Free Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

it would. One reason for my indifference was that the adorableness factor took over. All baby clothes are adorable, whoever they're meant for (and in the end, of course, they're meant for the parents). All remind you of how vulnerable an infant is, how wholly incompetent and in need of adult largess. You don't look at blue clothes and think "strong" or pink clothes and think "fragile." You look at everything in these micromatized dimensions and think, "How precious! How ridiculous! What was evolution thinking of?"
I also consoled myself with the knowledge that the association of

     

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pink with girls and blue with boys is fairly recent. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the color codes were less absolute than they are today, but if anything, pink was likelier to be put on boys and blue on girls than the reverse. So though we may at this point be convinced that one color is inherently feminine and the other masculine, the conviction clearly is nonsense. (If you want to spend a few minutes on pleasant mental thumb-twiddling, you can make up plausible fables to justify either interpretation, to wit, that blue, in lying on the high-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum, is a more appropriate color for those high-energy boys, or, alternatively, that blue, being a color of cool objects such as ice and water, better suits the supposedly sedate nature of girls.) The arbitrariness of the distinction gives me comfort and lets me think, Eh, let's not get too frazzled over this one. When it comes to girls' clothing, I'm less opposed to pink than I am to dresses, for the simple reason that I hated dresses and skirts as a child. I hated the way they impeded my mobility and playground power, and I hated the fear I had while wearing them that with one stiff breeze I would be exposed to the world, with no choice afterward but to slip quietly into a permanent vegetative state.
Yet if there's one thing about the pink-blue dichotomy that annoys me, it's the unidirectional manner in which we sometimes let it slide. It's fine to dress a girl in blue, but think about pink on a boy. Think hard about subjecting your son to girl clothes. Think about dressing him in a pink T-shirt, and even you, my most rad-chic mother, will hesitate and, in compromise, reach instead for the yellow shirt with the duck on it. None of this is surprising or limited to babies, of course. A woman can wear stovepipe trousers or blue jeans or a farmer's bib or tails and a top hat and so what she's just exercising her options as a consumer; but if a man puts on a skirt he'd better be ready to pick up a bagpipe and blow. We've known this for years, but it's still a nuisance to know it. "I guarantee that even if you were given a case of free diapers and they happened to be pink, you would use them for gift wrapping before you would put them on your firstborn son ," Vicki Iovine writes in her very amusing book, The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy . "It's an illness, I know, and we could all keep our therapists busy for weeks over this issue of gender stereotypes, but it's the truth." When I first read that line, I thought in irritation, She wouldn't say that about using a box of

     

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free blue diapers for your firstborn daughter; yet I knew that for all her flippant shoulder-shrugging, Iovine was right. You don't dress your first or second or twelfth-born son in pink diapers, unless you are a mother in a Hollywood horror movie who will soon be revealed as having Medea-sized intentions.
So what exactly are we afraid of when we fear polluting a boy with pink? Are we worried that we might turn him gay? The evidence strongly suggests that sexual orientation has little or nothing to do with one's upbringing, and in any event gay sons love their mothers, so what's the problem there? Is it the usual misogyny, the association of masculine with "fully human" and "quality controlled," and feminine with "circa human," the ''chipped goods on