I was seven years old when I decided that the color pink was the epitome of girlhood – something that at the time was so unfortunate to be experiencing. Not that my favorite color, yellow, was any better as far as femininity goes in terms of eight year old boys terrified of cooties, but nonetheless – pink was for girls only. Anything girly immediately held back everything cool about me, especially in elementary school. It was an immediate limit. I could only be included if I was less girly, and I was teased less without the bows.
This mentality continued as I made my way into middle school. I avoided pink like it would give me the plague. I mean, in a sense, it can. The only woman to ever be taken seriously in hot pink is Elle Woods – and even she had to prove her worth over a perm in a court of law. Pink, for me, at this time in my life, represented everything that society tried to push on me – that I couldn’t be successful if I was not complacent, quiet, and traditional.
Growing up, I denied liking the color pink at every chance I got. Now, however, I find myself gravitating towards more traditionally feminine things – makeup, bows, pink. At first, I thought I was letting my younger self down. She worked so hard to deny all things girly, yet here I am at 18 years old indulging in it all.
What I’ve learned, beyond that the approval of men is at its core, worthless, is that there is so much empowerment to be found in the color pink – because it defies what society has expected it to be. Let me break it down, I grew up hating pink because it represented feminism, something that I wanted to avoid.
Now that I am a feminist, I believe that the color pink is not weak, but it is a statement. It speaks to a certain confidence in your girlhood – the legacy of the woman you were before and the woman that you are continuing to become. Denying the fact that I am girly did not make me any stronger of a woman, it just solidified the stereotype that anything associated with women is weaker, less important, and overall able to be ignored by anyone who listened to me drone on about my previous hatred of pink.
It’s still a journey, but I can attribute much of my progress to becoming comfortable with my girlhood – and the fact that seven-year-old me did really want to wear pink.