Since you are evidently serious about these claims, pay attention. No one had to figure out what colors are masculine or feminine in the way that people figured out that the planets orbit the sun. People assign gender to colors by association. It’s not by logical necessity or scientific observation or experiment.
You are competing in a game of association, nothing more.
See why it can be so difficult for a female to answer some of these threads? We’re much too rational and time-bound to play boys’ games. As an aside, how many of you had a pink shirt when that was the fashion?
Indeed I did provide grounds for building and you have indeed provided grounds for levelling.
Yes, whatever is on top is manish, you know this to be true in your heart of hearts. Being on top signifies dominance. A feather isn’t always on top of a hat the way the sky is always on top of the earth. The earth is green and the ocean/sky is blue. I don’t mind the ocean being associated with masculinity. In addition, the male fertilizes and nourishes the female with rain, you see, the ancients were right, their relationship is akin to man and woman. The woman is tied to the earth, hence mother earth green and father sky blue. The woman is a more earthy being, concerned with practicalities and reaslisms. The male is concerned with theoreticalities and idealisms. He is more spiritual than the woman, the more sensual and grounded of the two beasts, she is the maker of nests, the males heart cannot be so easily tied down. Blue and yellow are celestial spirit. Pink and especially green are terrestrial matter. Green is festive, lighthearted, playful and earthy, blue is deep, contemplative, serious and spiritive, otherworldly.
The sky vs the earth distinction is more fundamental than any planets.
Not only that, but I’m attempting to assess the inherent, intrinsic personality of each color.
Some associations are more fundamental than others.
Go build your nest and leave philosophy and science to us.
I’ll admit to rocking the pink button-up on occasion a few (ten-eleven) years back. I wore it unbuttoned over a White T-Shirt, honestly, to this day I still don’t think that it looked too bad. I can recollect getting a date with at least one young lady (I was a young guy) wearing that shirt.
“All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives us power. If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them.” (Lao Tzu)
precisionintermedia.com/color.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism
Some associations are more common, shared, or predominant than others. That’s it.
Given the time and the resources, you can condition people to think whatever you want about colors. Associations are by definition arbitrary. There’s nothing true or necessary about them. Even so, they are meaningful.
Lucis, this seems to be your essential argument for the inherent masculinity of the colour blue:
I must say I find this argument relatively persuasive. However, I think you make one very basic mistake. You have yourself expressed some form of awareness of it when you said, “yellow and blue (even though they’re opposites) are masculine colors” (emphasis added). The thing is that colours are relative, and indeed spread out between two opposite poles: red and violet. Now let’s have a look at the six basic colours. I will put your associations, if any, behind them between brackets.
This is in order of decreasing frequency, and thereby of increasing wavelength. Now if we compare green and yellow, you will see that, as far as frequency is concerned, green is always on top. Therefore, green should, according to your reasoning, be a more masculine colour than yellow. You might counter this by saying that greater wavelength, not higher frequency, makes a colour more masculine; but you will see that if we should then compare blue and green, green will always be on top and thereby a more masculine colour than blue.
Lao Tan also referred to his philosophy as the feminine counterpart to Confucian masculinity (or his diciples did). Ah yes, it should come as no surprise you’re a proponent of Taoism, like the matador tames and makes a fool of the bull, I am aware of your sly, subtle and… effeminate tactics. Humility isn’t power, pride is power, or at least the illusion of.
This isn’t an argument, it’s an excuse for not having one. Sauwelios gave me an argument. Associations, arbitrary, really? Hat isn’t to head what glove is to hand?
I agree with these color descriptions, they seem to correlate with my own.
The point was about the association between dominance and being on top, not about femininity.
I would question your sense of awareness – I am not a proponent of Taoism. I simply remembered the quotation after reading your post. It is irrelevant whether I agree with it or not. I don’t try to be sly or subtle so much as precise. But you stray from the topic.
I’ll try again.
An association is the pairing of two or more concepts.
Associations do not depend on logical relationships between concepts.
Therefore, associations themselves are never wrong.
Moreover, people develop different associations due to unique experiences and differing environmental stimuli.
Therefore, associations are not necessary facts about the world.
No need, some of my associations were deductive and some were inductive, go back and check.
Moreover, people develop similar associations due to shared experiences and similar environmental stimuli.
Interesting, Sauwelios, as you pointed out, I noticed this flaw in my reasoning. How to reconcile… to be continued.
Oh I see, you can’t see how colors could be anything but what they are. Not literally, perhaps, but figuratively, definitely. There is a logic to poetry.
Right, happiness being associated with high notes and sadness with low, is cultural, infact, everything is cultural, everything, including you saying everything is cultural (I’m putting words in your mouth).
Yeah, you’re right, there’s no correlation between the word amore and, amore. Amore may as well sound like ozgoth or crabop.
There are broad trends which Lucis is correct to point out but these trends do not hold as absolutes. For example, the Egyptian sky god (Nut) is female whereas the earth god (Geb) is male. It is an unusual inversion but it is hardly the only one of its type (merely the most famous). Likewise, Amaterasu is the Japanese goddess of the sun. So saying that the sky=blue=male or that the sun=male=yellow doesn’t hold true in all instances. Likewise, you have the Christian tradition in the West where the Virgin Mary is heavily associated with the color blue. Since she occupies the effective place of a mother goddess, you have blue associated with the feminine in this situation as well.
Thanks for the history lesson, but this was already addressed in the OP.
You take just about anything and read male or female qualities into it. It’s just an ad-hoc justification for ad-hoc symbolism. The sky doesn’t have a penis, nor does the ground have a pussy (though it might have some holes that could fool ya).
Maybe this Wikipedia excerpt will be of help:
[size=95]The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to (can be detected by) the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation in this range of wavelengths is called visible light or simply light. A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 390 to 750 nm.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400–790 THz. A light-adapted eye generally has its maximum sensitivity at around 555 nm (540 THz), in the green region of the optical spectrum (see: luminosity function). The spectrum does not, however, contain all the colors that the human eyes and brain can distinguish. Unsaturated colors such as pink, or purple variations such as magenta, are absent, for example, because they can only be made by a mix of multiple wavelengths.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum][/size]
You might argue that unsaturated colours are feminine whereas the colours contained in the visible spectrum are masculine. That would mean you’d have to retract your claim that green be a feminine colour, though.
Yeah, there are some notable exceptions, but overall…
Is violet/blue male and red/orange female or vice versa? Hmmm, where is pink on this color spectrum?
I’d say–
Does this make logical sense? Probably not. One pole should be masculine and the other feminine. Increasing femine and decreasing masculine or increasing masculine and decreasing feminine as you move from one side of the spectrum to the other. I have no explanation for this.
Are the darker colors (violet - green) femine or masculine? Are lighter colors (red - yellow) feminine or masculine?
On the one hand, males are strong, powerful, bold (red - yellow), females are subtle, sly and flimsy (red - yellow).
On the other hand, males are cold, stoic, cerebral (violet - green), females are passionate, flamboyant and extroverted (red - yellow).
Hmmm, could go either way, I think we have to look at the individual color.
OR what you could do is realize any genderizing of colors is completely arbitrary and made up, and has nothing to do with logic, so of course it doesn’t make logical sense.