2008/01/21 22:52
Somebody Call Steven Tyler
If you've been paying attention to my Flickr page, you've probably noticed that I am losing The War on Pink.
It's not that I have a problem with pink on principle or anything. It's just that girls get inundated with the pink from such an early age. It piles up and up and eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- girls wear pink, so pink is their favorite color and that's all there is to it. So I determined that from early on, Avery would have a lot of color options to choose from rather than getting pushed into the pink pigeonhole.
Thing is, though, it is really hard to find clothes for baby girls in any other color. The pink saturates the shelves at your local discount retailer (at which, unless you're retardedly wealthy, you're shopping for stuff that's only going to fit for three months), and other colors -- if they're even available -- are very well hidden. Your other option is to go across the aisle to the boy stuff for blue clothes, which usually have footballs or monster trucks or other extensions of a penis emblazoned across the front. Avery has a pair of blue-and-green dinosaur pajamas, and they even button left over right rather than right over left like all her flowery pink ones.
I could blame this all on a vast conspiracy by the garment industry, a cruel method of forcing us all into two colors so they don't have to spend money on other dyes. But as a parent, I've realized the truth is much simpler: We get offended when people guess our child's sex wrong. And because they all sort of look like little androgynous, rotund, clean-shaven Wilford Brimleys, wrapping a girl in gender-neutral colors like green is a recipe for disaster for high-strung parents. So we stick them in pink in order to keep ourselves from strangling the next waiter who offers to bring a high chair for the little man-lady-man(?).
Oh well. At least she looks cute in it. Navy blue's not really her color, anyway.
It's not that I have a problem with pink on principle or anything. It's just that girls get inundated with the pink from such an early age. It piles up and up and eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- girls wear pink, so pink is their favorite color and that's all there is to it. So I determined that from early on, Avery would have a lot of color options to choose from rather than getting pushed into the pink pigeonhole.
Thing is, though, it is really hard to find clothes for baby girls in any other color. The pink saturates the shelves at your local discount retailer (at which, unless you're retardedly wealthy, you're shopping for stuff that's only going to fit for three months), and other colors -- if they're even available -- are very well hidden. Your other option is to go across the aisle to the boy stuff for blue clothes, which usually have footballs or monster trucks or other extensions of a penis emblazoned across the front. Avery has a pair of blue-and-green dinosaur pajamas, and they even button left over right rather than right over left like all her flowery pink ones.
I could blame this all on a vast conspiracy by the garment industry, a cruel method of forcing us all into two colors so they don't have to spend money on other dyes. But as a parent, I've realized the truth is much simpler: We get offended when people guess our child's sex wrong. And because they all sort of look like little androgynous, rotund, clean-shaven Wilford Brimleys, wrapping a girl in gender-neutral colors like green is a recipe for disaster for high-strung parents. So we stick them in pink in order to keep ourselves from strangling the next waiter who offers to bring a high chair for the little man-lady-man(?).
Oh well. At least she looks cute in it. Navy blue's not really her color, anyway.
