[scrypt]

We all know that the assignment of gender to objects tends to be arbitrary.  If not, then the French language might prove to be suburbanite-disturbing (cf. la jeep).

 
As it turns out, the same level of institutionally enforced caprice applies to color.
 
Gender assignations of color are entirely arbitrary. If the goal is not to be accosted in the street for wearing the wrong hue to represent your artificial social group (the gang equivalent of wearing burgundy in the wrong part of L.A.), then blue is safer for men. 
 
But if the idea is to emphasize gender in any literal, scientific or historical way, then your tattooed-bicep'd blue or edible-gartered pink will only jilt you for something, uh, brighter in the long run.
 
Until the 1940s, pink and blue were either arbitrary assignations for gender or served as opposite gender signifiers from the ones applied today.
 
Here's my favorite article on the subject thus far.
 
Strange to think that I wrote about social object orientation on Head-fi eleven years ago ("A Disturbing Behind-the-Gender Leer at DAPs").

 

[Argax]

Thanks for sharing. This topic is really interesting as I always hated being tagged with colors as a kid. Generally, I didn't like blue or pink but other hues. I think one of the main reason people choose those colors is because they are raised to do so.

 

[mutabor]

Quote:

We all know that the assignment of gender to objects tends to be arbitrary.  If not, then the French language might prove to be suburbanite-disturbing (cf. la jeep).

 
Well, in Russian as in French every noun has a gender. But grammatical gender has nothing to do with perception of an object. Grammatical gender is more connected to a word structure. For example, nouns which end with a vowel "a" are feminine in Russian. 

 

[billybob_jcv]

Vive la différence!

 

[proton007]

I don't think the language analogy works.
Genders are assigned to objects only in languages that have the concept of grammatical gender.
 
Colors, however, are different, and they don't need the support of a linguistic structure to be in place.
 
The preference for certain colors, has been studied both with a biological and cultural basis. It seems that while preferences are biological, their propagation is cultural.
This means that while the majority of women may like colors in the red spectrum, those women who don't still have to follow because of cultural norms.
The same goes with men, who prefer colors in the blue spectrum.

 

[scrypt]

Quote:

 
Well, in Russian as in French every noun has a gender. But grammatical gender has nothing to do with perception of an object. Grammatical gender is more connected to a word structure. For example, nouns which end with a vowel "a" are feminine in Russian. 

Mutabor:
 
That vanishing breed, our creak-enhanced longtime Head-fi denizens (such as your lonesome) might point out I tend not to be serious, and that the phrase to which you're responding -- like much of what I write -- is meant to be a grotesque non sequitur:
 
Quote:

We all know that the assignment of gender to objects tends to be arbitrary.  If not, then the French language might prove to be suburbanite-disturbing (cf. la Jeep).

 
French nouns are only gendered in the literal sense in the humorist's imagination -- in this case, in a science-fiction round of what-if.  The phrase you've half-unpacked is actually saying this: 
 
In the literal sense, gendered nouns are abstract -- machined parts intended to snap in place in particular systems of grammatical coherence.  If they weren't, and the objects to which they referred really did have specific genders, then our world would be even stranger than it is already.
 
My point was not that the linguistic assignment of genders is actually parallel to physical gender, but that the arbitrary assignment of gender to sartorial color choices -- which certain evolutionary psychologists (and other zealots who seem incapable of distinguishing between the signifiers of cultural consensus and natural law) then posit are a matter of science -- is equally artificial. 
 
For more on the idea of using cultural signifiers to naturalize the language and thought patterns of consumer culture, see Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia and Roland Barthes's Mythologies (if you haven't already), particularly the last essay in Barthes.  You don't need to subscribe to Adorno or Barthes' sociopolitical views to understand their analysis of the ways in which nationalism and consumerism invest manufacturing choices with the weight of natural law through the construction of linguistic systems of association.  You can hear it in the Apple slogan, It just works.
 
You can also hear it at work in statements like this (overheard just prior to my posting):
 
Quote:

Pink's for girls and blue's for boys -- that's just the way it is.  Always has been, always will be.

 
(Always has been, as in, prior to 1940?  As in, visible in the sartorial choices of 19th century Aboriginal cultures?  If you say so, mein Ke-mo ca-sa-ba!)
 
Whether one (and by one, I mean that foont over there in the pink tux) lives in France, Russia or the States, whatever reinforces certain cultural suppositions is deemed to be fact.  By contrast, my invitation to imagine a world in which every gendered noun in French denotes an actual object's physical gender is only a mocking one: 
 
To reimagine your Jeep, for example, which -- in a universe where evolutionary psychology proved to be the Krazy Glue of existence -- might crouch on all fours in your garage waiting to be impregnated by your 1989 le Rambler through its comely exhaust pipe.  And all to continue the line of genetic purity once wrought by American Motors.

 

[Hi-Finthen]

Quote:

Vive la différence!

That's what S/He said , my good Joker ~
 
-  if you catch what I'm sprayin'  !