Opti

A good friend of mine was really into Anime in high school. He used to love fooly cooly. This pretty much sums it up for me.


I watched a movie called Akira and enjoyed it, not much anime experience most of you though.

triple88a

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Joe Perez

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So, this is masculine then?





Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?




What an adorable girl!

Except that's not a girl. It's Franklin D. Roosevelt (arguably one of America's more badass presidents, and the only elected democrat ever to fight against socialism) wearing his pretty white dress in 1884.

"It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing," says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. "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.’ "

Strong preferences for gender/color segregation didn't start to develop until the early 20th century.

And they weren't what you might expect.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, "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."

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. retailers. Preferences were by no means universal, and certain convictions were noted concerning what we would today consider "gender-neutral" colors such as yellow. But here's what they published:



Hmmmmmm.



So how did we end up where we are today? Toss of a coin, mostly.

As industrial output from textile and clothing manufacturers boomed in the late 1940s, the clothing industry as a whole decided to pull a Hallmark, and adopt a uniform standard for boy's vs. girl's clothing, the reasons for this being fairly obvious: With rigidly defined standards, young parents whose second child was of a different gender than the first would now need to go out and buy a completely separate new wardrobe for them, rather than simply passing on all of the apparel from the first child to the second as had been the universal trend until that time.

In other words, it's a marketing scheme. And a pretty good one at that.



I'm just old enough to remember the tail end of the original post-hippie feminist movement in the US, which brought with it not merely a trend towards the undoing of post WWII-era chromatic segregationism , but an actual folding-over the feminine ideal stereotype beyond neutral and into "masculine" territory. As they had done a few decades earlier, retailers picked up on this trend, actively marketing "boyish" toys and clothing as being suited for little girls. In fact, for a while in the early 70s, you'd be hard-pressed to find any pink clothing at all from the major retailers.





Of course, times change. By the late 80s, we were swinging back in the direction of pink vs blue. Although I do seem to recall quite a lot of pink and purple flying around during the glam-rock / hair-metal era, which was most decidedly NOT a feminine trend.



(Yes, young 'uns, rock stars used to dress like that. And not all of them turned out to be Freddie Mercury who, it should be noted, is generally seen dressed in white.)


It wasn't just the rock stars, either. Anybody remember when Apple Computer released its own (short-lived) fashion lineup in 1986?



Seriously. You can't make this stuff up. And this was back when Apple was actually cool for doing awesome ****, not for pandering to hipsters:





So where does that leave us?

Black / grey are pretty manly colors*. Blue is a stereotypically manly color. Green is an extremely manly color (it's associated with huge CGI explosions in outer space, ecoplasm, The Borg, The Matrix, some football team in Wisconsin, and who knows what else.)

I present you with the most manly thing imaginable:



* = those pedantic physicists in the audience who will point out that black and grey are not colors can go **** themselves on the jagged, magical horn of the pony depicted above. Black appears in the Pantone catalog, and that makes it a color.





But I totally understand what you're saying about ponies being a girly thing.

I'm just not sure what "girly" is anymore.

I mean, looking through the lens of contemporary youth culture, I gather that a girl who watches football, plays FPS videogames, and can name at least four different pro wrestlers is considered to be pretty damn cool.


And I don't see anyone calling Danica Patrick or Christmas Abbott "gay."



I came across this informational diagram while researching this post:





Now I just have to figure out what the deal is with the Japanese cartoons. That one is even more confusing than the ponies...

Full_Tilt_Boogie

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Random **** Ive made recently:

Scrappy Jack

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That is one BADASS Renault!

Pen2_the_penguin

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That's an MP5

Full_Tilt_Boogie

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I know, no MP5 in CSGO.

Strangely enough they did include this



and this

2ndGearRubber

Gender roles suck. I like a strong female role in a relationship. Hard to find these days.

triple88a

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Pinky

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Oh, what, like those dudes aren't cool as **** and totally getting laid by Real Girls??

Pen2_the_penguin

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this thread is getting so lol

triple88a

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I see this thread got a new title.

shuiend

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I go on vacation for 3 days with out internet and this is what I come back to. A picture thread about guys in dresses. **** you all. There is only 1 acceptable dress for a MAN to wear.

2ndGearRubber

I could see wearing a skirt. Seems like a good thing to wear for an autox event. All the miatas parked side by side, and the dudes in skirts, talking about baking, and make-up, and whatever the hell women talk about.

Seriously though, it seems like it would be very cool, temperature wise. However, erection coverage would be poor.

mgeoffriau

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2ndGearRubber

Story of my life...

viperormiata

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buffon01

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I was bored so I did this... I'm surprised I didn't see something like earlier

Joe Perez

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buffon01

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It's just part from Swift's Should'v Known (or whatever is called) and Mystikal's Shake Yo ***... I found it funny when I heard both songs.