Pink Please

Apparently, a group of neuroscientists at Newcastle University have completed a study confirming that boys like blue and girls like pink. And this is because during human evolution, pink represented the color of ripe fruit that as gatherers women generally did while the men were away hunting. I thought about writing a rebuttal. I thought about writing how flawed a study is for attempting to prove the existence of a biological basis for color preferences between sexes when only adults between the age of 20 and 26 were used. I thought about pointing out how these evolutionary psychology studies get away with such circular logic that says, “Our behavior today is innate because it was our behavior before; and it was our behavior before because we say it is today.” I considered writing about the 3 year old boy I knew who loved pink to the dismay of his father and thus had to (re)learn how to love blue. I considered all these things, but thought that it would be a waste of time. Instead, I think I'll post an excerpt to a book I have been working on for nearly 7 years...now that I proudly call myself a pink.marigold:

...When I was a girl my favorite color was pink. I don’t know why or how, but everything I owned had to be covered with the stuff. My bedspread was pink, my clothes, my school supplies. My pink markers, frayed at the tip, always ran out first. Oh, I was proud of that color. I was proud of being a girl. All the other girls in my class liked blue or purple. But not me. I stood by pink. Pink was girly, the most wonderful thing to be.

Then one year suddenly I hated it, detested it with every inch of my being. If I saw the color I made gagging noises. All pastels, relatives to the pink monster, became abhorrent taboos as well. I even hid my pink bedspread and replaced it with navy blue, wondered what on earth possessed me to buy pink bed covering in the first place. Pink was girly. Pink was for losers.

I carried this with me all the way through college.

Then I came to Japan for my junior year abroad. And everything was in pastels. I went about gagging at everything I saw. Everything looked like my bedroom at age ten. Everything was pink. Japanese folk don’t have this American aversion to cuteness. So it wasn’t unusual to find young men wearing pink clothing. Buildings were pink. Bulldozers were pastels. Men and women lugged pink suitcases while talking on pink cell phones and passing by stores selling pink comic books. I can’t describe the emotions I went through as I cursed my surroundings. I can’t explain the anxiety that fell over me when I entered department stores filled with pastel electronics, an oxymoron for certain. I left Japan still not fully understanding it, thinking Japanese people were somehow lacking in maturity. They were too girly to be adults.

Well the second time I came to Japan, the instant the plane landed and I felt myself transformed into that childhood bedroom, the sense of peace I felt as a girlchild came back. Not like before when the onset of those ungrasped girlhood feelings became anxiety provoking. This time I understood them. I understood how my man-member monolatry buried the girl in me.

I could even bring myself to buy pastels and to look at them with a sense of calm, that is, all accept pink. For months I would sit and stare at pink in fear, trying to remember what it was like to adore the shade. But I could not remember. I saw a pink chair and I looked desperately for a blue one before I reluctantly sat down. It was as if by sitting on the chair, all of the attributes associated with pink, weakness, vulnerability, naivety, would attach itself to me and be naked for all others to see. I would buy cleaning supplies and notice myself using the box’s color, not the price as the discerning factor. A weak-colored bottle of detergent couldn’t possibly be strong enough to get the stains out. No pink supplies enter my shopping basket. From hangers to notebooks, while all around me, pink seemed to elude me.

How could a color I once loved so dearly, wore so pridefully impress upon me as an adult something to detest and fear? The question is not one of those mysteries in life that we commonly shrug off as inexplicable. The answer is in the phrases, “You da man!” and its complimentary “You go! Girl,” whose nuances bespeak the valued condition by just being in one and the command that one catch up imbedded in the other. The answer is while I could embrace the pastels and soft hues that embodied the safe world of formative years, years of phallocentric inculcation personified in the single aversion to the color pink was harder to overcome than with just one’s sheer will to resist...

Anecdotes aside, I understand that these studies like the one done at Newcastle are more about getting continued funding for further research than anything else. But if nothing else, haven't we evolved enough yet to know that not everything is black or white or in this case pink or blue?