It’s perfectly fine to love pink, and just as fine to dislike it. But forcing that preference onto someone else? Not so much.
This Redditor’s 5-year-old daughter has made it clear she’s not a fan of the color. Her grandad’s partner, however, simply refuses to accept it. In her latest attempt to “fix” the child’s taste, she planned a surprise pink-themed party—where every inch of the space, from the balloons to the tableware, looked like it had been dipped in strawberry frosting and bubblegum.
Luckily, the girl’s mom found out just in time and quickly put a stop to it. Though not without some family drama, of course. Read the full story below.
The 5-year-old girl was well known for hating pink
Image credits: serenkonata / Envato Elements (not the actual photo)
So when her grandad’s partner decided to throw a pink-themed party, it ended about as well as you’d expect
Image credits: shurkin_son / Freepik (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Boshoku / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: DaughterPartyThrow
Image credits: PNW Production / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Pink became a “girly” color less than 100 years ago
Although many people are pushing back against the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, the association is still cemented into our brains. After all, it continues to be the default for gender reveal parties, dominates toy aisles, and colors beauty product packaging.
But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, this color coding is a relatively new concept.
Surprisingly, it used to be the complete opposite. A look at a 1918 article from the American trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department reveals the following: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
Earlier, in 1884, it was standard for boys to wear dresses until the age of seven, as it was considered gender-neutral. In the 21st century, however, this is often seen as a rebellious act against societal norms.
“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, told Smithsonian Magazine. Having explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years, she explained that, at one point, young children, regardless of gender, wore white dresses until around age six.
“What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’” Paoletti said.
The association of pink with girls and blue with boys took hold in the 1940s, driven by American consumer preferences and marketing trends. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti noted. And by the 1950s, pink had become strongly associated with femininity, though “tomboy” clothing was still acceptable for play.
This trend took a pause between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, largely due to the women’s liberation movement, which rejected hyper-feminine fashion and embraced a unisex look. Paoletti even found that for two years in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog didn’t feature any pink toddler clothing.
In the 1980s, prenatal testing became widely available, allowing parents to learn the sex of their baby before birth. This, in turn, fueled a resurgence of gendered clothing and products, as expectant parents began shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise, from diapers and baby clothes to strollers and toys. The rise of consumerism only reinforced these trends, leading us to where we are today.
Now, many parents face the question of how to raise their children: should they dress them according to societal norms, or allow them to fully express themselves?
“One thing I can say now is that I’m not real keen on the gender binary—the idea that you have very masculine and very feminine things,” Paoletti said. “The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about. And there is a growing demand for neutral clothing for babies and toddlers now, too.”
Some readers agreed that the mom was right to cancel the party
Others, however, argued that refusing to like a color was no different from forcing someone to love it
