Pink is a Problem. Or is it?
I was sitting at Legoland, drinking my coffee while the kids were playing in the castle ropes course. Across from me was a stand with toys and dress-up gear - directly facing me, a set of toy pirate shields. One was yellow and one was pink.
The pink one annoyed me, but I wasn’t sure why. It was just a pink shield for kids who like to play pirates and who also like pink.
I sat there a pretty long time (the kids love that ropes course), and it finally occurred to me. The pink shield was annoying because it was next to the yellow one. If the yellow one hadn’t been there, the shield wouldn’t have annoyed me at all. Pink is a color and yellow is a color, and they are both great colors. But pink in our culture has meaning, and that meaning is “I’m a girl.”
That meaning forces a choice onto children that they don’t need to make. It’s not a choice about getting a toy in a favorite color. It’s a choice about gender identification.
Pink has now become so strongly identified with femininity and in particular, being a girl, that to select something in pink is symbolic of identifying as a girl. It means that a child looking at the two shields isn’t seeing just a pink shield and just a yellow one, and choosing the color they’d rather have. It means that the child is saying “I’m a girl and I like this shield” or “I’m not a girl and I like this shield.”
Forcing a child to declare their gender identity via the color of an object is a choice kids don’t need. It adds unnecessary anxiety to the mental load not just of the child - whose choice is now declaring their gender identity - but to everyone around them watching them make that choice and considering its implications. A child who just wants a pirate shield now also has to declare whether they identify as male or female. A girl can’t just pick the yellow one - she will feel that she’s supposed to pick the pink one because it’s there for girls. And a boy can’t really choose the pink one even if he likes it better - he’ll be telling the world that he’s not identifying as a boy.
Both pirate and girl at the same time. No pink necessary.
Sure, we could brush this problem off nonchalantly and say, “Who cares what pink means? Get the one you want, boys and girls.” But it’s not that easy. There are few adults who are confident enough in their own self-identity to wear whatever they want regardless of what others may think or say. Young children, most of whom are just beginning to understand social cues and symbols and whose understanding of the world tends to be blunt and literal, have difficulty understanding that holding a pink shield doesn’t have to signal femininity.
And so the attempt to empower girls by giving them a “girl option” has actually had the opposite effect - what it really does is take their choice away. The choice should be: “Do I want to be a pirate today?” But now it's: “Do I want to be a pirate girl or a pirate boy today?”
The solution is to show kids that there are many ways to be a girl or a boy - and that pink is an awesome choice regardless of gender. At Princess Awesome, sometimes we use pink, because it can be gorgeous for rockets lifting off or ninja hiding in flowers. But it’s not the only option, because it’s not the only way to be a girl.
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Draig Goch
September 07, 2019
Bethany’s comment is spot-on. I was the Tomboyish girl when I was little, but nobody thought twice about my Ghostbusters toys/shirts, and I also had She-Ra stuff to play with. Girls didn’t have to choose gender-specific stuff even in the mid-80s. Boys don’t get those options. And if you really want to look at “the pink problem” start with the pink triangle.