Who would have thought that a single color could be so loaded? Sure, plenty of colors mean something, make instant connections in your mind, but those tend to be cursory. Green, blue and yellow may mean something, but they don’t make a statement about you. Pink is an entirely different story.
When I was a little girl, my bedroom was pink. From the pastel paint on the walls to the dust ruffle that hung beneath my striped bedspread, it looked like the decorator had suffered mental scarring from a nasty accident in a Pepto-Bismol bottling plant. When anyone asked my favorite color, though, I was always a bit of a brat and would claim it was purple. But I secretly loved my pink. I don’t know why I thought it should be a secret because at that point, so many things that I desired were pink.
First, there was my fascination with Barbie. The first doll I owned was from the “Barbie and the Rockers” series. For the uninitiated among you, this was during Barbie’s rebellious, “punk” stage in the ‘80s. Picture the Bangles crossed with Christina Aguilera. Picture knee-high pleather boots with a matching mini-skirt, big hair and too much painted-on purple eye shadow. Each of the dolls had its own shade that colored everything from its clothes, to its instrument, to the streaks in its hair, but nobody wore pink. Nobody but Barbie. Barbie the lead singer wore pink. Barbie, the front-woman, wore pink. Barbie, the focus of everyone’s attention, wore pink.
Curiously (or maybe not so curiously), my pink-bedroom stage corresponded to the years I devoted to ballet. The school where I danced performed different shows throughout the year, but the highlight was The Nutcracker. In the little world my fellow ballerinas and I danced in, your status for the year was determined by the role you played in the previous December’s performance. With the exception of the Sugar Plum Fairy-which was always danced by a guest professional anyway-the costumes of the most coveted roles were pink. Clara’s party dress and nightgown were an innocent, powdery blush. The Rose Queen’s tutu was a deep magenta. When the costumes for the Arabian Coffee were re-done, their blue silks and chiffons were switched to a bright pink. (No euphemisms are applicable here. This was no “mauve” or “pale pink.” This was the pink against which all other pinks measured themselves.)
But then I quit dancing and threw myself into junior high sports. And with the change in my extracurriculars, I wiped the last vestiges of pink from my life. My parents let me redo my bedroom: the walls were painted blue, the bedspread was replaced with one covered in bold, multi-hued (not including pink, of course) shapes, and my ballet things were loaded into a plastic shopping bag and pushed to a back corner of my closet. From the start of seventh grade through most of high school, I avoided any connection with pink as best I could. I was pink when I was a girly-girl. I was pink when I was shuttling off to ballet and my friends were playing soccer or going to gymnastics. I was pink when I still read American Girl magazine while the other girls in my class pored over Teen and Teen Beat. I was sick of being pink.
Senior year of high school, one of my friends from the track team wrote a piece for our composition class about the time when she’d lost her pink—the first time she’d beaten her boyfriend in a race. I might have smirked when she began to read it, but at some point her tone changed and she seemed almost bittersweet. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t be a bad-ass sprinter and still wear a pink dress if she wanted. I’m not trying to make this an earth-shattering epiphany, but it did cause me to think.
For so long I rebelled against a color because I was afraid of what it would say about me, not because I just didn’t like it. I wasn’t into frilly ribbons and bows, but my attempts to be the tomboy always fell a little flat, too. I had a hard time realizing that I wasn’t a color; my clothes or some other inanimate object were. And just because I bought a pink shirt in the springtime didn’t mean that I was going to sit wearing it in a sunroom somewhere, afraid to pick up a pencil because I might disturb my pristine appearance (Need proof? My toenails are painted pink right now, but my fingernails are ragged enough to make any manicurist cringe).
Maybe this all sounds a little too feel-good, too self-empowering for your tastes. That’s fine. Just don’t let yourself be fooled by the pink pigs embroidered on my socks—yes, I’m almost 21 years old. And don’t ask if real men or real women wear pink. It doesn’t matter if they do, it matters that they can.
Rachel Sierminski is a junior in the College and an associate editor of the Georgetown Voice. Her bedspread right now is bright orange … not that you cared anyway.
