Freeing Pink

My friend Grumpator had this link on her blog to an article about reclaiming the color pink for women (and women gamers in particular). Now if you spend a lot of time in children's clothing departments, like me, you wouldn't think pink had gone out of style in any way. In fact, head to the barely-adolescent Claire's store like I did this last week with my nieces and you would think middle school girls might as well be spray-painted from head to toe in pink--it would certainly be cheaper than plunking down cash for thousands of cheerily pink accessories a girl can deck herself out in these days.

But other than identifying semi-gender-neutral-looking babies as XX and as a way for newly pubescent females to advertise their sex to oppositely-pigmented males, pink really does have a bad reputation. It's the brand of girlishness, the mark of blank-eyed giggling, the hue of "math is hard", the stamp of non-threatening femininity. You can see why feminists would snarl at the color: it's an expression of everything they have been fighting to overcome. Pink says, "I am a girl and all the insipidness that that implies."

The article's author tells the story of how she came by her first Gameboy Advance (a handheld gaming device): a boy returned it to the store because it had a pink cover. In fact, he didn't even return it in order to get a new one: at the time GBA's were so popular there were no other ones in stock. The boy was willing to give up his chance at what was then a real advance in personal gaming just because the cover color was, frankly, too girly.

The author's--and just about any woman's--natural reaction is defensive indignation. Isn't this proof that no matter how far women come in this world, we will never overcome this idea of "girl = weak"? A pink-covered GBA plays the same games as a black-covered one. The only reason a boy might give up his chance to own something like that must be a perpetual, deeply-rooted, cultural misogyny.

Well, yes and no. The truth is that, for years, the feminist movement, however flawed, has been breaking down gender barriers--for women. Not for men. The reason: being the "fairer" sex, the "weaker" sex, meant acquiring masculine traits--clothing, careers--as a step up in the world, a move toward equality from the standpoint of an underclass. That means traditional femininity still reeks of that underclass and the cultural landscape that holds it that way is far more ruthless with men who are willing to cross those barriers than women. Dress your girl like a boy and she's an adorable "tomboy". Dress your boy like a girl and he's an embarrassing "fruit".

Truth is, I can only feel sympathy for the boy giving up an awesome new gaming device because likely his only other option would have been to walk into open degradation by anyone who saw him using it. And that's males and females, women and men, girls and boys. Because equality still means masculinity and when we as women aspire to it, we acknowledge that we want to leave femininity behind, as a lesser, a garishly pink reminder of weakness and frailty. No wonder that for all the inroads we've made in a man's world, men are still standing far outside the door to ours.

The song "When I Was a Boy" by Dar Williams starts out as her lament about moving from a free and boyish childhood, where she could climb trees and scratch her knees, into an overly feminized adulthood where she's offered skimpy clothes to wear and has to have a man walk her home to keep her safe. The turning point in the song is where she admits as much to a man, saying, "I have lost and you have won." Instead of ending there, the man gets a chance to also lament the small expressions of femininity that he has been forced to leave behind in order to be considered manly now:

Oh no no, can't you see
When I was a girl
My mom and I, we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked
I could always cry
Now even when I'm alone, I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too
And you were just like me
And I was just like you

I'm not advocating a gender-neutral world, which doesn't seem possible or even desirable. Our current sexual dichotomy is part of what makes life so very interesting and exciting. But I do think that the human race would be better off if ideas traditionally thought of as feminine--nurturing, kindness, compassion, gentleness, sensitivity, emotion--were as accessible to men as wearing pants is to us. And maybe femininity wouldn't be seen as weakness; something for women to flee and men to avoid any appearance of. This is not an exclusively male bias. Note that the author titled her post as "reclaiming pink". Clearly she once shunned pink for the very reason the GBA-returning boy had, something she was angry at him for. And how often have we said, "It would be nice to have a sensitive man", then watched a man cry and secretly thought, Oh, grow a pair.

Let's not reclaim pink. Let's free it.