# data[].attributes.body
A 33-year-old woman from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania who began as a country singer-songwriter and has transitioned into pop and indie folk over time. Currently, she is the #1 musical artist in the world on Spotify with approximately 107,000,000 monthly listeners and is on tour, the Eras Tour, which has already garnered over 1 billion dollars. The Eras consist of each of her albums in succession: Taylor Swift (debut era), Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights. In her 17 years of fame and confessional songwriting, Taylor has created a sense of intimacy between her and her fans through her lyrics in such a way that strongly resonates with people, mainly girls, and thus has become a significant symbol of girlhood and growing up.

The essence of the Eras:

Taylor Swift (Debut): country music, summer, sweet tea, early teenage years, bright green and teal

Fearless: early high-school years, country music, happy, gold, cowgirl boots, heart hands, spring

Speak Now: early adulthood, growing up, romanticization, fairytales, revenge, deep purple

Red: early 20s, autumn, passion, angsty dread, red, female friend groups

1989: early 20s, New York, light blue, serial dating, moving to a new place, summer

Reputation: late twenties, snakes, black, being stabbed in the back, intimidating, rebuilding yourself, falling deeply in love, revenge, winter

Lover: early thirties, hopeless romantic, pastel pink, blue, and purple, gay pride, light happiness, marriage, summer and winter

Folklore: early thirties, woods, forgiveness, peace, groundedness, self-reflection, mercurian, black, white, gray, august, late summer

Evermore: early thirties, isolation, warm orange, maroon, dead nature, emotional turmoil, bitterness, late fall, november

Midnights: early thirties, insomnia, self-loathing, sparkles, night time, 70s fashion

The Eras tour has brought forth women of all ages to celebrate songs many had grown up with and associated with their lives for so long. This coming together to celebrate one’s personal resonance with Taylor’s various eras has created a sense of pride and love for growing up and growing to be different than you were without hating who one was before. With fine-tuned performances and production of her various songs for 3.5 hours, trading friendship bracelets, dressing as your current era, and spending copious amounts of time and energy on this experience, this became a significant celebration of girlhood.

The friendship bracelet trading project began in reference to a lyric in the final chorus of “You’re on Your Own, Kid”:

“‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned

Everything you lose is a step you take

So make the friendship bracelets

Take the moment and taste it

You've got no reason to be afraid”

(Fan project) Dressing as your Era to the tour, dressed very extravagantly, or as a song lyric reference. Brought forth a sense of commonality among concert-goers and a sense of community amidst the similarity.

(Fan project) During marjorie, a song about Taylor's passed grandmother who had abandoned dreams of being a vocalist whom she misses dearly and feels that she is a part of her life, fans at every location of the show shined flashlights in loving support of Taylor and the beautiful dedication to her grandmother.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a film directed by Greta Gerwig that came out this past summer depicting a Barbie who began to malfunction in her perfect matriarchal world (Barbie Land) having cellulite, suicidal thoughts, flat feet, and imperfect hair. The outcasted, messed-up Barbie told her to venture outside of Barbie Land and into the real world to find who is playing with her in order to stop her from projecting her problems onto her Barbie. Within her adventure into the real world, Barbie discovers the beauty of the real world within its hurt, love, connection, and realness that she never experienced in Barbie Land. As well as this, Ken discovered patriarchy and brought it back to Barbie Land and attempted to ruin the peaceful matriarchy in place. The Barbies and humans Barbie befriended are able to prevent the Kens from taking over and Barbie ends up finding that she wants to be human instead of perfect in Barbie Land and goes to live as a human, pain and everything.

Overall, this is a feminist film highlighting the utmost difficulty of being a woman but also the absolute beauty and joy of being human despite the strife of it all. There was a significant sense of bonding among women going to see this film dressing up as their favorite Barbies and crying over the emotional power of this film. This brought forth women of all ages to create an intergenerational experience made by and for women.

As well as this, fans made a huge effort to dress as their favorite Barbie, or as the proverbial, general Barbie, or even just in pink to attend this movie. Many addressed fellow movie-goers with a shimmering "Hi Barbie!"

The common shared experience of America Ferrera's monologue; very emotional and bonding to voice the difficulty of living in a patriarchal society.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: “a hypothetical social system in which the father or a male elder has absolute authority over the family group; by extension, one or more men (as in a council) exert absolute authority over the community as a whole.”

# data[].attributes.body
Technical definition:

The period of life for females from birth through early 20s

The common shared experiences apart of growing up as a girl

# data[].attributes.body
This term is very significant to this research paper given how it’s the central culture that is being discussed; this collective experience between girls is marked by many different kinds of experiences with the Eras tour and the Barbie Movie being recent significant markers of it.

# data[].attributes.body
“‘fangirl’ can be used as a verb, intended to describe (and deride) ‘a youthful, (hyper)feminine, and performative act of cultural consumption marked by excessive displays of embodied affect’ (2020, p.1).”

fangirl (noun): "a girl or woman who is an extremely or overly enthusiastic fan of someone or something"

# data[].attributes.body
"Internalized misogyny is when women subconsciously project sexist ideas onto other women and even onto themselves.”

# data[].attributes.body
This term is specifically significant within the energy surrounding the Barbie movie and the Eras tour; people consistently dressed up in their most on theme attire (i.e. different kinds of barbies, different eras, song lyrics, etc.), and expressed the most vibrant excitement and craze over these two events and thus can be considered a significant aspect of this topic.

# data[].attributes.headline
To what extent and how have this past year’s pop culture occurrences facilitated an upswing in community among girls?

# data[].attributes.subject
To what extent and how have this past year’s pop culture occurrences facilitated an upswing in community among girls?

# data[].attributes.body
Among girls surveyed, they reported that the "essence of girlhood" can include:

getting a sweet treat, girl dinner, girl math, friendship bracelets, wearing hair bows, watching your friend’s location as they go on a date, debriefing after the party, hot pink pepper spray, screaming your favorite songs in the car, rotting in bed on your phone with your best friend, watching old Barbie movies, having spare tampons and hair ties, having floor time, sitting near other girls on a nearly empty bus, asking if they got home safe, taking care of your drunk friend, discussing the nuance and turmoil of gender and sexuality just to follow with reference to an inside joke and let laughter inevitably ensue.

# data[].attributes.body
Within this topic, patriarchy plays a significant role in why girlhood and the joys of girlhood as seen in this last summer is so important and appreciated; in a male dominated society, media and celebrities naturally tend to appeal to males and are written to please men, but the Barbie movie and the Eras tour were prime examples of experiences written by and for women. If anything, they are so written and made for women that it brought forth an immediate and immense community to celebrate and enjoy these experiences with (i.e. saying “hi Barbie!” to everyone at the movie and complimenting their outfits, trading bracelets and talking to people at the Eras tour, etc.)

# data[].attributes.body
In terms of this topic, internalized misogyny is a very common experience among women in that has made significant strides in overcoming as seen in the craze surrounding the Eras tour and The Barbie Movie this summer. Previously, it’s been very easy for internalized misogyny to lead women to be uninterested in things similar to media/celebrities like this, but something about the unabashed and very popular attention surrounding leads one to believe that a significant aspect of internalized misogyny has been left behind to simply enjoy girlhood together.

# data[].attributes.body
It seems that everywhere one looks, there is a lot going on for women right now; in the music industry, there's Taylor Swift and Beyonce with their record-breaking world tours, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo and their extremely young success, boygenius receiving 7 Grammy nominations on their first album, and the Grammy nominations for record of the year and album of the year being 7:1 women to men ratio. Kim Kardashian was recently named "Man of the Year" by GQ for her successful clothing business, Skims, and the film industry has been dominated both by The Eras Tour Movie and The Barbie Movie. Even pink has been named the color of the year in the fashion industry. The terms "girl dinner" and "girl math" have dominated generation-z associated social media lingo. It's a good time to be a girl, but how has all of this happened?

# data[].attributes.headline
How have The Barbie Movie and its fan projects facilitated a sense of community among girls? 

# data[].attributes.subject
How have The Barbie Movie and its fan projects facilitated a sense of community among girls? 

# data[].attributes.headline
How have Taylor Swift, the Eras Tour, and its fan projects facilitated a sense of community among girls?

# data[].attributes.subject
How have Taylor Swift, the Eras Tour, and its fan projects facilitated a sense of community among girls?

# data[].attributes.body
definition: interaction between members of different generations

# data[].attributes.body
(The Eras Tour and The Barbie Movie are both examples of bringing women, in particular, together to bond over shared love, however, unlike other occurrences of late, these bring together women of different generations. Western society in particular has been lacking prominent intergenerational experiences, but these two events specifically added that element of bonding.)

# data[].attributes.headline
How has the occurrence of these events and their associated projects potentially influenced society?

# data[].attributes.subject
How has the occurrence of these events and their associated projects potentially influenced society?

# data[].attributes.body
voicing misogyny and its difficulty can lead to positive change

bonding with women leading to stronger community

potentially diminishing internalized misogyny (especially in younger generations)

promoting intergenerational connections

# data[].attributes.body
This piece speaks to the experience of going to The Eras Tour and the craze of being a Swiftie.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Taylor Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner gives it a shot anyway.

# data[].attributes.body
This source describes the importance of fangirls and how they are extremely significant in pop culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hear directly from everyday fans and experts on the gender disparity within the world of fandom

"Why are young women screaming at a One Direction concert seen as hysterical but grown men screaming at their inanimate TVs, rioting and causing millions of dollars of damage, seen as part of being a sports fan?" writes Lucy Blakiston for Shit You Should Care About. As the founder of a pop-culture portal that commands over 3.5 million eyeballs, a day in the life of Blakiston involves curating everyday memes laced with insightful commentary on the happenings of the world. However, there is little humour in her disposition as she skewers the gender-based gatekeeping prevalent in the realm of fandoms-and, for that matter, governing who gets to call themselves a legitimate fan. "I never once thought their interest in these sports was hysterical or something to be ashamed about. My interest in One Direction, on the other hand, was seen as juvenile and embarrassing," she challenges.

Her wrath isn't unwarranted, given the crucial role that fangirls play in moving the levers of culture forward by sheer strength of numbers. However, historically, their self-worth has been reductively minimised to a screaming, pulsating mass of hysteria-easy target practice for the literary lampoons that deny them power in the very institutions that they have created. This isn't to say that they are powerless. Fangirls of today can take down white supremacist hashtags by flooding them with fancams. They can sabotage a political rally by booking hundreds of tickets for seats they don't intend to use-case in point: the K-pop stans who successfully inflated attendance expectations for a Trump rally in Tulsa. If they wake up one day and put their mind to it, they can even free Britney Spears from conservatorship. The one thing they haven't been able to do is to escape the unyielding onslaught of derision and mockery.

In an infamous essay for New Statesman, Paul Johnson scoffed, "Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures." The article would go on to become of the most complained-about pieces in the history of the publication. And while the Beatlemaniac of yesteryear has become the Belieber of today, fangirls are yet to escape the clutches of condescension and knee-jerk ridicule.

For critic Barbara Ehrenreich, the policing of fangirls is nothing new-she credits it to a historical mandate that insists on moulding teenage girls into symbols of purity. Any subversions from the norm trigger memories of the Victorian-era idea of hysteria, a medical condition attributed to women exhibiting erratic behaviour with the "tendency to cause trouble." In an essay in 1992, Ehrenreich observed, "To abandon control-to scream, faint, dash about in mobs-was in form, if not in conscious intent, to protest the rigid double standard of female teen culture."

Taking a detour from the codes of patriarchy can come with dire consequences. Blakiston recalls being mortified when a video of her and her best friend screaming after securing One Direction concert tickets was broadcast at her 21st birthday party. On the other side of the globe, her experiences are mirrored by Arunima Joshua, a 27-year-old content writer. "While interning at an indie music establishment in 2015, I had been looping "Blank Space" the whole day on my earphones. But when a colleague asked me what I was listening to, I was embarrassed to admit that it was a Taylor Swift song-knowing the lighthearted, but judgmental ribbing that it would inspire." During the singer's reputation era of 2017, Joshua pretended to be an "ironic Swiftie" in order to continue publicly sharing her inputs on the album. It was only two album eras later, in her mid-20s, that she found herself emboldened to publicly claim her status as a devoted Swiftie.

Since the public proclamation of her fandom, she finds that she is often furnished with unsolicited, patronising recommendations to listen to an under-the-radar artiste instead. "Within the music community, fangirls of female pop stars are expected to not know enough about the technical aspects of music, and the artiste's lyricism is further dismissed as a petulant pre-teen obsession with fairytale tropes. This does not translate for male fans of metal and hip hop genres, whose fandom lends them an air of intellect to bolster their image," she points out.

Matisse DuPont, a Boston-based educator and gender consultant, believes that the gender-based disparities within the world of fandom exist because cishet men have largely been considered the standard in most societies. "As a consequence, their interests become the default," they explain. "Affiliation with the fandom of men's sports is often used as leverage to gain access to spaces where men dominate and have power. Cultural tropes like the 'cool girl'-who isn't like other girls because she loves sports-often exist to disparage feminine interests in favour of masculinely coded ones. This also makes it impossible for women to have a vested interest in sports without becoming a part of the boys' club."

Today, DuPont believes that modern society continues to remain complicit in the denigration of feminine interests in order to maintain patriarchal social systems. "This comes to a crescendo when we talk about the interests of young girls-anything they like becomes vapid, trendy, over-hyped, cringe and sappy. Masculine fandoms are figured to be historical and universal, whereas feminine fandoms are seen as nothing more than a fad," they observe.

Blakiston believes that momentum can be achieved by erasing the systemic disparity; while sports fans are assured that they can make a living out of their hobby by becoming commentators, YouTube influencers or fantasy gaming pros, a boy band fangirl is made to believe that the skills she is learning aren't legitimate. "This couldn't be further from the truth because being a fangirl can help you learn valuable skills that are transferable in the real world. Take your pick: website, blog and forum building, community management, Photoshop skills, video editing, writing and editing-fanfic writers, I see you-as well as mobilising and organising." She believes that the blueprint for the latter can be found with the Indian BTS ARMY that mobilised to raise a whopping two million rupees within 24 hours during the devastating second wave of the pandemic that gripped the nation in April. "It's no wonder that there's a confidence gap between men and women at the workplace because it's so hard to recognise our skills when we keep being told that our motive for learning them is something to be ashamed of," she ponders.

So can the fangirl ever be freed from this censure and cultural conservatorship? Joshua has cause to believe that the advent of internet culture could be the turning point for the plight of the modern fangirl, with meme pages-such as Blakiston's Shit You Should Care About-as well as a slew of other femme-identifying popular culture accounts validating and celebrating them. "They also regularly call out the high-handed attitudes of largely masculine pop culture fandoms that gatekeep music and bands. Even if they're just memes, their thought-shifting impact endures beyond the screen," she says.

At the end of the day, she sums up the impact of the fangirl with a famously cited quote: "The greatest musical act since the advent of mass media would have just been four scrawny boys from Liverpool, if it hadn't been for the hordes of screaming teen fangirls on American shores that kicked off the legendary Beatlemania-those thousands of young women created the world's first pop music stars." But hey, it's probably just the hysteria.

Also read:
7 personalities who are helping us evolve our conversations around gender identities The rise of gender-agnostic models in India How Navya Naveli Nanda is amping up her fight against gender inequality in India

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's time we stopped treating fangirls as pop culture's favourite punchline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hear directly from everyday fans and experts on the gender disparity within the world of fandom

# data[].attributes.body
This piece pertains to the Barbie Movie's influence on the color pink and how we perceive it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I don't know how to feel about pink. The color has been inescapable of late, as Barbie branded shoes, clothes, rugs, and pool floats dominate my social media feeds. But the very meaning of pink seems to be changing. Barbie director Greta Gerwig has successfully wrapped a feminist message up in the traditionally girlie hue.And the public, in its enthusiasm for the movie, now the highest-grossing of the year, has adopted her signature color as well. Even men are wearing more pink. It's not quite a neutral, but it seems to be trending more in that direction than it has at any moment in my lifetime.

Pink has always been fraught. It's a color that many people either embrace or reject based on their concept of what it connotes. But it's a question I've been wrestling with anew in the wake of reporting a Barbie cover story, and living in her pink world in the months preceding and following its publication, while simultaneously growing a baby girl inside me. As I scroll past yet another bubblegum onesie tangentially tied to the movie, I wonder, Do I incorporate Gerwig's slightly subversive version of pink into my daughter's life or is it still too restricting? Is pink's rising popularity, especially among men, a signal that the gender binary is falling, or does it make the divide between men and women all the more defined? Put more plainly: Is pink still a "girl color," and is it bad if it is?

To understand the meaning of pink right now is to study a marketing behemoth but also to recognize the societal changes that have been happening over time. Jada Schumacher, a color specialist and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, argues that corporate entities beyond Mattel set the ubiquity of pink in motion long before the movie premiered. Pantone announced in January that its color of the year would be Viva Magenta, a more purplish shade of pink than the one associated with the doll. Shades of pink also cropped up last year at Valentino's runway show and on celebs like Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and Anne Hathaway.

"It's been alternating between saturated hues and very soft, but I think it's been years in the making, regardless of Barbie," Schumacher says. But as a Mattel executive put it to me in May, Barbiecore "didn't just happen." The company has tight ties to the fashion industry: Many successful designers dressed up Barbie as kids and have collaborated on a line of doll's clothes at one point or another. The viral photos of stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling filming the movie no doubt stoked excitement and inspiration. And now pink has spread well beyond fashion. When Schumacher noted how pink even insurance commercials had become lately, I gently broke it to her that even Progressive has a specific Barbie partnership.

With each new pink partnership, the color seems to shed the notion that it's exclusively reserved for girly girls or that it's in any way unserious. Instead it's an expression of empowerment."The movie is reclaiming pink," says Jo Paoletti, a professor emerita at the University of Maryland who specializes in fashion history and consumer culture and wrote a book on the pink-blue divide. "This is the kind of cultural phenomenon that launches 1,000 dissertations."

Read More: We're Ignoring the Real Reason Barbie Might Dominate the Box Office

Pink's politics have changed in the last decade

It's perhaps unfair to give Barbie all the credit. The perception of pink has changed radically just in the lifetimes of the Millennial women who flocked to see Gerwig's film. That movie consciously references the aesthetic sensibilities of iconic female films from their childhoods- Legally Blonde, and Mean Girls -to draw parallels between Barbie's journey of self-discovery and those of other seemingly ditzy, fashion-obsessed blondes who found deeper meaning in life by the end of the film. When Elle Woods decides to wear a pink leather skirt suit for move-in day to Harvard Law School, the audience is meant to chuckle at her apparent frivolousness. She ends the movie in her all-black graduation gown. Cher's pink-hued closet represents her obsession with fashion-until she finds new purpose and gives away many of her clothes. When Regina George insists, "On Wednesdays, we wear pink," she uses the color as a status symbol distinguishing the cool (and vapid) girls from the mathletes.

Pink got a girl-boss makeover in the mid-2010s, according to Schumacher. A softer hue, Millennial pink, dominated the marketing of makeup company Glossier and period-underwear company Thinx, a nod toward their "made by powerful women, for powerful women" ethos. There was even a brief time where various interior design blogs argued that pink was the new neutral color to consider for your living room. Not coincidentally, Millennial Pink's peak popularity around 2016 coincided with Hillary Clinton's bid for President.
Read More: How Greta Gerwig Got Barbie-From the Clothes to the Dream House-Just Right
The next year, pink took on a new identity. Think back to 2017 and all the pussy hats at the Women's March paired with rallying cries like "pussy grabs back" in response to former President Trump's notorious Access Hollywood tape. Pink became an emblem for a more aggressive power, according to Rebecca Jordan-Young, the chair of the women's, gender, and sexuality studies department at Barnard College (Gerwig's alma mater). "The ramped-up vocal misogyny of Donald Trump...lots of women decided to own these symbols of femininity that had been grounds of disparagement," she says. "The pink pussy hats were the most feminized moment of political activism I've seen in my adult life."

Women wearing pink pussy protest hats gather in front of the U.S. Capitol for the Women's March on Washington, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, in Washington on January 21, 2017. Brian Snyder-Reuters

That wasn't an obvious transition. "People were saying, 'Wait a minute, weren't we anti-pink?' and people were saying, 'No, no, no, this is being used in an ironic way. We're claiming femininity and women's power,'" adds Paoletti. " Barbie has echoes of that, but it's much more commercialized."

Gerwig's pink isn't a color of protest. Frankly, that wouldn't sell. Instead it's one of fun vibes. It's almost a relief for audiences to embrace the color without feeling they're making a statement about their femininity. They're simply reveling in the joy of an unabashedly feminine film.

But Paoletti believes the marriage of color and message is more complex than it might initially appear and applauds Gerwig's ingenuity. "This isn't a story about Barbie getting married and having a baby and becoming a compliant wife while wearing pink gingham. Not at all," she says. In fact-spoiler alert for the end of the film-Barbie explicitly rejects a relationship with Ken in order to pursue her own path. "It's the pairing of message and imagery that makes the pink powerful. Maybe it's upsetting some conservatives exactly because people are using something that's so traditionally feminine in a counterintuitive way."

Is pink becoming more neutral?

As pink has become more popular, it's figured more prominently in men's fashion, as have other symbols of femininity. "The world is just becoming more gender fluid," says Schumacher, though she cautions that pink still has different meanings for different age groups. "I think for Gen Z, maybe even Millennials, pink is becoming more of a neutral," she says. Members of Gen Z think differently about gender than their predecessors: They are, for instance, are more likely to identify as trans or nonbinary and to believe that there are more than two genders than any previous generation. "But I think for Gen X," Schumacher says, "we're never going to totally lose that idea that 'pink goes with girls.'" She says men of older generations probably won't start wearing more pink, unless they're "clotheshorses, urban trendy people, artists, people of that crowd."

But that crowd can be rather influential. Lionel Messi, the most famous soccer player on earth, is wearing a pink jersey on his new MLS soccer team, Inter Miami. Not a jersey with a pop of pink. An entirely pink kit-shorts, socks, and all. As with Barbie, Messi's arrival in the U.S. spurred a push for pink products, including Adidas literally spraying the city of Miami with pink smoke. David Beckham, the fashionable part-owner of the team and a soccer legend himself, championed the color. The team says that surveys have found Inter Miami's fanbase wanted their players to wear pink because it would help the team stand out. Inter Miami is still the only American pro or college sports team to showcase the color, but they may not be the last. The pink jerseys are so popular that Adidas reportedly can't keep them on the shelves. Still, old color stereotypes die hard: Iowa's college-football team has notoriously painted their visiting locker room pink to discomfit other teams-a sexist choice they've been rightly roasted for on Twitter.

Lionel Messi at an Inter Miami game at DRV PNK Stadium on August 30, 2023 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Megan Briggs-Getty Images

Messi isn't the only dude wearing pink. Male tennis players from around the world have been sporting pink on the tour for years. Harry Styles has worn not only pink but clothing in general that defies the gender binary. Daniel Craig very consciously wore a pink jacket to the premiere of his final James Bond film at the end of a media tour in which he openly criticized the misogyny of the character. Pink has been the color of choice for several all-male K-Pop groups, including BTS. And pink was apparently inescapable on the streets outside men's fashion week in Milan earlier this year.

These decisions tend to have a trickle-down effect, especially for younger generations. On TikTok younger men have been moving toward traditional symbols of femininity from pink to pearl chokers to bright-colored nails. Machine Gun Kelly, Tyler the Creator, and Pharrell have launched lines of nail polish. Men's magazines are recommending the best pearl necklaces for men thanks to their popularity among even straight cis guys on mainstream reality shows like Love Island. Even professional baseball players are wearing pearls.

Still, Paoletti argues that it's impossible to tell whether the trend will prove sustainable. Men started sporting long hair in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she says. It seemed rebellious at the time but has become fairly conventional since. Pink could follow the same pattern: "We won't know until a year from now whether it's mainstream."

Jordan-Young, meanwhile, doesn't believe that men wearing pink is a harbinger for some immense societal shift. Yes, the Kens sport pink and pastels in Barbie. But they do so to fit into Barbieland where all things revolve logistically and aesthetically around the Barbies. Jordan-Young argues that, if anything, the pink used in Barbie reasserts the gender binary: Barbieland is a woman's paradise; therefore it's pink. When the Kens and Barbies clash, Barbieland is briefly taken over by the Kens: They fill it with leather and cowhide and the traditional symbols of the hyper-masculine cowboy. Barbies like fashion and sleepovers. Kens like horses and boxing. There's no crossover.

Jordan-Young says she admires Greta and the movie, but "found the gender binary of it, the pink of it, totally exhausting." she says. "This movie is the most 'war between the sexes' thing I've seen since I was a little kid," she says. That trope, that way of doing gender, is very, very mainstream."

She's hardly the only one to call out the lack of fluidity in the movie, though one could argue that Gerwig renders a rigidly binary world in order to critique the stereotypes associated with these two dolls, Barbie and Ken, who have always served as representations of "ideal" men and women-and does subtly hint with the character of Allan at a version of Barbieland that allows for a wider range of gender expression. One of the Barbies is played by Hari Nef, a trans actor who told TIME that she was attracted to the script because the very notion of a doll, or Barbie specifically, as the ideal of a woman is a complicated notion she wanted to explore with Gerwig. "It's a tricky word that holds, for me anyway, such a strict standard created by the patriarchy that deserves to be scrutinized but also a promise of liberation and safety and belonging."

The real test: Babies and pink

So where does all this leave the mothers of little girls? And how should I decorate my daughter's nursery? For a while now, some parents who want to raise empowered daughters have been wary of dressing them or decorating their room in too much pink, worried about the power of princess fantasies and eager to avoid connecting their daughters to all those Legally Blonde-related stereotypes.

Laudable efforts have been made in the recent past to not impose pink and blue on babies. In the last decade, toy stores have begun to stop separating "girls' toys" (dolls) in the "pink aisles" from "boys' toys" (building blocks and chemistry sets) to mix everything together. In fashion, too, children's clothing brands like Primary and Dinki Human are dedicated to ridding themselves of "boy" and "girl" labels in favor of vibrant options for all.

In some ways, the effort to rid the world of pink and replace it with a gender-neutral color scheme may even have gone too far. What's come to be jokingly known as the "sad beige baby" trend favored by momfluencers has dominated Instagram for the last couple years. Baby Gap even created a beige section in some stores. The quiet luxury neutrals showcased by adult fashion brands like The Row and shows like Succession have made their way to toddlers to create one Instagram-friendly, minimalist aesthetic for the well-heeled parent-and those who want to avoid gendered colors anyway. In fact, the style has become so pervasive that even its own advocates are getting sick of it. As one TikToker points out, all those teeny-tiny beige baby clothes make children look like orphaned farmhands in a Werner Herzog film.

Now, if celebrities and influencers are any indication, parents seem to be rebelling against sad, beige babies and adopting, to varying extents, pink for baby girls once again (not that it ever entirely went away). Naomi Osaka's nursery features both beige and pink. Chrissy Teigen and John Legend recently revealed in one of those addictive Architectural Digest videos that their daughter's room is a bubble-gum daydream as is the one occupied by the child of supermodel Jasmine Tookes. The design magazine Domino assures me I'll still love these pink nurseries after the Barbie trend fades.

But even if parents see pink as an empowering option for their daughters, they may not feel the same for their sons. Jordan-Young says the pink popping up is still definitively marketed to girls. "Are the pink baby clothes being sold to put the boy babies in too? That would be amazing, but I don't think that's happening," she says.

If anything, Paoletti believes, companies are even more aggressively drawing lines in the sand when it comes to colors and babies. "Lavender used to be a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral color," she says. "But now any kind of pastel, except for blue, is considered girlie. Even the territory of gender neutral has shrunk."

Until we see a push by parents to dress their little baby boys in pink, the system remains rigid. The burden then falls upon the children themselves to find ways to express themselves sartorially. That's certainly happening among teens and tweens, but it doesn't indicate our notions of color will be completely overthrown anytime soon.

"I see individual people insisting that they can and will move outside and across the gender binary and not be captured by it," says Jordan-Young. "But that's very different from dismantling the binary itself. Those individuals shouldn't be left to do all the work." In other words, dressing in pink still means breaking with your given "team" as opposed to uprooting the very idea of teams at all.

"It hasn't weakened the binary at all. If anything, there's a way in which there is a more conscious articulation of gender as a binary than there has been in a very long time," she adds. "It's an interesting paradox."

So if I dress my baby in Barbie pink, am I empowering her or imposing society's conceptions of color on her? "It's not that simple," says Paoletti, reminding me that very young babies can't even see color. The war is still among the adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is Pink Still a 'Girl Color'? An Exploration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Typically seen as a 'girl color,' pink is everywhere these days. Is it because of 'Barbie'?

# data[].attributes.body
Taylor Swift being the man.

# data[].attributes.body
trailer for The Barbie Movie

# data[].attributes.body
The Era's tour fan project: friendship bracelet trading