Pastel Pink & Baby Blue.

Dear reader this year I really hate pastel pink. And additionally baby blue as it turns out. I’ve never before had problems with either of these colors. It’s entirely a new phenomenon.

Why? Well, because every baby thing ever seems to be in pink or blue rendering otherwise utterly non-gender specific items suddenly ‘gender specific’ by societal expectations. Girls, for instance, cannot like sports, trains, puppy dogs, or some jungle animals — these are things that come on baby blue onesies and sleepers. Boys, on the other hand, cannot like cats, owls, some jungle animals, some teddy-bears, etc because these are things that come on pastel pink onesies and sleepers. And so I become very frustrated when I look at that pink sleeper that is simple and soft and cute and I love the little cat curled up sleeping on it, but because it is pastel pink I hesitate to get it.

Part of me has choice words to say to myself about this, They involve me doing my own off-beat thing and who cares what people think if I dress my Boyo in pink? It is none of their business and he is hardly likely to be bothered at two months if someone refers to him as ‘she’ (it’s going to happen anyway more than likely), and neither will I. The other part of me doesn’t want to deal with the inevitable comments (spoken or un) if I did choose to dress him in pink. #sigh

I suspect it would probably be more socially acceptable to dress my daughter in blue than my son in pink & this irritates me almost more than the expectation that all little girls should be dressed in pastel pink. As a case in point diaper bags come in pastel pink and baby blue and as the child does not carry the diaper bag apparently it’s appropriate for women to carry around baby blue bags — If diaper bags that look like diaper bags are your thing that is & that’s a whole separate can of worms to open up.

What it really boils down to is I hate that there is a gender expectation with clothing colors that is basically found at no other point in time (although see above commentary on socially acceptable — you see few adult men wearing pastel pink shirts). My solution has been to, when possible, purchase non-baby blue items so yellows, greens, browns, and other colors, but I feel a bit limp noodles about it. If I were slightly braver he would have a pink cat onesie already. I’m not, so he doesn’t.

He does however have this:

I was originally looking for something that would match the owl wash mitt I’d already purchased, but apparently owl towels only come in pink and three times the cost of cat towels in pink, so he has a cat towel – in pink. He will love it at least until someone in society tells him that pink is a ‘girly’ color at which point they will deal with the glares from Mummy.

In the battle of ‘society’s expectations for how you dress your child’ I feel as though society is still probably winning… but bath time will include pink.