CREATIVE WORK
Pink Running Shoes
On my first run in years, my thoughts were on my bright pink running shoes. In the not-so-distant past I discovered a different perspective about the colour. As a little girl I rebelled against girliness. As a matter of principle I rebel, less so now that I’m older. Pick your battles and all that. But I think even at the ripe age of 6 I knew I was a feminist, and blunt refused to wear pink. I believed feminists do NOT wear pink.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
​
A relatively well-known theory is that pink used to be a boy colour. Someone in the Victorian era apparently decided pink, as a close relative to red, symbolised power, strength and virility, all of these very masculine traits. Whereas blue was deemed soft, serene, pure and demure, how women were expected to be. (Probably a man who decided that. (I’m just saying that without proof. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was Queen Vic herself. Although arguably a feminist in her own right, she was a woman of her time.))
​
But there appears to be no consensus on when the colour norm reversed. I heard an unofficial story that the suffragettes at the end of the 19th Century adopted the colour as an up-yours gesture to the men who tried to suppress them. They reclaimed their power as women in what is now coined as the first wave of feminism.
​
I can’t find much information on the internet about this story, but I’m still scouting the brick-and-mortar libraries for proof.
​
Nonetheless, true or not, it inspired me anew. I was born in the last quarter of the 20th Century, but thanks to those brave women at the other end of the century, I could go to the university I wanted to go to, study what I wanted to, earn an income, be independent, vote from the moment I was voting age – 18, not 30. My husband works alongside me to clean and cook and raise our kids, and I’m in charge of the family’s budget, for better or worse.
​​
I pay tribute to the suffragettes and their sacrifices, the radical and less-radical ones, as I pay homage to Cleopatra and Nefertiti a millennium-and-half earlier. And Joan of Arc six centuries ago, Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman to study at the renowned Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in the 17th Century, who defied the conventions of her time and painted other strong women.
(I love this story about Artemisia. When she was heavily pregnant, a young relative of Michelangelo commissioned her and other artists – all men – to paint the ceilings for the Casa Buonarotti in honour of the great Michelanglo. And she was paid three times more than any of her male associates on the project.)
​
Then there is Emily Bronte and her sisters, Jane Austen, George Sand, Emily Dickinson, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Marie Curie who was the first woman to receive the Nobel Price, Simone du Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, Betty Friedan, Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin. The list is long and prolific, and undoubtedly history mentions only the proverbial tip.
​
But I digress. I grew up at the end of the second wave of feminism and became a woman during the third wave of feminism. The popular view is that pink became a girl colour again during a marketing push in the 1980s and 90s when science made it possible to know the sex of an unborn baby. Nurseries became genderfied on colour, as did the baby clothes and toys. The popular belief for that era is that pink is a dainty and sweet colour, associated with love. Hence a girl colour. (Queue profuse rolling of eyes.)
​
The third-wave feminists scorned pink as a symbol of oppression, repression, weakness. Of course. But in a way that also didn’t give me a choice as a woman to love or hate the colour without making a statement about my sex. I guess that’s the oxymoron of feminism: we make statements about our sex because we are forced into gender-specific roles in the first place.
​
Being a woman in this world would not have been a problem for me if it wasn’t that people throughout the ages (men and women) exploited my sex as a tool for whatever purpose they wanted to achieve, be it burning me at the stake for wanting my own truth, subjugating me into the role of a concubine because I don’t have a penis, infantilising my mind, my experiences in life and how I engage with these experiences.
​
Someone decided girls and femininity are meant to look a certain way, as someone decides so many things for us in our subconscious on a daily basis, shaping our ideologies and our values in the subtlest ways, almost coercively covert.
​
So, I flipped it around and thought someone also decided blue is a boy colour, early on manipulating boys into gender bias at the same time as girls. And that is how we’re reared, within this world where we’re willingly cast into little boxes, be it gender, ideology, appearances, the concepts of success, sexuality, beauty, normal, etc, etc, etc.
​
There’s talk that we’re in a fourth wave of feminism, one where pink reveals its strange paradox in our lives. I love this quote from a post on thestray.org : “Pink is growing out of femininity into feminism.” Indeed, hot pink is the new black, with an unashamed up-yours, fiercely strong attitude that is ours to own. I love it and embrace it.
​
Nonetheless I realised that I don’t have to be held hostage to perceived symbolism of pink, or any colour for that matter. It is self-limiting. I can find my own meaning – power – in colour.
​
And today, as I headed out for my first run in many years, my Tulip dog in tow, I chose to draw feelings of power, freedom and joy from the pink shoes on my feet. And yes, they’re hot pink.