Saturday, March 6, 2010

Pink Space




Have you noticed how most little girls in our urban areas are now dressed in pink? I don't remember it being the case even ten years ago. I have not been able to figure out how this came about. Do the parents consciously choose it for their daughters, or is this the only color available for little girls' wear? In the store where I work, we give out balloons to children. Invariably the girls ask for pink balloons. The little boys are not dressed in any one color, and they ask for balloons of many different colors.

I don't like the color pink. I never have liked it. As anyone who knows me sees, I dress in black, orange, or purple. Is there something wrong with me? I never wore pink when I was a child. Have I missed something? What if some fundamental gender programming went wrong with me, and I missed pinkness? If so, I have also missed the essential female preference for high heels. Shall I go to the mall and re-program myself by buying pink garb? Or should I paint more pink pictures with flowers in them, like this one above? Where's the flower? The nebula is a flower, hence its title.

"Nebular Flower" is acrylic on illustration board, 10" x 7", from the endless series I painted in February 1990.

3 comments:

Tristan Alexander said...

This does look somewhat rose like..I think I like it! As for the pink thing, it is because little girls are "supposed" to like pink and I think the 8 years of Republican rule and the right wing push for everything to be "traditional" and like it was in the 50's, is the reason! I think it is a conservative effort to make little girls be more "traditional". Kids have no choice of what colors they wear utill they are older and by then the girls (some anyway) have been prograhmed to like pink. They tries forcing blue on boys but it has been less succesful for some reason.

Anonymous said...

It's okay -- I don't think that I look good in pink. Perhaps it was not socially imposed on us as children. There are reasons that marketers have made pink a priority color for little girls and they are following a trend laid down for them. Pink is an okay color, but no one is obliged to like it. Fine for sunsets where you will find it often with orange and purple!

Rae Trigg said...

I don't like pink, either, so no, I don't think it's genetically programmed. I think it's social programming. I always thought the assigning of colors to people based on gender had no basis in real life.