Pink and Blue

These things are fads and afterthoughts, not settled fact, or even settled history. It's true that *some* have said that pink is an "exciting" colour, but that may well be why many, but not all, girls prefer it, although cultural expectations and marketing may have a little something to do with it as well.

Some have likewise attributed the popularity of blue for boys to the acquisition of the Blue Boy painting by Henry Edwards Huntington (the railroad magnate) in 1921, to the consternation of the British public, who raised a storm of protest over the sale of a British masterpiece to the wild colonials, and then, after a brief but highly publicised exhibition in New York City, it was shipped off to *California*, practically on the frontier of what passed for civilisation over there and probably surrounded by savage Red Indians.

Huntington actually had the infernal gall to buy the painting popularly known as "Pinkie" (also British) around the same time, nouveaux riche, you know, and displayed them side by side, where they became popular icons of young girlhood and boyhood respectively, so the taste for pink and blue, and their differing associations in the public mind, at least in the USA, are easy to explain without recourse to the psycho-babble of past centuries and the musings of newspaper columnists on deadline at a loss for a good idea.

The "controversy" has been aired many times in my lifetime, and is *old* news, "buzz buzz," as Hamlet put it way back when. They might as well have rescued the column from the newspaper morgue (the place they keep old clippings) as had someone write it again.

Maybe the columnist didn't tell them she was cribbing.

The Blue Boy (circa 1770) by Thomas Gainsborough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy

Sarah Barrett Moulton: “Pinkie” (1794) by Thomas Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkie_(Lawrence_painting)

There's a link to "Pinkie" from the "Blue Boy" article, which may be more convenient since the Drupal software seems to have savaged the link containing parentheses.

Humans have a mania for categorising things, and will do so completely at random if objective criteria are absent, which is why "white" stands for *purity* in Europe and North America (not to forget the "Western" lands Down Under) and *death* in many bits of Asia.

The fact that these paintings exist, however, is a simple refutation of the idea that longstanding tradition has magically changed, and blue *does* show the inevitable dirt less readily than pink, so it may be that the "switch," if it ever really happened, and if the preferences claimed ever really existed, were for utilitarian reasons rather more than psychiatric interventions.

As for me, I like them both, and both look good on me, which is all that counts as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers,

Puddin'
----------------------
Pink is the navy blue of India.
--- Diana Vreeland

Picasso had his pink period
and his blue period. I am in
my blonde period right now.
--- Hugh Hefner

I've been in my "blonde period"
all my life, although I do
touch up the grey these days.
--- Puddin'

The official colours of the Middlesex County Cricket Club are pink and blue (forever), so the real question is: Are these men (and one woman) *all* transgendered?

http://v4admin.sportnetwork.net/upload/66/66_0_1226177005.jpg

http://www.artistquirk.com/pink-is-for-girls-blue-is-for-boys/

There is an extensive discussion of the topic at the above link, and rather more well-informed than the reaction to the article in the newspaper.