I like pink. It’s a cheerful, friendly colour and I wear it semi-regularly. Exploring my closet, I see a polo shirt, a button-up, multiple t-shirts, a few ties, and a variety of underpants in fuchsia, magenta, and rose. I think it goes nicely with my dark colouring. When picking out my iPhone case, the young man showed me examples in black and navy. I said defiantly, “No, I’ll take the pink one. Thanks!”
In the Western world, pink is, of course, associated with the feminine and the girlie, but that is a relatively recent historical development. Even after parents stopped dressing their little boys in frilly dresses, as they did in the 19th century, children’s clothing took awhile to be gendered as blue for boys, pink for girls. A 1918 department store publication actually advocated the colours reversed–“dainty and delicate” blue for girls and “strong” pink for boys. It was only after the Second World War that the colours were codified in the way we now think of them.
The interesting thing is that blue never stopped being appropriate for girls or women. In parents’ race for gender-neutral clothing, most often the masculine was adopted for both sexes. Rich Victorians dressed their sons in dresses because they wanted to protect them. Modern day parents put their daughters in overalls because they want them to feel strong and capable.
But the fashion industry keeps trying to reclaim pink as a colour for men, and every other season a slew of articles appear arguing that ‘yes, men can wear pink!’ To quote Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, I think they doth protest too much.
“For a fact, real men do wear pink and this is what differentiates them from ‘boys,’” argues an online fashion writer. “If you still don’t believe me, you may want to visit Thailand — which is popular for men in pink so much that the King favors the color pink for himself. Also, the French have adopted this color for years and jackets and sweaters in pink are common among French men.” Well, if they’re doing it in Thailand and France…
My problem with arguments like this is that they only go half way. While deconstructing pink as a feminine colour, they uncritically accept the idea that there are ‘real men.’ It’s pretty obvious who doesn’t fall into that category. Presumably, bikers, playboys, and rugby players are allowed to wear pink. Florists, interior decorators, and fashion correspondents for cable TV (the exact men who are more likely to wear it) just don’t count.
As a gay man, to finally address the pink elephant in the room, I always thought I was above these gendered signifiers. Like every single generation since the Stonewall Riots, I thought that gender roles and stereotypes could be swept away with a swish of my hand and a reading of Judith Butler. I wear pink because I like it. Simple as that.
But then I read David M. Halperin’s How To Be Gay (guess the colour of the book’s cover), which I received for Christmas because my parents are awesome. It’s an academic tome and it’s mostly about Joan Crawford, but one of the author’s arguments is that gay men, aware from a young age that they don’t act like other boys, are keenly aware of social constructs, of all identities being a performance. They can heighten their masculinity to blend in, and heighten their femininity for attention.
To survive a hostile world, gay men needed a cultural perspective that acknowledged mainstream hierarchies while rejecting them. Camp is the embracing of gender roles so extreme they are sucked of their coercive power. When the drag queen dons a sequined gown and a giant wig, she demonstrates that femininity, beauty, and glamour are not just the domain of women, but are constructed attributes anyone can step into– with the right makeup and lighting, of course.
The book, which doesn’t even address fashion, made me reevaluate my relationship with pink clothing. Do I wear pink despite the fact that it is associated with femininity, or because of it? Am I ignoring gender roles, or acknowledging their power by subverting them? The point shouldn’t be that real men can wear pink. There’s no such thing as ‘real men’–they are as mythic as Leprechauns and Santa Claus. But even myths have clothes (quick, what colours do Leprechauns and Santa Claus wear?) Pink is fun to wear precisely because ‘real men’ aren’t supposed to.
That isn’t to say there aren’t men who wear pink because they genuinely like the colour. Perhaps in a century or so, pink will have lost its feminine connotations and we’ll all be in unisex silver jumpsuits as predicted by the movies. In the mean time, as a man who was told as a child to “not walk like a girl,” who was bullied in gym class (despite the fact that I was good at volley ball!), my pink polo shirt declares, “I know what men are supposed to wear. What else you got?”
It’s quite a lot of work for such a delicate colour.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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