"Girls Like Pink" but what does that make me?

My parents had three girls, and it just so happened that we were completely uninterested in baby dolls; rather, stuffed animals were our thing. In preschool, for our class Christmas-present swap, I got a cardboard jewelry box with white & light pink stripes and light pink roses and a light pink ribbon to open the top. It might not have been the sole pink thing I owned at the time, but it was definitely the pinkest. I don't know how long after getting it home the redecoration occurred, but for the years after that I remember the box being stamped with two brightly colored but dark-inked stamps on either side of the cover. It wasn't that I wanted to destroy the pink, I just wanted to add my own touch. It was elementary school that I learned of girl's bathrooms being layered in chalky pink paint and unappealing pink tiles and boy's in a much more aesthetically pleasing and overall cooler color of blue. "MY favorite color is blue!" I would think to myself. It simply wasn't fair that I had to bypass the blue aquarium-like setting to pee under a peach-tinted fluorescent bulb. It was then that I saw pink as a deviation from the norm, and that norm belonged to boys.

Then in middle school came the socialization of "hot pink." Girls who wore hot pink, or had hot pink backpacks, or pink lunch boxes, or pink eyeshadow with pink lipstick, or pink ribbons in their carefully straightened hair, were the girls who sighed all the time and thought it was cool to not listen to the teacher. "HELLO this is our EDUCATION here!" I would turn around and think to myself. ".... And why do you have so many 'cool' friends and if my one friend is absent I have to eat lunch with people I don't even like?!" Not only did I have social jealousy of these pink-wearing girls because of their fan-base and seemingly cooler less-controlling parents, but I also felt disdain towards their actions and what those actions implied in a social construct. In P.E., a girl in my glass wore tight bike shorts that's length were so short on her thighs that it didn't pass her vagina. Honestly I'm not making that up, I remember commenting to a friend that I couldn't believe that first she wore that and second she didn't get in trouble for it. Her standing in the middle of the field with her arms crossed talking to a friend and making the voluntary class soccer game unfold around her. Hot Pink now equated to me that I am over-sexualized and society accepts it. I can also act apathetic to other people's interests and actions and when I am required to kick, I will do so poorly because I obviously couldn't care less about your boy stuff, only how to tease you boys.

Pink = Bad and Pink = Female so Female = Bad. As a girl I adamantly rejected the color pink, because it associated me with "girly" things and to be girly is to be prissy, easily frightened, dainty, naive and overall incapable. Politically and socially inactive, as Baumgardner and Richards put it.

Once I began studying feminism I realized that I was making masculinity the norm and striving for it. How wrong I am and how conscious I am now of my newfound perspective that all things girl are NOT bad, and I should NOT feel "ashamed" in loving the girly things that I do.

I just got a job at Smoothie King. I sat patiently for 20 minutes past my scheduled interview time. I waited quietly with my ankles crossed under my lacy skirt for the smoothie-rush to pass. Once inside I giggled at the right times and answered my interviewer's questions with cute yet confident quips. Once he offered a hot pink Smoothie King t-shirt I blurted out AH OTHER COLOR DO YOU HAVE. Aside from the broken English, it wasn't even posed as a question.

It isn't Girly stuff that I avoid, I love girl things, I really do. Feminine touches and lace and giggles and higher-pitched voices. Sweet stuff. Whatever. My issue is the generic girly things and attitudes automatically associated/assigned to me because I am a girl.

What needs to be done is a conscious separation of the girly things we know and love (because YES THEY'RE AWESOME) from the air-headed ideas we're supposed to represent. Girls ARE strong and Girls ARE powerful! I'm excited to participate in a community who thinks so as well, and as third wave feminisms grow I believe that peoples' understandings of patriarchal oppression will as well.

In the mean time... here are some links to articles talking about Girls and Pink, because it is interesting to see what everyone's opinion is of the color and what it represents (in order of what I think is most interesting).
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/crabmommy-an-open-letter-to-the-color-pink-245713/
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1654371,00.html
http://mwillett.org/mind/pink.htm
http://www.dsfanboy.com/2008/01/30/girl-gamer-magazine-thinks-its-still-the-1950s/

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