{"id":5528,"date":"2008-12-22T00:00:45","date_gmt":"2008-12-22T05:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=5528"},"modified":"2017-09-16T16:35:43","modified_gmt":"2017-09-16T21:35:43","slug":"guest-post-bear-with-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2008\/12\/22\/guest-post-bear-with-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Bear With Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college<\/a>, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)<\/p>\n

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post<\/a> reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article<\/a> by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.<\/p>\n

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: \u201cIf you like the colour note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls\u2019 preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.<\/p>\n

But what about the teddy bear? Isn\u2019t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?<\/p>\n

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.<\/p>\n

Now there\u2019s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles \u2013 thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it\u2019s not just girls.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agn\u00e8s Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Hat tip to Magda<\/a><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .) A couple of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,373,55,2102,253,1711],"class_list":["post-5528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animals","tag-color","tag-gender","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-toysgames"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5528"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70878,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions\/70878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}