I'm a Feminist Who Wears Pink...You Ok There?

I'm a Feminist Who Wears Pink...You Ok There?

• Wednesday, 27 December 2017

Little girls are, for the most part, taught that women can be anything. It's a great message; I am more than for it (#girlpower.) I know I can be anything I want to be. I know my gender shouldn't define my prospects. However, I also know that although my gender shouldn't be an obstacle, at some point it most definitely will (and already has been, but we'll get into that another time.) I mean, can we really say that we are promoting gender equality, when the message we consistently send out is that in order to achieve anything significant, girls need to adopt stereotypically-masculine traits. Like, sure you can be a girl and solve a quadratic equation, but you can't solve it wearing a dress. You can chair a meeting, but not wearing gels with crystal diamonds on the thumbnail. You can fix a car tyre, but not while wearing lipstick.

I mean, everyone knows that lipstick prevents people from being competent.

What I am getting at is this: why can't I participate in the feminine behaviours associated with my gender and be a boss-ass bitch? Surely, it can't mean I'm a failed feminist, right?

I've wanted to write this post for a while, but the trigger for it can be pinned down to a recent video of a certain famous race car driver's comments regarding his nephew, laughing whilst claiming "boys don't wear dresses!" It completely sums up my perspective of where gender equality fails. Wearing a dress - arguably the epitome of all that is feminine - is weak; it's laughable. It is the complete and utter devaluation of femininity. It is the reason why everyone is fine with a little girl playing with car toys and balks at a little boy wearing a dress. It's less about enforcing rigidly defined gender roles on boys and girls, and more about straight up fucking misogyny. Anything regarded as "feminine" is still seen by men and women alike as occupying lower status.

We see the devaluation of femininity play out frequently. There's the whole trope of "you throw/run/hit like a girl," not to mention the fact that "girl" is routinely used as an insult among boys and men. Women are advised to tone down their femininity—less ruffles, less makeup, less flashy jewellery; more dark pant-suits with clean lines—if they want to be taken seriously at their jobs. And while the backlash against the hyper-gendering of little girls—the ubiquitousness of the culture of Princess, tutus and a pink colour palette—is just as important as the hyper-gendering of little boys, there is occasionally an anti-femme tone that creeps into the discourse.

There's a difference between gender expectations and freedom of choice. There's nothing wrong with plastic tiaras and pastel colours, but they shouldn't be pushed onto little girls as a means of gendering. Like, for example, I've seen toy 'ambulances' that come in shades of pink and blue, which is super annoying on one level as it sends the 'subtle' (lol) message that girls need some kind of special girl car to be a successful girl paramedic. But on another level, I guess there is nothing objectively wrong with a pink toy ambulance. When people ask "Why can't girls just play with a regular toy?" I always wonder why the pink ambulance can't be the "regular" toy? I mean, I know why, but it's frustrating to constantly see the stereotypically-masculine version of any given toy being hailed as the "regular", while the feminine version is sniffed at.

What I'm trying to get at, I think, is the idea that gender equality doesn't mean that everything has to be androgynous. It means that all the girly things we've been taught to disdain should be seen as being just as good as all the masculine stuff we've been taught to embrace.

The way forward isn't to teach girls to be more like boys—that's just the same old patriarchal shit of privileging masculinity over femininity. Instead, we should be teaching all kids that wearing skirts and loving pink and wanting to play rugby are totally cool and fine ways to be. There's nothing inherently bad about being feminine; it's enforcing femininity on people as a means of oppression that's the problem. We feminists fight for breaking the gender binary, which is for sure an admirable idea that should be tackled with enthusiasm. But as we move towards viewing gender as more of an all-encompassing spectrum, we need to make sure that spectrum includes the colour pink.

*omg look at that: a little girl wearing pink and blue...groundbreaking.

*photo creds to my mam.

© Kerry Maxwell 2017