Photo Of Little Boy Wearing Pink Shoes To Preschool Sparks Heated Blogosphere

leatherbear

A viral photograph of a young boy who opted to wear pink shoes on his first day of preschool has sparked intense debate in the blogosphere.

The boy in the photograph is identified only as 5-year-old Sam. A Facebook user identifying herself only as Sam's sister posted the photo to the "Have a Gay Day" page, and wrote:

"Yesterday my mom posted a picture on Facebook of my 5-year-old brother Sam wearing a pair of shoes he picked out for his first day of preschool. She explained to him in the store that they were really made for girls. Sam then told her that he didn’t care and that 'ninjas can wear pink shoes too.'

However, my mom received about 20 comments on the photo from various family members saying how 'wrong' it is and how 'things like this will affect him socially' and, put most eloquently by my great aunt, 'that sh*t will turn him gay.'"

The user goes on to explain that Sam liked the shoes because they were "made out of zebras," as zebras are his favorite animal: "What does it say about society when a group of adults could stand to take a lesson in humanity from a class of preschoolers?"

The photograph has since drawn over 120,000 likes and has been shared over 19,000 times.

Meanwhile, the photograph was the subject of a heated blog posted on The Stir. In the piece, blogger Mary Fischer disagreed with Sam's mother, saying she wouldn't let her own son wear pink shoes to school because it would "subject him to being bullied or treated unfairly all because most people associate pink with girls and blue with boys."

Fischer continues:

"Yes, I get the whole 'we should let kids be free to express themselves' thing, and I'll be the first to say 'more power' to this mom for taking a chance and letting Sam go off to preschool in his pink zebra print flats.

Somehow I'm guessing if my son were to put on that same pair of shoes – he wouldn't even make it through the five-minute bus ride to school in the morning before someone laughed at him, asked him why in the heck he was wearing pink shoes, spewed all sorts of mean jokes his way, or told him he was dressed like a girl."

She then adds, "Bullying is bad enough as it is without handing tormentors their material on a silver platter."

You can read the full blog post here. hXXp://thestir.cafemom.com/big_kid/147885/mom_who_let_son_wear

Video @ hXXp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/little-boy-sam-pink-shoes-preschool-photograph_n_2277397.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

uicuic

Great stance, that mother deserves respect. Progress should never stop.

myrea

I'm kinda seeing the 2 sides of the fence , but… did you know that untill the start of the 1900's girls wore blue and boys a reddish pink... if you go threw most paintings prior to that date mostly women are in blue and men in red... and boys in sky blue are marked as nobility and generally the dark blue in men was not all that well conotated, so this marking of pink as a girls colour only happened after the infamous marking of gay in the 2nd world war... food for thought how a dumb society only gets dumber...

agis

Ok myr you have been strongly molapproved :cool2:
Moreover there would be a thing… while the mourning color for western societies is black for japanese society, for instance, is white.
Mmmm of course a mole wouldn't know colors. Her sight world is binary. White/light/on danger/bad; black/darkness/off safe/good.
This colors stuff seems interesting though ^-^

myrea

@agis:

Ok myr you have been strongly molapproved :cool2:
Moreover there would be a thing… while the mourning color for western societies is black for japanese society, for instance, is white.
Mmmm of course a mole wouldn't know colors. Her sight world is binary. White/light/on danger/bad; black/darkness/off safe/good.
This colors stuff seems interesting though ^-^

:love: my work is very much about colour history and yes it's a dream job right now.

agis

@myrea:

@agis:

Ok myr you have been strongly molapproved :cool2:
Moreover there would be a thing… while the mourning color for western societies is black for japanese society, for instance, is white.
Mmmm of course a mole wouldn't know colors. Her sight world is binary. White/light/on danger/bad; black/darkness/off safe/good.
This colors stuff seems interesting though ^-^

:love: my work is very much about colour history and yes it's a dream job right now.

colour history?! :cheesy2:
Tell me more ^-^

myrea

The antropology of colour, colour as perceiver in society regionally, just as you were commenting, it is studies in most marketing, publicity film making arts in general to architecture, by example we can have a whole set of red nail polish and women will be mad about how some reds make them feel. :cool2:

andy32

Being European the colour doesn't worry me. Here kids (boys and girls) are running around with pink rubber boots.
I also remember the 80's when young men wore pink, yellow and mint green everything (shirts, trousers, jackets …)
and today I see a lot of men wearing trousers and jeans in bright colours even purple ... And remember all those
baby pink shirts a few years ago.

What makes these shoes so clearly feminine is the cut and and that small bow.
I do think that the same print on sneakers wouldn't cause any problem at all.

The main point here seems to be the current discussion if parents should support their sons if they want to wear girls clothes ( and vice versa) .
I'm with anyone who thinks that this may be the next frontier of gender equality where children define their own space in their society.
To the parents: Be aware of your surroundings. While this move might be challenging but acceptable in certain urban communities it might not in a rural environment. Don't forget that there might be the possibility of a war by proxy going on even in kindergarden where your ideologie might collide with that of an other kids parents.

agis

@myrea:

The antropology of colour, colour as perceiver in society regionally, just as you were commenting, it is studies in most marketing, publicity film making arts in general to architecture, by example we can have a whole set of red nail polish and women will be mad about how some reds make them feel. :cool2:

That's charming myr :hug2:. At least for me cause my attention happened to be caught many years ago by this very topic but, as usual, since it was an interest separated from a work/job, it proceeded in the usual anarchical way. Sure it seemed to me though I had to start from somewhere. After all even our German friends are aware of that and have called it the Anfang problem. Now, since luckily it seemed there was a lot of work already done, I decided I had to start from optics eh… dunno... ^-^.
And, there, I found a terrible thing: since the colour is there considered as the product of luminous radiations of different wavelength, grosso modo between 390 and 740 nanometers when they impact the human eye (retina) and since we must consider also a chroma (position in the spectre), a brilliance (intensity) and a saturation (pureness in the waves distribution) it was possible to calculate the numerical value of the possible perceived by humans colours. And this value was 7.295.000. :crazy2: Now tell me what a poor mole could do with you surface mammals :cry2:

agis

@andy32:

Being European the colour doesn't worry me. Here kids (boys and girls) are running around with pink rubber boots.
I also remember the 80's when young men wore pink, yellow and mint green everything (shirts, trousers, jackets …)
and today I see a lot of men wearing trousers and jeans in bright colours even purple ... And remember all those
baby pink shirts a few years ago.

What makes these shoes so clearly feminine is the cut and and that small bow.
I do think that the same print on sneakers wouldn't cause any problem at all.

The main point here seems to be the current discussion if parents should support their sons if they want to wear girls clothes ( and vice versa) .
I'm with anyone who thinks that this may be the next frontier of gender equality where children define their own space in their society.
To the parents: Be aware of your surroundings. While this move might be challenging but acceptable in certain urban communities it might not in a rural environment. Don't forget that there might be the possibility of a war by proxy going on even in kindergarden where your ideologie might collide with that of an other kids parents.

Well said andy in my language there is even a name for those shoes: "ballerine" a word which is also used as such to denote the French word "danceuses" (she-dancers?)

uicuic

Danseuse! and in French we also use the word "ballerine" for the same meaning of ballet-ish show. But ballerine does not mean danseuse apparently, we just say "danseuse etoile".

agis

@uicuic:

Danseuse! and in French we also use the word "ballerine" for the same meaning of ballet-ish show. But ballerine does not mean danseuse apparently, we just say "danseuse etoile".

oh my gaaaawd uic in my poor head it seems there's a fight between the ol' French and the new English

"danceuse" :cry2: poor ol'mole…

anyway, faux frères apart, it seemed to me andy had a point there ^-^

uicuic

ok not to be naughty (and maybe you meant it as a joke) but in french we say "faux amis" when it comes to words which are spelt the same in two languages and mean different things

agis

@uicuic:

ok not to be naughty (and maybe you meant it as a joke) but in french we say "faux amis" when it comes to words which are spelt the same in two languages and mean different things

Naughty uic? How that? after all my French dates back from more than 30 years ago and I'm not checking it anymore. Maybe it is not even a French anymore after 30 years. Even Pier Paolo Pasolini when he spoke about his adopted city spoke about "the present historical form of Rome". Feel free so to correct me at your pleasure. I would be grateful to you for that :hug2:

myrea

@agis:

And, there, I found a terrible thing: since the colour is there considered as the product of luminous radiations of different wavelength, grosso modo between 390 and 740 nanometers when they impact the human eye (retina) and since we must consider also a chroma (position in the spectre), a brilliance (intensity) and a saturation (pureness in the waves distribution) it was possible to calculate the numerical value of the possible perceived by humans colours. And this value was 7.295.000. :crazy2: Now tell me what a poor mole could do with you surface mammals :cry2:

Blinding yourself in science? ahah :hug2: as for the henceforth shoes, well the design is nowadays femenine however it was assexual for millenia, and men wore bows in cloth as in shoes before women ahah somehow I grant that most cloth sexual designations are actually fairly old high medieval times however well to be tyrant about such is a 50's thing… the history of gay acceptance and reject actually is terribly interesting and gays should learnt it more instead of the actual focus on the 20th century only...

As for such as language well portuguese are dead set on not fusing with brazilian and brazilians are dead set on the same, why our govenment's want the union I know not why... Portuguese has become a base language for other countries let them devellop or bastardize it ... same with french and english or any other empire language.

agis

@myrea:

Blinding yourself in science?

:funny2: myr :hug2:

Don't ask though :-. The scientific thingy didn't seem to work so well this time for some reason… dunno ???
So, since I was aware of that ancient say:

there is not a thing you can think to which hasn't been previously thought by an ancient Greek

I decided to go and see what Dax's ancestors had concocted about it and, as a matter of fact, they had proposed a number of interesting theories.
They more or less all agreed these colours had to stem someway as modulations/qualities of the light and above the light stood the problem of the human sight that is to say "how do we see?"
Concerning that on the Greek philosophy market it seemed to me you could find grosso modo 4 solutions.

a ti (something) comes out of the eye and goes to catch the object with its shape and chromatic aspects (Pitagorians, Alcmeon from Croton, Euclid, Ptolemy…)
a ti comes out of the object with its shape and chromatic aspects and goes to catch the eye (Democritus and other atomists)
a ti comes out of the object with its shape and chromatic aspects, another ti comes out of the eye and they meet halfway (Empedocles)
No ti coming out from anything exists but there are only modifications happening in a "medium" placed between the eye and the object (Plato, Aristotle)

Now myr all these things seemed ingeniously constructed but I didn't feel to be left with a criterion for a choice ??? …

myrea

@agis:

Now myr all these things seemed ingeniously constructed but I didn't feel to be left with a criterion for a choice ??? …

lazy aproach = let the wavelength come to you
overworked = go and seek the wavelength
romantism = let us meet halfway
actually very realistic for the time, the wavelength is emited the attention of perception of the being is too and they meet in medium, if they could articulate that the medium is the retina to brain process…

agis

@myrea:

@agis:

Now myr all these things seemed ingeniously constructed but I didn't feel to be left with a criterion for a choice ??? …

lazy aproach = let the wavelength come to you

overworked = go and seek the wavelength

romantism = let us meet halfway

actually very realistic for the time, the wavelength is emited the attention of perception of the being is too and they meet in medium, if they could articulate that the medium is the retina to brain process…

Manco mal (which means not bad at all) myr ^-^
Of course since the values cannot be deduced from the facts, this way, after the science, we would get outta the gnoseology too getting to a moral field instead.
Anyway of Pythagoras, the pythagoreans, the atomists we dunno much and our scarce sources are also affected by interpretation problems. About the ones you seem to prefer, Plato and Aristotle, we know much more instead but this would deserve one of those boring posts. So how do you actually face the problems when you study the colours myr? ^-^

myrea

@agis:

So how do you actually face the problems when you study the colours myr? ^-^

I'm far more in the historical factual and hencefoth the antropological interpretation as quoted so I do not have many problems, basically it would go around to tell the client this was the colours they used dued to a, b and c, if he is interested in others, I might adapt the periods or think if the designs ever overlapped or coexisted. If not and the client really wants a huge mix of styles I use therory of colour so to adapt the tones picked = I call this frankensteining… people which have every single design period or style in their house clashing it all together ahaha.

agis

Very nice myr ^-^ Following the anthropological bit we could go on a lot while you might have imagined mine was a more "philosophical" focus.
This is mebbe too serious and not very chit chat though. We will come back to that in future perhaps :hug2: