The Antlerette October 2019 Volume 94 Issue 2
Pretty in Pink Lorelai Paige, Staff It’s happened to countless young girls: they start off adoring princesses, ballerinas, and the color pink. But somewhere along the line, usually from third to sixth grade, they take a dramatic shift to “tomboy” and assert that they aren’t a “girly-girl”, which includes denouncing pink as the worst color on the color wheel. What changed between these two periods of time? It wasn’t an actual change in personal style, it was the young girl learning that society looks down upon most feminine things, including pink. Pink suggests all kinds of things, as with all colors. But most people can agree that most things pink are associated with femininity, which gives a clue to why society looks down upon it as a color. It’s clear that most things known to be enjoyed by women, especially teenage girls, are immediately dismissed as shallow or immature. A similar thing happened with the Beatles, where people hated them for the longest time while teenage girls gravitated towards them until adult men started listening to them more, and then society deemed the Beatles an “acceptable” band to enjoy. The same idea goes for pink. As long as it remains a color that is mostly liked by girls, it will continue to be considered a lesser color by the rest of society.
All the connotations associated with colors can feel meaningless when we look at the history of pink and blue as girl and boy colors respectively. In the 1920’s, pink was considered a boy color because it was a more vibrant color and blue was considered a dainty girl color. This all switched to what we have today for largely unknown reasons in the 1940’s, with blue being masculine and pink being feminine. Like whatever color you want to like. Especially as a girl who was taught to renounce pink and become a tomboy in order to be accepted, I’ve rediscovered my love for pink that I had as a young kid. So, if you think a color is simply nice, don’t let patriarchy put down your interests.
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