Thougts on Pink
Amanda Marcotte blasts a study showing that “women really do prefer pink”
I think the logic goes something like this: Armchair evolutionary psychologists are always trying to argue that women were born to wear aprons and abhor shoes and book-learning. Which we all know is silly. But if they can establish in people’s minds the idea that women are born preferring pink, then it’s easy to start convincing people that other, less arbitrary and more oppressive markers of femininity are also innate.
While I don’t agree that there’s some secretive cabal of “armchair”(by which Amanda must mean the researchers and scientists with PhDs and MDs who do these studies) evolutionary psychologists, this is not the point I want to argue. One thing that is lost in the latent social construction vs inborn traits/evolutionary debate is that just because scientists can do a study showing women are, on average, more attracted to pink doesn’t mean its an inborn or an evolutionarily defined trait. Even if it holds true for a large number of women and there’s a scenario for it being genetic or inborn, it could still easily be “socially constructed”(or at least not genetically determined). A lot of time is wasted whenever a study showing some sort of persistent gender difference and some feminists have a knee jerk reaction that implies that whoever doing said study is some sort of misogynistic tool.
It should be noted that I like pink because I (think that I) look fantastic in it.
