A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about how gendering clothing is really dumb and pointless. I have found recently that I have more to add to this argument.

I was shopping the other day at WalMart and found that they sell gendered earplugs. I could not find a difference in the earplugs despite the fact that the women’s ones were pink. I also found men’s sunscreen which, by further inspection, had absolutely no change, just that it was in a “manly” black bottle. I have yet to see a point to this useless gendered marketing.

While I was thinking about this topic, I started wondering why pink is deemed the “girl color” and blue is the “boy color”. Well, I found out that back before World War 2, it was the opposite. Pink was considered the masculine color and blue feminine. It was like that until one Mr. Adolf Hitler decided to tag all the gays in Germany with pink triangles to label and kill them more efficiently. This created the whole pink being a feminine color fad. And now men apparently can’t use pink earplugs because it makes them too feminine or something.

There’s a great quote from the English comedian Eddie Izzard that says, “I wear dresses. They’re not ‘women’s dresses’. They’re my dresses, I buy them. It’s like when women wear trousers, they’re not cross-dressing, they’re not wearing ‘men’s trousers’.” Izzard is on point with this quote. In my last gendering piece, I talked about how guys jeans are just like girls jeans but with pockets. I don’t feel like I said too much about guys wearing “girl’s” clothes, but there is really no problem with that. There’s too much emphasis on what kind of clothes everybody buys. If you want to wear a dress, go right on ahead. If you want to wear jeans from the guys section, be my guest. Clothes are simply to cover up our bodies, so why does it matter what kind and style of fabric we choose to complete that task?

My point here is that the color of the bottle of your sunscreen doesn’t change whether you’ll get a sunburn or not. (I also found men’s Q-Tips while I was out. Again, no difference.) A guy wearing pink doesn’t make him gay (or a woman, for that matter) just like a girl wearing blue doesn’t instantly become a man. I can use sunscreen from a black bottle and use “manly” Q-Tips if I so please. A guy can wear a dress and I can wear jeans with pockets. Most everything is unisex if you want it to be. Our society puts such a huge deal on being as masculine as possible or vice versa when in reality, it quite honestly has no influence on your gender identity.