A Scrap of Pink

It’s a colour that just embodies everything girly.

Yuck.

But I only learnt to hate pink after I’d learnt to love it.

I used to stare at the pink girls on shiny cardboard boxes who looked so real, so friendly, laughing with their hair curled golden, advertising a tea party set made in but not of CHINA.

But the boys in my class wouldn’t touch pink, poisonous pink, in case it made them like tea parties (minus the tea) too.

No, boys didn’t like pink. They liked mud and dust and farts and grass stains, no daisy chains and dolls.

“Pink stinks!”

So I turned to purple. At fourteen I painted my room dark plum. It wasn’t a boy colour. But it wasn’t quite a girl colour either. Was it a woman colour? I thought I was quite mature, unique, independent. No stinky pink here.

Fast forward and I’m back to the start, wondering why and when and how femininity became such a tarnished art, why pink became this yucky thing, thick on my tongue this pink gunk this goo that labels me as feminine too. My pink tongue refusing to speak, to think about pink.