Pinked.
So… my friend Rahul walks into class with his bag around his shoulder and his jeans, baggy as always. Everything’s the same. Except for the fact that when one of my other friends lifts her face from a book and sees him, she cries out, “Dude! Are you kidding me! You look so GAY!” Yeah! She took a dig at his sexuality. Reason – the shirt he was wearing was pink.
So what if it was?
Is pink really only a girls colour? I had always thought this generation was beyond that age old cliché. But now, PINK had gotten me thinking.
And whenever we get thinking, Google is what we look up to for refuge, right? That’s precisely what I did. And wow – the number of papers written about pink and its association with sexuality and gender forced me to think even harder. On one side there was all this information about pink being ‘rosy’ and the epitome of feminity. Open no-no’s about men wearing pink and the idea of men in pink being gay were ample. They actually considered the colour to be that for little girls and homosexuals (this comparison – I still don’t understand why!). But, on the other side, there was a strong voice against this cliché saying that pink like any colour was at the end of the day, merely a color! So just like a girl carried off the colour so could a boy. One of the most brilliant but rarely-known facts that supports this statement is that in the 1920s, pink was actually a boy’s color and blue was a girl’s. It was only in the 1940s that societal norms changed and pink became a girl’s color.
Google can say all that it wants. But what about people around us? Like my friend who openly called it a homosexual colour in class. To find out more, I spoke to a few friends – guys and girls alike. Turns out, the girls don’t really have a problem as long as the guys ‘can carry it off’ (and they say they are not demanding!). The guys too don’t seem to bother about how they are perceived when they wear the colour. And this I got to see myself when Rahul walked back into class the very next week in the same pink shirt. Just this time around, he wasn’t mocked at. For those who think it’s because my friend changed or became less conservative, that’s not what happened. It was just that she wasn’t around!
For all those boys like Rahul, who still love pink, pink loves you too.
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About the Author: Lipi Mehta
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