why is pink feminine?

[CK76]

It's not pink! It's lightish red!

"Yeah, we have a name for light red, it's pink!"

 

[Grubnar]

It's not pink! It's lightish red!

Donugh, I understand you need to saveguard your mascilinity. But really dude, it is a wholelot faster just to say pink!

 

[Ulquiorra4sama]

I say that pink is either very feminine or very masculine.
Because, really... How much (or little) of a man do you have to be to wear pink nowadays?

 

[The Eggplant]

Men are supposed to be tough and threatening...
tell me do these look threatening to you?

Um...yes, actually. Very much so.

OT: Color arbitration of any form is silly. Pink being "girly" is dumb, but so is the whole "only real men wear pink" bullshit I hear around my campus from time to time. It's a mark of insecurity whenever anyone feels the need to define what it is they're wearing. Clothing is an expression of self, and any attempt to qualify or demonize the wearing of certain kinds of clothing is a mark of weakness in the self. (Except muumuus. Some shit just should not be.)

 

[flying_whimsy]

Originally, pink being similar to red, an aggressive color, meant it was usually associated with boys. With the rise of home video that changed. Because of the porn industry's habit of referring to vaginas as pink bits. And now you know.

Actually, the change from pink to blue for the boys' color happened during the cold war, with red being associated with communists and their sympathizers being labeled pink-o's.

 

[careful]

you cant attribute to colors adjectives that personify it like dainty, fierce, masculine, etc. because it is the colors that came first. femininity is not an aspect of pink, rather pink is a symbol of femininity, in the sense that there may also be other symbolic colors of femininity. so more specifically my question is always haven been given the concept of femininity why did we chose pink to be a visual representative? there is a reason, it may be arbitrary, but there is a reason. I like the idea of pink being close to red which is most readily associated with blood from a suitable perspective being the male hunter kills prey and sheds its blood and hence masculinity becomes associated with red and by extension then pink, but the hospital color coordination of sexes seem more likely.

 

[ScarletRider]

The Pink Panther would probably disagree with the assertion that pink is a feminine color. Although it does look great on the fairer sex.

 

[infinity_turtles]

Originally, pink being similar to red, an aggressive color, meant it was usually associated with boys. With the rise of home video that changed. Because of the porn industry's habit of referring to vaginas as pink bits. And now you know.

Actually, the change from pink to blue for the boys' color happened during the cold war, with red being associated with communists and their sympathizers being labeled pink-o's.

That was a joke : P

 

[Kpt._Rob]

Now, I'm not an expert, but way back in the day I had picked up this book, I can't remember what it was called exactly, but it was like "Strange but True: 101 Weird Facts" or something. Can't necessarily vouch for its quality, but I had bought it at my elementary school, so one assumes the author probably did his research.

Anyways, according to the book, during the middle ages, men were (just in case you weren't aware) considered to be much more important than women. Faimlys wanted a boy, because it was a patriarchal society.

The color blue was believed to ward off evil spirits, so families who had a boy would clothe the child in blue to ward off the evil spirits.

Little girls, on the other hand, were not considered as important, and it seems the color pink was arbitrarily assigned to them.

These gender specific colors have stayed with us down the centuries, though most people are not actually aware that this is why they were originally assigned.

 

[maxben]

Personally, I get hungry when I see pink, if you know what I mean...;P

http://www.hiyoooo.com/

OT: Here's an interesting theory.

Back in the 1800s, the idea of color therapy was put forward, possibly by the same doctors who advocated bleeding and the use of leeches. Color therapists thought that patients who bathed in a certain color of light could heal physical and psychological ailments. Color therapy died when antibiotics came out and most people realized that the idea of being healed by colored light was just bunk.

It is this writer's belief that a book could be written about every one of the major colors in the color wheel. There is a cultural and psychological history that could be examined and explored in comparison to major events and trends of the day. For example, pink has been accepted as a baby girl color and is still the balloon color of choice for proud parents who want to announce the birth of their baby girl. So how did pink become accepted in our culture as a girl or feminine color?

I have asked this question repeatedly of color theorists and received no answer, so I did a little digging myself trying to come up with a plausible conclusion. And here's what I found...during World War II the Nazis used a color- & shape-coded system to keep track of their prisoners. Jews were given a yellow star of David to wear to identify them. Homosexuals were given a pink inverted triangle, which is also half a star of David. During WWII, the color pink would not have had a feminine or masculine association. It is my theory that the association of pink as a feminine color began with the use of the pink triangle back in the twentieth century by Nazi Germany. The association of pink with homosexuality could have changed or morphed into representing the feminine during this time.

[sub]http://artsociety.suite101.com/article.cfm/color__the_history_of_pink[/sub]

This.
I did a long project on the colour pink and, as posters noted above, it used to be a male colour as it was associated with the masculine red.
The Nazis decided to denote gay men with pink and the stereotype of gay men being less than "real men" made sense by the use of pink as pink is not real red.
If I remember correctly from History of Sexuality class, homosexuals in Germany tended to be overly masculine rather than feminine so the Nazi obsession with the masculine put them in danger for looking very very gay. As such, they feminized gays to separate them, again, from "real men".

 

[Tyrannowalefish_Rex]

you cant attribute to colors adjectives that personify it like dainty, fierce, masculine, etc. because it is the colors that came first

But these colours are associated with certain contexts, and they harmonize in special ways, so there is sometimes already automatically a "characterisation" of colours that may then be picked up and further moulded by convention. I think in a society shaped by military, there is a tendency to subdue all connotations to their own context, otherwise I would regard the connotation of pink with blood as rather farfetched, to be honest.
As a counterexample, think of the cherry blossom so popular in Japan. Not very menacing.

 

[maturin]

Didn't read it but usually Long answer=Right answer. So what this guy said.

It didn't actually give an answer. He said that pink was a masculine color in the early nineteen-hundreds.

Of course, the point being that there is no real reason.

He said that pink is watered down red, and red is generally associated with blood, anger and passion, dating back to the medieval concepts of colored types of bile or fluid determining personality and mood.

 

[Gretchion]

I don't know, why is black affiliated with being a goth or cool.

Red with violence, and yellow with being a coward?

Then again when you put red next to yellow people start to get hungry...??

Personally, I get hungry when I see pink, if you know what I mean...;P

Not so sure about yellow, but red is easy. Red is the color of blood, so obviously it's the first color we'd pick to associate with violence and danger.