Tag: Art and Cultures (Page 1 of 11)

We all buy in to the Blue-is-for-Boys, Pink-is-for-Girls myth, even though we know its bullshit. Here I bookmark some notes on The Wearing Of Pink.
First: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? After the war, according to J.B. Paoletti, a historian:

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

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It is hard to overstate the influence of Disney cartoons on our folklore. The stories of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty et al have been around for centuries, but the versions presented by Walt Disney and his studios have become the definitive, almost canonical representations of the characters. Many people have a huge problem with this, because the studio’s versions tend to overlay its particular moral prism over the stories, which can be partriarchial – or just very saccarine – and much of the ambiguity and darkness is lost in the retelling. For example, Disney’s relentlessly upbeat The Little Mermaid has a very different fate to Hans Christian Andersen’s Den Lille Havfrue. The former gives up her entire heritage and identity for the love of a man; the latter tries and fails to stab him, and then finds herself consigned to a purgatory in the spirit world.
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