Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Speaker 1: Valentine's a day fast approaching, so of course we have
Speaker 1: decided here to devote a few different episodes too, you
Speaker 1: could say Valentine's Day content or maybe anti Valentine's Day content. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Usually Valentine's Day comes around and we sort of begrudgingly
Speaker 1: do an anti Valentine'sday just to be like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: coming up terrible. But I've noticed this time we have
Speaker 1: like five or six topics that we have planned to
Speaker 1: really plumb the depths of different aspects of Valentine's Day
Speaker 1: and to really attack it from four different fronts and
Speaker 1: just take it out. Ye, take it out, take it out.
Speaker 1: You know what we're talking about here. We're really going
Speaker 1: to get into Valentine's Day. We're going to dust it
Speaker 1: and put it away, and we're gonna start by exploring
Speaker 1: the color pink. Yes, because pink and red are the
Speaker 1: predominant color scheme for Valentine's Day. It's the colors that
Speaker 1: just assault you come pretty much the end of January,
Speaker 1: maybe even right after Christmas. These days, you start seeing
Speaker 1: it popping up everywhere, trying to sell you that candy,
Speaker 1: try to sell you those flowers, try to sell you
Speaker 1: god knows what else, all in the name of this
Speaker 1: big commercial holiday. Yeah, I call it the pink menace.
Speaker 1: And I call it that for a couple of different reasons.
Speaker 1: Some you know, the associations with Valentine's Day, which is
Speaker 1: the sort of treacle that we we cling to, these
Speaker 1: notions of idealized love and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: But also because I just don't enjoy the color pink,
Speaker 1: and I never have. So you don't like looking at it,
Speaker 1: you don't like wearing it. It makes me feel unsettled. Okay,
Speaker 1: And this is something I'm going to point out. I
Speaker 1: think some of our female listeners will understand what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about here. There is a certain hue of pink
Speaker 1: that you will find in a gynecologist office, and it's
Speaker 1: usually this kind of mauve pink hue that you find
Speaker 1: in literature about the reproductive system, or you even see
Speaker 1: in the models of the reproductive system. Okay, I know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. That that that shade of pink.
Speaker 1: You also see on the translucent pages that go over
Speaker 1: anatomical illustrations. You see it like nice and shiny there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you particularly will see it in a gynecologiest office.
Speaker 1: And I call it vegonna pink. And it's just it's
Speaker 1: just that kind of shade of pink. That's just it
Speaker 1: doesn't have a lot of verve to it. It's a
Speaker 1: bit of a depressing pink. And also I feel like
Speaker 1: I'm in the ganna coologist office. I don't necessarily need
Speaker 1: to be um, you know, walloped over the head with
Speaker 1: this color. I know what I'm there for, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean in our culture, pink
Speaker 1: has become this huge gender thing. It's become the color
Speaker 1: for females, right, It's become fetishized, I think. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about out pink diamonds, pink firearms, pink legos, which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about a little bit. Pink salt Does that count? Uh?
Speaker 1: I feel like that is the natural colored salt, right,
Speaker 1: hillily and salt, And it's very tasty. So I will
Speaker 1: put that to the side. Beautiful cracked over a freshly
Speaker 1: baked pizza. Okay, So in this episode we're going to
Speaker 1: We're going to discuss pink. We're gonna talk about pink
Speaker 1: from a cultural and historic standpoint. We're gonna break down
Speaker 1: some of the science of pink and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and at the end of it, we're gonna reach out
Speaker 1: to the rest of you and get your input on
Speaker 1: pink as a color, as a color that appears in
Speaker 1: her surroundings, is the color that we we take on
Speaker 1: on for ourselves. How do we feel about it and
Speaker 1: how does it make others feel? Yeah, I'd like to
Speaker 1: read this quote from Elizabeth Camp. She's writing for a
Speaker 1: on magazine, and she says, pink matters because it is
Speaker 1: bound up with ways of being in the world that
Speaker 1: are partially aesthetic but also personal and political colors and
Speaker 1: code aesthetic norms that run straight through to style, personality, culture,
Speaker 1: and class. You know. Growing up, I feel that pink
Speaker 1: was never like a huge deal. Like I wasn't one
Speaker 1: of those kids that was raised with this idea like
Speaker 1: just beaten into you do not wear pink because pink
Speaker 1: is a girl's color. But on the other hand, I
Speaker 1: don't remember having a lot of paint clothes, except perhaps
Speaker 1: around Easter, you know, where you would have to have
Speaker 1: dressed and sort of pastor pastel colors and go everybody
Speaker 1: goes to church, and you get this horrible picture made
Speaker 1: and it's you know, and your your your kid, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of sunny out. You just all you want
Speaker 1: to do is get out of those church clothes, and
Speaker 1: then instead you have to stand around and stay in
Speaker 1: them and and wait for everybody to get together. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so I have kind of those connotations with with pink
Speaker 1: and some of its pastel colors, not so much that
Speaker 1: it's I guess a little bit that it would that
Speaker 1: it is feminine as well, because you end up going
Speaker 1: to you know, two junior high and then it's it's
Speaker 1: the issue of gender is huge, to the point where
Speaker 1: I remember being made fun of because my legs weren't
Speaker 1: hairy enough and therefore it was a sign of femininity
Speaker 1: and man was there, and I remember feeling bad about it, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess like I have to wear long pants all
Speaker 1: the time. So I was gonna talk to you about that. Um,
Speaker 1: but let me ask you this, does the color pink
Speaker 1: ever evoke associations with calmness or peacefulness? Well, I will
Speaker 1: say when it comes to pepto bismol. There is the
Speaker 1: there is the promise of possible peace with the color.
Speaker 1: But with that I also have a strong memory of
Speaker 1: it was either me or one of my sisters taking
Speaker 1: pepto bismol for an unsettled stomach as a kid, and
Speaker 1: then vomiting it up against the wall and onto the floor.
Speaker 1: And the floor was white carpet, so he had a
Speaker 1: nice pink stain there from where someone had had vomited. Okay,
Speaker 1: well that ties in lovely to a color called drunk
Speaker 1: tank pink. And why does a tie in so well, Well,
Speaker 1: it is a color that was used and actually I
Speaker 1: believe it's still used in some holding cells in jails.
Speaker 1: It's a bubblegum pink color. And think about a sort
Speaker 1: of maybe an unruly intoxicated person they're locked up, the
Speaker 1: cell they're put in, is that's drunk pink pink. What
Speaker 1: are the effects? Well, the idea here is that the
Speaker 1: pink is going to have a calming effect, a soothing effect,
Speaker 1: because you have not a you know, necessarily a delightful
Speaker 1: TV drunk like otis on the Andy Griffith's Show, but
Speaker 1: rather somebody who might be a little a little violent,
Speaker 1: a little a little out of it and a little perturbed.
Speaker 1: They've been apprehended and placed inside of a cell. So
Speaker 1: if there is a promise of potential calming from this color,
Speaker 1: in fact, if you have some studies that back this
Speaker 1: up as well, all the more reason to just throw
Speaker 1: a bunch of pink paint at the problem. And I
Speaker 1: hope that it's kind of a magic bullet, right, Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this was discovered in n by psychologists who figure
Speaker 1: it out that this hue of pink could really calm
Speaker 1: people down, and they used it on buses, school buses.
Speaker 1: They painted the seats pink, and they discovered that vandalism
Speaker 1: rates declined. Uh. Door to do door to door charity
Speaker 1: workers wore pink shirts in their donations rose threefold and
Speaker 1: um some some very clever football coaches even introduced the
Speaker 1: color into locker rooms. Yeah, in particular, the visitors locker
Speaker 1: room at the University of Iowa was painted pink back
Speaker 1: in seventy nine, and it was it was heavily criticized
Speaker 1: for for being you know this this means of demoralizing
Speaker 1: and also trying to to to use colors to manipulate
Speaker 1: the effectiveness of your opponents. Um. One of the key
Speaker 1: individuals that pops up in these studies is Alexander Schauss,
Speaker 1: and that's why you sometimes see the pink. This particular
Speaker 1: mode of pink referred to as shause pink, also known
Speaker 1: as Baker Miller pink, also known as passive pink, also
Speaker 1: known as p s which I like that because it
Speaker 1: sounds even more nefarious, like you're gonna use p six
Speaker 1: one eighteen against your enemies. Well, and that has sort
Speaker 1: of incarcerated sound to it as well. Right bring up
Speaker 1: the shouts is quoted as saying, even if a person
Speaker 1: tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink,
Speaker 1: he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's
Speaker 1: a tranquilizing color that SAPs your energy. Even the color
Speaker 1: bind are tranquilized by pink rooms. UM very much playing
Speaker 1: into this idea that it's it's it's like a vampire
Speaker 1: of colors. It's just SAPs your soul out of you. Um.
Speaker 1: He He conducted a couple of different studies. The most
Speaker 1: notable one was posted in the final issue of Ortho
Speaker 1: Molecular Psychiatry in nineteen this when he took a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three healthy men exposed them to cardboard squares
Speaker 1: one of them blew one of them pink, And after
Speaker 1: a full minute of staring at these, they were asked
Speaker 1: to hold their arms out in front of their bodies,
Speaker 1: you know, like a like a like a horror movie
Speaker 1: zombie or mummy or something, and you know, and see
Speaker 1: how long they could hold them out. And then their
Speaker 1: arms were put down. They were given a few seconds
Speaker 1: to recover, and then they did a second test, same thing,
Speaker 1: and he found all but two men were dramatically weaker
Speaker 1: after staring at the pink, while blue left the strength
Speaker 1: in the test intact in both the first and the
Speaker 1: second strength test. He ended up following this up in
Speaker 1: another study thirty eight men squeezing a measuring device, and
Speaker 1: again found found that they were weaker after exposure to
Speaker 1: the pink. Now, the amount of time that you're exposed
Speaker 1: to the pink is really key here, because Adam Altar,
Speaker 1: who wrote the book Drunk Tank Pink, has said that
Speaker 1: there's pretty good evidence that over a nine month period,
Speaker 1: the very aggressive prisoners at a naval prison in Seattle
Speaker 1: were much better behaved when they emerged fifteen minutes after
Speaker 1: being put in the pink drunk tank. After that fifteen
Speaker 1: minute exposure, if you go up to thirty minutes, you
Speaker 1: have the reverse effects of that calming suit and color.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, that color becomes distracting, it becomes angering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's also the o this idea that you're you're tamping
Speaker 1: everything down, You're you're kind of repressing stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: going to eventually explode, Like paint cannot constrain the beastly
Speaker 1: heart for too long, it cannot. The mary Kay of
Speaker 1: it all will just fall apart, and the beast within
Speaker 1: all of us, even mary Kay, will emerge. So we
Speaker 1: were talking about this after we we looked at some
Speaker 1: of these studies, instantly thinking about the use of pink
Speaker 1: in sport and in physical combat, Like you would think
Speaker 1: you would see more usage of pink on the playing
Speaker 1: field um and and even on the battlefield UM in
Speaker 1: lieu with some of these colors, that it wouldn't just
Speaker 1: be a matter of all, let's paint the visitor locker
Speaker 1: room pink and hopes that will will mess with their head,
Speaker 1: Like why not? Why not just full on pink uniforms
Speaker 1: and let your opponents try and play against that. You
Speaker 1: get a thirty minute advantage, right, and then they're gonna
Speaker 1: start to become aggressive. But maybe they'll be a little
Speaker 1: over aggressive. I don't know much about sports, but maybe
Speaker 1: it's like a judo thing where you know they're they're
Speaker 1: they're only ramping it up. Then you can adjust accordingly
Speaker 1: and use their aggression against it. Well, we were also
Speaker 1: talking about Dennis Rodman, who were saying seems to have
Speaker 1: co opted a lot of the more uh, the more
Speaker 1: feminine aspects of of his dress and his portrayal of himself.
Speaker 1: I mean, just think about this guy. He's a big guy.
Speaker 1: He is um. You know, if I were to be
Speaker 1: a basketball player and met him on the court, I
Speaker 1: might be like, wow, okay, this guy is formidable. But
Speaker 1: now think of Dennis Rodman wearing lipstick, or his hair
Speaker 1: is a very feminine color, or he's wearing makeup, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it's like you're playing against a
Speaker 1: ground queen. And this becomes an entirely different proposition because
Speaker 1: now Dennis Rodman is playing with coda, with gender and
Speaker 1: with hetero norms. And we know, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: this more, that nothing could be more unsettling in a
Speaker 1: society that really ascribes to gender norms than someone crossing
Speaker 1: those boundaries and playing with it, and it becomes a
Speaker 1: bit of a threat. You're turning our established symbols and
Speaker 1: motifs on their head, and it's essentially playing mind games
Speaker 1: with me. Like, suddenly I have to do a whole
Speaker 1: lot of extra computing to make sense of you on
Speaker 1: the basketball court, whereas before you were just just a
Speaker 1: big dude. And there I'm surrounded by big dudes. I'm
Speaker 1: a basketball player out there, I'm probably a big dude myself.
Speaker 1: But then this, this just throws everything in its head. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So what we're saying is make sports more interesting. Put
Speaker 1: the drag element in there. Yeah, RuPaul coaches, this is
Speaker 1: this is going to really amp up the psychological aspect
Speaker 1: of it. I would I mean, I say this a
Speaker 1: lot that I would be pretty much into any sport
Speaker 1: if it could itself be more like pro wrestling. So
Speaker 1: in pro wrestling you see lots of craze, the outfits
Speaker 1: and face paint. If if you saw more crazy outfits
Speaker 1: and face paint and say professional basketball, I would be
Speaker 1: more tempted to watch. I would be there with you
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you now, one of the things that
Speaker 1: we talked about these archetypes, uh, that that you could
Speaker 1: turn your head, is this idea that women like pink.
Speaker 1: It's completely ingrained, it's hardwired. And this, of course is
Speaker 1: an erroneous idea out there that women are inherently gravitating
Speaker 1: towards pink. And we start touched on this a bit,
Speaker 1: albeit indirectly, and when we did our episode on the
Speaker 1: color blue, because it turns out that most people prefer
Speaker 1: blue overall than any other color. That's right. I remember
Speaker 1: in that episode I mentioned that, UM that my son, uh,
Speaker 1: my wife and I we UM. We didn't say, all right,
Speaker 1: here's blue, this is the boy's color, this is the
Speaker 1: one you should like, stay away from pink. But he
Speaker 1: ends up gravitating towards blue. Yeah. And I believe that study.
Speaker 1: I know it was a paint company that funded it, UM,
Speaker 1: but I want to say it was the thirty countries
Speaker 1: that they surveyed, and it was blue first, and then
Speaker 1: I believe it was green, and then yellow was maybe
Speaker 1: the last color that that people preferred or didn't prefer
Speaker 1: very much. Pink didn't even make it onto that list,
Speaker 1: is my point. Um, So if you delve into this
Speaker 1: a little bit more, you'll see that there's a two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology,
Speaker 1: and they had one year old girls and boys that
Speaker 1: were shown pairs of identical objects like bracelets, pill boxes,
Speaker 1: and picture frames, but with one of those objects being
Speaker 1: pink and the other being a second color. Now, they
Speaker 1: were no more likely to choose pink than any other color.
Speaker 1: But after the age of two, the girls started to
Speaker 1: like pink and buy four boys were determined in their
Speaker 1: rejection of pink. And the point of this is that
Speaker 1: it is not hardwired. It is a cultural script that
Speaker 1: kids began to sworb via all of the media around them,
Speaker 1: via the ways in which their parents may address them
Speaker 1: or direct them toward things. Plus, you're growing up in
Speaker 1: an age of TV abundance. You're just constantly marketed to
Speaker 1: with products the pink for the girls, the blue or
Speaker 1: some of the color for the boys, and it's just
Speaker 1: just beaten down into your head. Um. That being said,
Speaker 1: it's weird to look back in my own childhood and
Speaker 1: having been raised very much in this age of just
Speaker 1: all the television you can stand uh and and then
Speaker 1: all the messages that are that they're on those airwaves.
Speaker 1: I distinctly remember Kinkishi muscle figures. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you remember these at all. Um, they're like little a
Speaker 1: Japanese product. I remember correctly. Uh, And it was Knkisi
Speaker 1: in Japan and in the US it was muscle men um.
Speaker 1: And they were all these kind of wild, sort of
Speaker 1: pro wrestler characters, but they had like, you know, crazy
Speaker 1: animal heads or extra limbs. They were just elaborate comic
Speaker 1: book type characters. But they were all this They are
Speaker 1: all made out of this pink binda bowl material and
Speaker 1: there was nothing, you know, you just completely accepted that
Speaker 1: they're pink. I guess they're kind of fleshy. I don't know.
Speaker 1: They were called muscle men. Yeah, the muscles and muscles
Speaker 1: are pink. We weren't called squishy non musli women. I
Speaker 1: guess maybe maybe that's the thing. Maybe there was a
Speaker 1: discussion where someone said, all right, uh, these these Knkichi
Speaker 1: guys are pretty cool, but if we're going to market
Speaker 1: him in the US, we need to name him something
Speaker 1: really mask go in to make up for the pink color.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, that's some gender performance terms. They're
Speaker 1: like musclemen. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the color pink and how it actually hung with the
Speaker 1: guys for a long time. All Right, we're back. We're
Speaker 1: talking about pink. We've already talked about some of the
Speaker 1: psychology of pink in the Science of pink. Uh. Now
Speaker 1: we're talking about ginger and pink and then specifically how
Speaker 1: it's become coded into our culture, especially here in the West. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we think about pink is just being squarely for
Speaker 1: girls and women, but in fact, um up until the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, it was just as equally worn among men
Speaker 1: and women. In the seventeen hundreds too, you can you
Speaker 1: look back at old plates and you will see that
Speaker 1: men were just as likely to wear shades of lilac
Speaker 1: and pink as a woman. So what's interesting is you
Speaker 1: get to the nineteen hundreds and you get to children, right,
Speaker 1: and this is where the coding begins. And largely in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds, you have white clothing for children,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that is because when they're very young,
Speaker 1: what do they do? They spill things all over themselves,
Speaker 1: the urinate on themselves. There's a lot of washing of clothes,
Speaker 1: and so you don't want dyes in there. But as
Speaker 1: the chemical process gets um a little bit easier for
Speaker 1: for clothes to retain die than you begin to see
Speaker 1: more colors bring up in children's clothing. Okay, so we
Speaker 1: go from basically not having colors for the children and
Speaker 1: now we have them. So yeah, suddenly colors are in
Speaker 1: play for the the young children. And uh, it's left
Speaker 1: to the fashion authorities to tell you what colors you
Speaker 1: should dress. Here are your children in? And uh, interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: since there's not an established culture of pink for girls
Speaker 1: blue for boys, and in fact, pink is historically had
Speaker 1: been used by men and it had been a masculine color.
Speaker 1: In many instances you saw advice such as the following
Speaker 1: from a June article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants
Speaker 1: department said, the generally accepted rule is pink for boys
Speaker 1: and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink,
Speaker 1: being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable
Speaker 1: for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty,
Speaker 1: is prettier for the girl. The complete reversal of of
Speaker 1: what ends up becoming the gender color standard, right, because
Speaker 1: pink is associated with red, and red is a more virile,
Speaker 1: sanguine color, like the color of blood. It's robust. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I mean you're familiar with the Game of Thrones, Yes
Speaker 1: I am. You know House Bolton, of course, yes, vicious,
Speaker 1: vicious House. Their their sickle is the flayed man. And
Speaker 1: the colors of that signal red and pink. That's the
Speaker 1: colors of taking a person's skin off. I was just
Speaker 1: about to say that's what you would find, right, little pink,
Speaker 1: little red. Now it didn't. The color of pink didn't
Speaker 1: become co opted for women until after World War Two.
Speaker 1: Now think about this, this is important. During World War Two,
Speaker 1: you have Rosie the Riveter. You have a pretty stark
Speaker 1: reversal of gender roles, right because you have now women
Speaker 1: that are in factories and they are working and they
Speaker 1: are making income because the men are having to go
Speaker 1: overseas and fight in the war exactly. So what happens
Speaker 1: after that is men return, and then there's this really
Speaker 1: intense movement for heteronormatizing the gender roles, for essentially putting
Speaker 1: women back in their place and You see that in
Speaker 1: the fashion the day, right, because you see post World
Speaker 1: War two, Um, no longer is Rosie wearing her dungarees, right,
Speaker 1: her blue dungarees. You see women in ads with nipped
Speaker 1: in waiste and they're wearing a lot of pink and
Speaker 1: a lot of product plays coming in. You see a
Speaker 1: lot of shades of pink and the products that are
Speaker 1: being offered, and the message is that the woman's house
Speaker 1: is her demain. So it's no longer like Rosie the riveter.
Speaker 1: It's more like tend to your roses. Yea. And instead
Speaker 1: of and instead of working on the machinery, suddenly you
Speaker 1: have the benefit all of all this new futuristic machinery
Speaker 1: that's coming into your kitchen and into your household for
Speaker 1: you to utilize in your traditional feminine role in the house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and hey, why not get some of that stuff in
Speaker 1: the shade of pink, especially new beauty products too. Right,
Speaker 1: you've got a pink brush to come on your hair
Speaker 1: on times a day. Um. Now, in the seventies, you
Speaker 1: do see pink taking a backseat, and some of that
Speaker 1: is because of the more feminist oriented ideas that colors
Speaker 1: should be unisex um. But then the big eighties return,
Speaker 1: and with the eighties neon colors fuchia, and you see
Speaker 1: pink kind of trickling in again as a hyper gender
Speaker 1: performing color. Yeah, because on one hand, you get the
Speaker 1: idea that you know what, well, you know, women can
Speaker 1: be scientists. Of course, women can have all these different
Speaker 1: roles in society. But not only are they strong enough
Speaker 1: to do that, they're strong enough to wear pink if
Speaker 1: they want to. Yeah. Yes, But I think I feel
Speaker 1: like some of this was really just a marketing juggernaut.
Speaker 1: And we've seen those you know of late and say legos,
Speaker 1: because no longer is that just you know, here's these
Speaker 1: primary colored legos. Now you have more girly hues of
Speaker 1: legos and pink and purple and other pastels that are
Speaker 1: being marketed. It's pretty brilliant, is now. If you have
Speaker 1: a two child family, two different genders, you don't have
Speaker 1: just one set of legos, you have to Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the same thing with like an easy bake oven type devices.
Speaker 1: I've seen those where you have the existing one, which
Speaker 1: is generally some sort of a pink kind of color scheme,
Speaker 1: and you just change it to black or blue or
Speaker 1: something or black and green and get a boy to
Speaker 1: cook a little gross things in it, right, and then
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's marketed to to those those gender stereotypes.
Speaker 1: Side note, my daughter got an easy bake oven for
Speaker 1: Christmas purple and pink, I gotta tell you, although they
Speaker 1: come in different colors, and uh, the pizza is disgusting,
Speaker 1: I've not like. I didn't think I'd ever met a
Speaker 1: pizza I didn't like, and I really I had to
Speaker 1: spit it out into the trash can. I don't know
Speaker 1: what they're using in that mix. Also worth noting in
Speaker 1: this whole uh nineteen eighties reconfusion of pink is that
Speaker 1: you also see paint being lives as a as in
Speaker 1: fashions for men, but it's oftentimes kind of wrapped in
Speaker 1: this this way of thinking, like he is so masculine,
Speaker 1: he's wearing pink. He doesn't even care. That's how masculine
Speaker 1: he is. I feel like that's what happened with purple.
Speaker 1: Remember the purple tie craze and purple shirt craze happening
Speaker 1: in the minnow sphere. Yeah, that was like the I
Speaker 1: don't I want to say, like, for some reason, why
Speaker 1: is this in my head? We just felled and like
Speaker 1: ussered this and anyway, like over the past five years,
Speaker 1: it was like, yes, we're in purple. We're doing it
Speaker 1: with style and masculinity, which is totally fine with me.
Speaker 1: I just think it's interesting to see colors genderized like that.
Speaker 1: But then I feel like a lot of that kind
Speaker 1: of gets back to this whole idea of again what
Speaker 1: the color represents, and this idea of children and pink
Speaker 1: and little girls or sugar and spice and everything nice,
Speaker 1: you know, and and boys or was it puppy tails,
Speaker 1: dogtails and yes, snail tails gross thinks slimy things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then pink it becomes this sort of confectionery color, right,
Speaker 1: and girls are like cupcakes. And not to take this
Speaker 1: too far afield, but what happens when you transform a
Speaker 1: girl into everything nice and she's all delicious spice, and
Speaker 1: she's a cupcake. It's a lot easier to walk that
Speaker 1: kid into objectification. The older she gets. She's something to
Speaker 1: be consumed or to be you know, looked at. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's something unnatural, something manufactured for consumption. And it's really
Speaker 1: weird place to wind up as a culture. Uh. If
Speaker 1: I can return to pro wrestling for just one second,
Speaker 1: of course, it can always For the last time in
Speaker 1: this episode, I do want to point out Breadth the hitman. Heart,
Speaker 1: one of the the icons of pro wrestling, always wore
Speaker 1: pink like. Sometimes it was very pink like, predominantly pink
Speaker 1: his outfit. Other times it would be like a pink
Speaker 1: and black type of setting. And a lot of times
Speaker 1: he was a guy. Sometimes he was a bad guy.
Speaker 1: But it never played into any kind like. He never
Speaker 1: did any kind of effeminine character like. It was never
Speaker 1: playing into feminine pink. It was just his last name
Speaker 1: is Heart and Valentine's days pink, So he just wore
Speaker 1: pink so well. And if we've learned anything from David Eagelman,
Speaker 1: we know that the unconscious is really at or care right,
Speaker 1: So if you're named Heart, maybe you would say, ah, yes,
Speaker 1: hearts are pink and red. And I assume that role
Speaker 1: for myself. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: back to camp Um. In her article and and On
Speaker 1: real quick and UM, I'm gonna read this quote, she
Speaker 1: says the exclusion of boys from a wide range of
Speaker 1: perfectly viable, even important forms of dress and play because
Speaker 1: of their association with femininity is bad enough, but in
Speaker 1: a patriarchal society, the confinement of girls to a limited
Speaker 1: set of permissible ways of being is considerably worse. In particular,
Speaker 1: there is empirical evidence, such as the research from the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan, to suggest that highly gendered clothing can
Speaker 1: serve as a trigger for something called stereotype threat, meaning
Speaker 1: that girls and women end up performing worse than they
Speaker 1: could on test of stereotypically male abilities such as mathematics
Speaker 1: and engineering. Now, um, I know that stuff Mom never
Speaker 1: told you has talked about stereotype threat quite a bit
Speaker 1: in particularly in the fields of stem science, technology, engineering,
Speaker 1: and math. But this is all part and parcel, this
Speaker 1: idea that you're performing gender, you're doing via color, via
Speaker 1: the things that you wear. And if girls are bad
Speaker 1: at math, as Barbie once said, when you pulled a
Speaker 1: chord on her um, then they're primed to be bad
Speaker 1: at math. And that's why all of this matters, All
Speaker 1: this sort of symbolism. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it really
Speaker 1: gets down to symbolism. And I'll make sure to link
Speaker 1: to our previous episode on the power of symbols on
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode at Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot Com because a lot of the same
Speaker 1: energy as at work. We establish all these meanings for
Speaker 1: these symbols and then also just the colors of themselves,
Speaker 1: and then our brain is interacting with those symbols at
Speaker 1: at a subconscious level. I mean, they're really controlling, especially
Speaker 1: when you look at Victoria's Secret Okay, which we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in the next episode too. Um, if
Speaker 1: you look at something called Pink Nation, which is a
Speaker 1: range of underwear for tweens, and it's like this crazy
Speaker 1: you know, Futia Pink Feller thing, and it's like these
Speaker 1: thongs and stuff like that, you know, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's unsettling because you do see that you see all
Speaker 1: of this stuff being uh codified and put out there
Speaker 1: and consumed by the general public. And so you know,
Speaker 1: again going back to David Eagleman, so much of this
Speaker 1: is working on an unconscious level. You know. There's an
Speaker 1: article in The Atlantic definitely worth checking out titled will
Speaker 1: a major sports team everwhere pink? That I found pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: It does point that in the nineteenth century, uh, you
Speaker 1: did see uh pin State uh deciding on pink and
Speaker 1: black for the schools and therefore the football team's colors,
Speaker 1: and they later changed it to blue and white. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, you do not see pink in
Speaker 1: any kind of major usage with a with a major
Speaker 1: sports team, except during October or Pink Cober as it's
Speaker 1: become branded. Where pink, of course, is the color that
Speaker 1: has been taken on by the breast cancer awareness groups,
Speaker 1: and to help promote that cause, you'll see sports teams
Speaker 1: adding some pink to their to their outfits, wearing pink bands. Uh.
Speaker 1: In wrestling, sorry, I came back to one more time,
Speaker 1: they'll add like a pink rope, you know, and then
Speaker 1: wrestlers will have like pink have have pink outfits that
Speaker 1: normally they wouldn't have the pink color scheme, and all
Speaker 1: that actually just serves to cement the idea that pink
Speaker 1: is a feminine color and if a male is to
Speaker 1: wear it, then he's just doing it out of a
Speaker 1: show of strength and bravery, uh, you know, for his
Speaker 1: his female counterparts, although breast cancer does effect men too,
Speaker 1: albeit none at the same rates. Um. Yeah, it's interesting
Speaker 1: that that it is then used so effectively in that
Speaker 1: campaign because it's not a color that's uh, that's sort
Speaker 1: of a boring color. It's really captures your attention, and
Speaker 1: so it is put to good use in that campaign,
Speaker 1: and as you say, it's some further cements the idea
Speaker 1: that it's genderized. And then there's this additional idea that
Speaker 1: maybe there's a pink pride going on, you know, via
Speaker 1: the pink lego set, Like maybe it's a hey, well,
Speaker 1: girls can be engineers too, and they you know, we'll
Speaker 1: just put some pink on it and encourage them to
Speaker 1: do it. But in my mind, I don't know why
Speaker 1: you would have to associate pride with it. Uh, Why
Speaker 1: wouldn't you just encourage the child to play with whatever
Speaker 1: the engineering building block set in the first place in
Speaker 1: a very non gendered way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean unless
Speaker 1: it's you know, the point where they're already completely control
Speaker 1: by the symbols in place. Yeah, and then you know,
Speaker 1: my daughter certainly went through a brief pink phase, and
Speaker 1: I would say that she's pretty well balanced in whatever.
Speaker 1: You would say that the colors of that symbolize being
Speaker 1: a girl and a boy. And she was j from
Speaker 1: Ninjago for Halloween. She she was so excited to be
Speaker 1: the blue ninja. UM, So I have hopes there because
Speaker 1: you know, we've tried to tell her that this is
Speaker 1: these sorts of things are available to you no matter
Speaker 1: what your gender is. Is there a pink ninjago. There
Speaker 1: is not a pink ninjaga. There is uh Nia who
Speaker 1: is um. She's not a ninja, she's a samurai. Um.
Speaker 1: And so she's a bit apart from the rest of
Speaker 1: the ninja. But you know she's a character on there.
Speaker 1: But that my daughter is not interested in her. She's
Speaker 1: interested in Jay. No. She was red the question that
Speaker 1: we have about pink, and we're not trying to um
Speaker 1: blow your mind. No, I was gonna say, we're not
Speaker 1: trying to whittle pink down to nothing. But the question
Speaker 1: that comes up is does pink even exist? Which is
Speaker 1: kind of not a fair question, but we'll go ahead
Speaker 1: and ask you right it. I mean it definitely made
Speaker 1: the rounds. Uh, this particular headline because at surface level
Speaker 1: it's just nice and mind blowing and makes you really
Speaker 1: love science. Uh. If you're the type of person who
Speaker 1: loves science without reading beyond the headline, um, then then yeah,
Speaker 1: you just think, whoa pink doesn't exist? I see it,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't exist. That's blowing my mind. That's like,
Speaker 1: you know, but but when you actually get into it,
Speaker 1: it's a bit more complex than that. And but it's
Speaker 1: also a bit more mind blowing than that when you
Speaker 1: start talking about how we perceive colors and ultimately how
Speaker 1: we perceive the details of what we take to be reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, here's the simplest way to say this is that, um,
Speaker 1: there is no single wavelength of visible light that appears pink.
Speaker 1: So think of Roy jeep it right, your red, your orange, yellow, green, blue,
Speaker 1: and to go and buy it. That is all the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum of light. There is no pink within it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't see pink wavelengths of light. Something looks pink
Speaker 1: because certain wavelengths of light are reflected and others are
Speaker 1: absorbed by the pigments. Pink is a reflective color, not
Speaker 1: a transmissive color. You perceive it because your brain translates
Speaker 1: light bouncing off of the pink object. And moreover, it's
Speaker 1: a bit of color mixing by your brain. So consider this.
Speaker 1: At the back of your eyeball, specifically on your retina,
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of rod and cones. Now, rods
Speaker 1: are just all interested in the amount of light that's
Speaker 1: coming in, right, they're light sensitive, and colins, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, are all interested in color. But the cones
Speaker 1: come in only three types, red, green, and blue sensitive.
Speaker 1: So what's a pink to do? Well? There has to
Speaker 1: be some color mixing by those cones. So if you
Speaker 1: think about it, you have blue cones working with green
Speaker 1: cones to produce scion, and then they work with red
Speaker 1: cones to produce the color magenta. Now, if you want
Speaker 1: a true pink, then you have to have, um, those
Speaker 1: cones firing just partially, those um, those blue and green
Speaker 1: ones firing partially, but the red ones fully firing. And
Speaker 1: that's when you get a bit of you know, messaging
Speaker 1: to your brain. Hey, we've mixed this together, and that's
Speaker 1: pink that you're looking at right now, which is kind
Speaker 1: of mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean to throw a
Speaker 1: little more context to um. When you see white, that
Speaker 1: means all the cones are activated. Black, none of the
Speaker 1: cones are activated. And if you want to see gray,
Speaker 1: that's all three cones activated, but only partially. So similar
Speaker 1: in a way to pink. So you think of gray
Speaker 1: and pink in similar terms. Yeah, I mean same if
Speaker 1: you look at a yellow banana, right, Um, your eyelax
Speaker 1: yellow sensitive cones. So then the yellow of that banana
Speaker 1: activates your red and green cones and they fire together
Speaker 1: and then they send a message to your brain. So
Speaker 1: it really is like having a little artist in your
Speaker 1: brain there, But ultimately it's it's all kind of like
Speaker 1: having a little artist in your brain in a sense.
Speaker 1: Something I don't want to feed into the idea that
Speaker 1: we're just brains, uh in a body or a ride
Speaker 1: around a horse. We've talked about the mind body connection
Speaker 1: plenty of times, but essentially blind brain depending on these uh,
Speaker 1: these feeble side organs to relay information to it and
Speaker 1: convince it what the outside world consists of. Yeah and uh.
Speaker 1: In a Scientific American blog entitled stop this absurd Warm Pink,
Speaker 1: the author explains that photons and neurons interplanning with cones
Speaker 1: in the eye and the perception of the brain area
Speaker 1: is pretty much a magic trick. That any color is
Speaker 1: on her head. And this is from the article. It says,
Speaker 1: pink is real or it is not, but it's just
Speaker 1: as real or not real as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
Speaker 1: and violet. So, in other words, probably shouldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: quibble about whether or not pink exists. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people were really quick to dismiss it and uh
Speaker 1: and gast it aside and use this against pink. They are,
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm tempted to I'm not a fan
Speaker 1: of pink, but hey, it's there, it's around, it's it's
Speaker 1: peppt alebismal right, it's it's in the color code. Do
Speaker 1: you think some people might have leaped to this as
Speaker 1: well because they identify pink as a feminine color and
Speaker 1: would therefore see this as an attack on on the
Speaker 1: female gender. And I mean, I suppose you could choose
Speaker 1: a subtext like that out of it and say it's
Speaker 1: so weak it doesn't even exist pink. Yeah, or maybe
Speaker 1: they have, maybe they have some sort of agenda against
Speaker 1: other um groups out there, or maybe against just Bret
Speaker 1: Hart in general. I don't know. I think it is
Speaker 1: the Bret Hart conspiracy. Yeah, all right, So there you go.
Speaker 1: There's our exploration of pink, and hopefully this episode itself
Speaker 1: was what was in the pink was pink in the
Speaker 1: sense that just exactly the way we we meant to
Speaker 1: h do it. That's right, because the at them all
Speaker 1: and you have in the pink. Originally in that like
Speaker 1: the top of something like you know, it's in the
Speaker 1: pink at the top of its class, but then later
Speaker 1: on it began to take on associations with good health. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was reading that it's possible that it had. It
Speaker 1: also ties into fox hunting jackets as well, which were
Speaker 1: more red. Right, but again the associations between red and pink.
Speaker 1: There's Bolton territory where it's the colors of tearing something apart,
Speaker 1: so it would be you know, in keeping with Wow.
Speaker 1: That was nice that that brought it full circle. Hey,
Speaker 1: in the meantime, if you want to catch up on
Speaker 1: other episodes we've recorded, if you want to check out
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode and check out the
Speaker 1: links also include some links to some of these outside
Speaker 1: sources we've been talking about. Go to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. You'll find
Speaker 1: all the podcast, all the blog post, all the videos,
Speaker 1: links oide to our social media accounts, anything you could desire.
Speaker 1: And if you have pink hued thoughts that you would
Speaker 1: like to share with us, we would love to hear them.
Speaker 1: You can send them to Blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. For more on Thiss and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.