, the colour that was scandalous to put on a boy a century or so before went from being acceptable for boys to being the colour coded for boys.

So because of a war, the difficulty in finding the pigment for 1 lone painting and the chance combining of two seperate paintings that sold well together we have had pink and blue swapped round and become fiercely controvertial and deeply socially entrenched.

As a side note back when all of fashion was claiming black as the most elegant many goths (mainly the Baby-Bats set who were teen goths in the 90's who reacted against the gloomy The Crow/The Cure media Goth stereotype and who had a strong Anime influence) rebelled and started wearing pink, often as a accent to black to stand out in nightclubs. Goths started to dye their hair pink, black corsts got pink edging, knee and thigh high socks and stockings were banded black and pink. Goth culture feturing a lot of androgyny had both male and female Goths wearing pink especially as streaks in their hair.

It is only recently, mainly because of the pairing with breast cancer awareness that pink has become strongly fashionable amongst women again with heaps of things being made in pink colour or packaged in pink for the cause and i know quite a few men who started wearing pink shirts in solidarity with breast cancer awareness.

So it wasn't so long ago that what we call the Pink Fog would have been called the Blue Fog lol!

[fiona_libby]

I think some humans are guilty to some degree of assuming that people should act in stereotypical manners and that anyone acting outside the norm must be a weirdo lets hope with some more evolution the human species may learn that we are all normal regardless of how we live our lifes

huggs

:hugs:

Fiona

[Genifer Teal]

. . . .I guess there are still many here in the south that subscribe to "boys will be boys, girls will be girls..."


Or more like "boys SHOULD be boys and girls SHOULD be girls."

Gen

[Toni_Lynn]

This was something that initially confused me as a teen and then gave me stubborn resolve because it was so stupid.

My mum forced a strict set of rules upon me, and as such you may have read about the abuse I took over my crossdressing from age 13 on.

Back in the 70s Jockey introduced men's bikini style underwear with no fly and an almost 'french-cut' styling. I bought secretly some to try to see if this made any difference in my feeling vis a vis crossdressing -- to see would they cure me (hint -- they didn't). Well when my mum found them, I got abused over them. It had to be white only Fruit of the Loom fly front briefs only! This may explain why I have a thing for girls wearing those said same white briefs and go crazy when my wife wears them.

Then we turn to my sister -- it was okay for her to play softball. And I was so totally hurt and confused when we went to the boys department at KMart and bought boy's jeans for my sister.

I remember going home and crying myself to sleep. I woke up the next day, so angry that I pulled on a pair of panties from stash, put on a bra, and dressed for school wearing a sweater to hide the straps of my bra.

BTW -- I should point out that I do not fully agree with thoughts that 'girls can wear anything including boys clothes and get away with it and boys can't'. Personal experience has shown that it is not true.

The event strengthened my resolve to just be me, and I would not let my mum get away with hurting me. Every time she found stuff, I just buy more than before. I tart reading girls magazines, and dressing hwne they weren't home. It took years for me to finally just be myself, but it was worth it

Huggles

Toni-Lynn

[angelfire]

I don't think it matters. When I was in elementary school, for 2 years my best friend was a girl (eww, cooties, hah). My parents bought me a barbia & ken doll so we could play that together. We also played dress-up (my first crossdressing ventures I guess), but once my parents found out about that, they put a stop to it.

If the colour of something was really that big of a concern to her, she could have just painted over the pink & such. She could have painted it blue, or even white just to be gender neutral.

[Rachel Morley]

.... I guess there are still many here in the south that subscribe to "boys will be boys, girls will be girls..."
Not just the south either! :sad: You have touched on something that has always ticked me off seemingly all my life. I absolutely hate the notion that "pink is for girls and blue is for boys". Have you ever been in a store and seen a little boy pick up a doll or something girly only to hear his mom snap, "Put that down, that's for girls”? Same concept. I so wish we didn't live in such a bi-gendered world. :sad:

[Schatten Lupus]

It apparently mattered to my mom. I wanted an easy bake oven when I was a kid, but my mom wouldn't get me one because it was for girls. I really didn't understand why though, since at that age all I saw was a toy that I could bake cookies, brownies, etc. with.

[Toni_Lynn]

My parents bought me a barbia & ken doll so we could play that together.

Oh poo! My mum got me a G I Joe. Ugh! He did get to dress up, though in Barbie's clothes. I wonder if he'd have gotten a Section 8 a la Max Klinger in MASH :daydreaming:

Huggles

Toni-Lynn

[Tomara]

A couple of weeks ago I went to a small local restaurant for lunch , when I sat down at the counter the waitress came for my order and placed a pink napkin on the counter with the silverware , I placed my order and she came back with my soda with a pink straw , so now I have to ask what is it with all this pink , and she says it is good to get in touch with your feminine side once in a while !
At this point I am looking for the camera crew to tell me I was busted !
After I ate she told me they had a bridal shower and all the pink stuff was left over.
If they only knew just how in touch I am with my feminine side they would have been the ones blushing instead of me ! LOL
Tomara

[nicole123]

I grew up in a house that there was very specific rules for gender specific toys, I had all the cars and trucks and a bb gun and all the other male specific toys and was not allowed to play with “girl toys”…..yeah that worked out well. :gorgeous:

[Tip or Ozma]

[QUOTE=battybattybats;1530782]The pink/blue thing is really recent. The blue is older.

My understanding is that prior to the 1920s pink was indeed a color for boys and blue was for girls. I will try to track down some more details.

[Marshchild]

I thought of this thread today when I was waiting at a pedestrian crossing in the city, and heard a woman behind me asking her young son if he was going to help her make the evening meal - tacos - when they got home. I had to bite my tongue and keep myself from saying, "Ooh, can I come to dinner?" as I love Mexican food! :heehee: Seriously, though, I thought it was nice, particularly in light of some of the unhappy stories I've read here. Another thing I thought was sweet was once seeing a boy offering his mother advice on clothes when she, he and his sister were wandering through a department store's women's clothing section. By contrast, the girl was shuffling along behind them both, looking rather bored.

[Marshchild]

Ah, if it was only pink and blue! My sister-in-law's mind used to be so colour-coded that she refused to allow her sons to wear purple because she said that was a girls' colour. Go figure.

There's a lot about this in a book by Alison Lurie called The Language of clothes.

Yes, I've heard that purple is sometimes "denigrated" as a girls' colour too (which is sort of funny when you consider that it used to be a colour that only the rich and powerful could afford to wear; nay, that only the rich and powerful were allowed to wear!). Well, if your sister-in-law felt that way about the colour, she certainly wouldn't have sent her sons to this all-boys' school here called CBC (Christian Brothers College), since their colours are white and purple! Students there wear purple blazers with white trimming (which I think look really good), as well as purple-and-white striped ties; and I remember once playing in a basketball game against them during my own school days* and discovering that their basketball uniform included purple shorts (which I very much liked the look of as well). Even more "suspiciously", their school crest features three seahorses - we all know about their rather odd reproductive habits, don't we? :heehee:

I've a few pieces of purple clothing myself: some in the especially sissyish shade of lilac and one a purple "Spartan" Utilikilt (basically, a skirt made especially for men). I chose this colour as it was the most outrageous one they offered for that particular "model", which turned out to be just as well as they had none of the other colours in stock when I placed my order. (Maybe a lot of their other, more manly, customers were shying away from it, thinking it was a little too "girly" themselves.)

*Which my team won, the CBC guys being even more hopeless than we were! :heehee:

[shannonsilk]

[QUOTE=battybattybats;1530782]The pink/blue thing is really recent. The blue is older.

My understanding is that prior to the 1920s pink was indeed a color for boys and blue was for girls. I will try to track down some more details.

If you think backto all those old Disney animations, you may recall that Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Wendy in Peter Pan were all wearing blue. Of course noow, I picture the Little Mermaid and Beauty(and the Beast) as all pink, but maybbe they're not.

[Laura Evans]

[QUOTE=Lesley Ann;1529585]... Pink is not always for girls and blue for boys, infact this colour code was unheard of until the Victorians came along...


Aother little known historical fact is that at one time pink was for boys and blue for girls so the present color-gender match is real only in our present context. It will probably change again. Does color really decide one's gender? I don't think so.