Pretty in Pink?

It is a strange time to be pink. On the one hand, never before has the assignment of blue to boys and pink to girls been more rigid. As pointed out in The Washington Post last week (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/12/04/every-gift-for-children-this-year-is-terrifying-a-walk-over-the-thin-pink-line-in-target/) and as any visitor to the Target toy department can attest, the strict gender coding of children’s toys (and apparel) by color is as stark in its contrast as the opposite hued fans in the home and visitor sections at a Michigan vs. Ohio State game, where maize and blue compete with scarlet and gray. On the other hand, in the last several years pink has made deep inroads into men’s fashion and sports culture. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have both taken the court in pink shirts (though, oddly, the only match that Nadal has ever lost at the French Open, a tournament he has won eight times, he lost in pink). Professional and college football teams put more and more pink in their uniforms during their annual breast cancer awareness efforts, a practice which culminated with the University of Oregon Ducks, who have grown into a de facto division of Nike’s fashion empire, donning entirely pink helmets in a contest this fall against Washington State. And the kind of teenage boys who wear expensive basketball high tops, at least the ones in Baltimore, have been mixing bright pink kicks into the rotation. Pink has never been more feminine, while at the same time becoming increasingly masculine.

This schizophrenic identity is perhaps not surprising when we consider how very recently it was that the color came to be identified with gender, and even less surprising given the shifts that occurred in that short history. In the 1800’s babies and toddlers of both genders were clothed in white dresses; it wasn’t until the first part of the twentieth century that color entered the picture. And over those first several decades pink was more frequently linked to boys, if only because, as quoted in a Smithsonian Magazine piece (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html), the thinking of the day held that “pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl,” an observation which, lest we think ourselves beyond all that, doesn’t sound very far off from “sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” a nursery rhyme which we repeat as often and as thoughtlessly as Jack and Jill or Humpty Dumpty. This trend didn’t reverse itself until the 1940’s, when the current code, pink for girls and blue for boys, began to predominate.

The odd cultural space inhabited by pink is best illuminated by the controversy surrounding the University of Iowa football stadium’s visiting locker room, the walls of which are painted pink. If pink is feminine, then the protests (reported at http://www.sportsgrid.com/ncaa-football/iowa-pink-locker-room/) of former UI professor Jill Gaulding that the painted walls are a form of “pink shaming” designed, per Gaulding, to mark the visiting Boilermakers or Cornhuskers as “a bunch of ladies/girls/sissies/pansies/etc.”, are absolutely correct. But if pink, per the Ducks and all the other young men whose color palettes Nike is radically expanding, is now as masculine as it is feminine, and as masculine as it once was prior to the 1940’s, then the University of Iowa is standing on firm ground in asserting that it paints its visiting locker room walls pink for the calming effect it has on its opponents, becalmed Boilermakers presumably being less capable of punching their opponent, i.e. the hometown Hawkeyes, in the mouth, which is football-speak for a job well done. Indeed, a quick Google search (http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/color_pink.htm) reveals that pink’s calming effect has been well established in color psychology research (was Nadal becalmed at Roland Garros when he suffered his only loss while wearing pink?), and that the University of Iowa, while perhaps first, is not alone in its practice (http://www.milb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130717&content_id=53916674&fext=.jsp&vkey=news_milb).

As recently as ten years ago, perhaps even five, Gaulding would have been right, and the University of Iowa would have been wrong. But now that pink is hyper-feminine at the same time that it is uber-masculine, Gaulding and Iowa are both right, as if the rules of quantum physics, where an electron can be in two places at one time, have invaded the realm of ethics. In football, when electrons are simultaneously in two places, i.e. when there are penalties on both the offense and the defense on the same play, the penalties offset, resulting in a “do-over,” a concept that is as alien to our observable Newtonian world as the behavior of electrons (which is why every husband foolish enough to try to win an argument with his wife knows that once you’ve said something, even if you immediately realize you should never have said it, you can’t take it back). So perhaps Gaulding and Iowa should engage in a do-over and work through this whole pink locker room thing. Because think what might happen if Gaulding visited the locker room while the Oregon Ducks were in town, putting on pink helmets that were a perfect match for the locker room walls. If, sensing Gaulding’s presence, the Ducks asked themselves, “Are we not men?”, they would be left doing quantum ethics and calculating probabilities while inhabiting a Newtonian world where, as in the effort to definitively locate those elusive electrons, the only meaningful final answer is maybe. For if pink is both feminine and masculine, then it really is neither here nor there.