Pink

Haven’t been feeling very clever. Yesterday was rough. Today is better. I’m wearing a pink shirt and I don’t know what happened with that. I’ve always been in the school of thought that pink sucks. My mom gave me this shirt and I guess I’m just too old to hate pink. Pink has won me over.

What hasn’t won me over and never will, is the whole color-coded by gender thing. I refuse to join in the Barbie culture of pink is for girls (see the Barbie aisle at your local Wal-Mart. You DO have a Wal-Mart, don’t you?) and blue is for boys. That’s just a bunch of crap and who thought that up in the first place anyway? Growing up I rejected this stereotype. Imagine me, as an adorable little girl aware of gender-based stereotypes already, at 6-years old, battling them left and right in my simple small way.

At the Rafter as a little girl, with my mother (an old department store, now gone the way of all the earth):
“Oh, Nikki, try this blouse on, it’s cute.”
“Mooooom, its PINK. And I hate blouses.”
“You don’t hate blouses OR pink.”
“Yes I do. Pink is for girls.”
“You ARE a girl.”

Minor detail.

Now I think just the opposite. I mean about pink. But not on me, although I’ve received many compliments on how I look in this blouse. Er, shirt.*

About the pink. I think it looks very good on men in the right context. Isn’t that funny? We have this color that’s supposed to be all feminine and we use it that way—socializing children from their very first moments on earth that girls dig pinks and pastels and soft/warm colors; boys like dark, cold/hard colors like blue. But then, oddly enough, when a grown man wears something pink it makes him seem more masculine and comfortable with his sexuality.

Anyway, if you go to my flickr site, I have a picture there of me in my pink shirt (along with one of Michael Jackson because I don’t know any other way of putting pictures on my blog). Actually, I have my green sweater on with my pink shirt underneath. I was wearing my J Crew clothes that day, along with Stoker who was in his Gap "outfit" (you can't say outfit when it's about a man. Only girls where outfits. Men wear a suit or a combination of a shirt and pants, but never, NEVER an outfit). In our defense I must say that I’m actually a jeans and t-shirt kind of person, as is Stoker. But when I scored a desk job 8 months ago (score?), I was forced to wear ‘nice’ clothes. Since then I’ve been working on increasing my wardrobe to include ‘nice’ clothes, because as we all know, jeans and t-shirts are not ‘nice.’ Wearing them is the equivalent of wearing your most worn out shirt and sweats. At least in the business world. Please note the heavy use of sarcasm to convey my opinion that jeans and t-shirts are the clothes of the gods, the modern day parallel for ambrosia, nectar and togas.

Thank you.


*I'll give you something to think about. Think about how English attempts to be a gender-specific language, but fails miserably at my fingertips. With words like blouse, panties, purse and etc. Which all actually mean shirt, underwear and bag. I reject the use of all these so-called feminine words. Stoker is hell-bent on getting me to admit that what I have is a purse and not a bag. He’s always trying to trick me into saying “My purse.” But it’s not a purse. It’s a bag, and it actually looks better on him than on me, which merely proves my point.