Oh, I don’t know if you ever know for sure, unless you find some of those social experimenters and loose them, but beware the difference between destructive and non-destructive testing. Factors I’d consider in evaluating a norm’s positive utility would include universality, stability, considerations of likely effect in aggregate, and so forth.
For example, I’d feel less masculine wearing a pink shirt around North America, but guys in China did so fairly commonly, and I’d expect to find considerable variation in this across time and cultures, so I consider it a bad idea, or at least pointless, for color based gender norms to be overtly encouraged. Women being the caregivers to young children seems to have been the case across time and cultures so I’m skeptical of the notion that there’s no purposeful innate difference in the mean approaches to childbearing and think people who discourage girls from playing with dolls not especially wise on the matter.
Different axioms of human nature are certainly going to give you different conclusions of course.
For example, I’d feel less masculine wearing a pink shirt around North America, but guys in China did so fairly commonly, and I’d expect to find considerable variation in this across time and cultures, so I consider it a bad idea, or at least pointless, for color based gender norms to be overtly encouraged.
You’d be right; the association of pink with femininity is fairly recent.
It’s not clear to me that putting a lot of effort into eliminating overt caste markers is the best way to go if you’re interested in weakening caste, though.
I think it’s one thing to let a child do both gender stereotypical and non-gender-stereotypical activities that they want, and quite another to try to keep them from doing gender-stereotypical activities.
As I recall, pink shirts for men were a fad in the US in the 60s and/or 70s, but googling doesn’t turn up quite what I remember—business-style shirts in fairly light pink.
Fine. How do we tell the difference? Also, how do we tell the difference between norms-masquerading-as-facts and facts?
Oh, I don’t know if you ever know for sure, unless you find some of those social experimenters and loose them, but beware the difference between destructive and non-destructive testing. Factors I’d consider in evaluating a norm’s positive utility would include universality, stability, considerations of likely effect in aggregate, and so forth.
For example, I’d feel less masculine wearing a pink shirt around North America, but guys in China did so fairly commonly, and I’d expect to find considerable variation in this across time and cultures, so I consider it a bad idea, or at least pointless, for color based gender norms to be overtly encouraged. Women being the caregivers to young children seems to have been the case across time and cultures so I’m skeptical of the notion that there’s no purposeful innate difference in the mean approaches to childbearing and think people who discourage girls from playing with dolls not especially wise on the matter.
Different axioms of human nature are certainly going to give you different conclusions of course.
You’d be right; the association of pink with femininity is fairly recent.
It’s not clear to me that putting a lot of effort into eliminating overt caste markers is the best way to go if you’re interested in weakening caste, though.
I think it’s one thing to let a child do both gender stereotypical and non-gender-stereotypical activities that they want, and quite another to try to keep them from doing gender-stereotypical activities.
As I recall, pink shirts for men were a fad in the US in the 60s and/or 70s, but googling doesn’t turn up quite what I remember—business-style shirts in fairly light pink.
More than I knew about pink shirts for men.
I agree. (worthless comment, but I decided against saying more and don’t see how to delete).