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Until a few minutes ago, I'd never heard of "pinkifying", either. Here, I'll make one up that will be instantly recognizable: Masculinizing.



Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy machinery, computers, video games, etc.

This surprised me. My stereotype of boys is that they like things which leads directly to professions such as politic, business, engineering, policing or war. While my steteotypes for girls would seem to lead to low professional value activities in comparison, like house-wife, florist, artist, hair dresser/makeup artist, care taker. With the exception of fashion and lucrative care taking jobs like doctor, the rest doesn't pay well.

I make nothing of this, I think it might be a telling observation, but I'm not making any argument of it. I do find it intetesting. What would be other people's stereotype for boys vs girls about what we might think they "like"? I think that's a good exercise, and a good place to start better understanding the problems related to them.


Yes, liking cute, pink things is a common girl stereotype.

Liking rough sports, guns, cars, and having a lot of testosterone are male stereotypes, among others.

If you need a visual thing you can do to something to make men like it more, you could paint it with racing stripes or hunter/army camo. It doesn't lend itself to a pithy word easily, but it's the same idea.

I'm not saying it's right to stereotype anyone. I'm saying that it's not eye-opening that it's easy to understand a stereotype about one and then fail to come up with something similar for the other.


I think its definitly not irrelevant though. The fact is, my bias is weaker for boys, at least I have to assume, since I need to think harder to come up with it. If this is true at large, it could be that boys are held to lesser expectations of conformance to a strict set of behaviors and interests.

I also find it interesting how once I do come up with the stereotypes, they do seem to lead right into the current job ratios.

Now, I don't know the cause of the stereotypes, they could be observations of nature, or creations of nurture, but I do find they tell a bit of a story.

Not eye-opening I'll admit, but an interesting detail.


I think it's a useful term, for sake of discussion


It's a real term. -ify is a productive suffix in English that can combine with nouns and some ajectives to create a verb. N-ify means "make like N, or endow with N, somehow"; Adj-ify is "make Adj".

Dictionaries do not exhaustively list every possible combination of a word with every applicable prefix and suffix.




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