It Was Never About Pink

When I was 8 years old I ripped all the princess stickers off of my bedroom wall. It wasn’t my first act of rebellion against femininity but it was one of the most memorable. It came from a moment of frustration only an 8 year old can really feel, stemming from the changing attitudes I was facing at school. Something about hitting the third grade really established a clear delineation between girls and boys, between femininity and masculinity. Teachers started asking for strong boys to move chairs or tables, and suddenly femininity meant weakness. Disruptive students were sat with shy quiet girls and suddenly femininity meant responsibility for others. “Like a girl” became an insult and suddenly femininity meant bad.  

It wasn’t only at school. At home, being a girl meant helping make dinner with all the other women in my family while my brother and cousins played until mealtimes. It’s not that I hated the time with my aunts and grandmother—I actually rather enjoyed it—what I began to resent was the expectation, and the assumptions that came with it.  

It was assumed that I played with dolls, and wanted makeup, and loved pink. I really liked pink too, but the teasing tone in which older family members would ask if it was my favourite colour made me hate it on principle. It made me feel like I was nothing beyond this idea of what a girl was. I started to feel ashamed and embarrassed of liking these things, these frivolous girly things.  

And so, my “I hate pink” phase began. I changed my room, I changed my clothes. I stopped playing house and all but ignored my beloved doll house. It went beyond just pink too, I remember being around 12 or 13 and holding back tears during a movie because I needed to be seen as tough, and strong. I have always been an overly emotional person, but this phase in my childhood had me associating emotions with weakness and foolishness, so I repressed that too.   

As I got older and became more comfortable in my skin I stopped thinking about my femininity or masculinity as much. I remembered why I liked pink so much, and it started making its way into my art again. It felt a little ridiculous that I had avoided a colour for so long solely because of its weird societal connotations. I thought about everything I had abandoned in an effort to be seen as less feminine. 

I started mourning the girlhood that my younger self could have had. In trying to rebel from what I thought was expected of me as a young girl, I missed the joy in the things that I truly loved. I had tricked myself into hating femininity itself rather than hating the people around me that were making me feel like my girlness was the reason for all the things I was experiencing.  

I realized that there was a lot of my childhood that I hadn’t quite unpacked. I wasn’t super ready to face it head on so I painted it. A lot of my work now is a love letter to my younger self, and an apology. Still now I don’t really know how to reconcile the negative feelings surrounding my childhood when overall it was a really great one. I was a happy kid, I did happy kid things, but a resentment for myself and my own femininity was always festering. I’m trying to reclaim that now, to embrace aspects of girlhood that I locked away when I was a kid and honouring them through my work.  

In university I started meeting other girls who had gone through an “I hate pink” phase, I hadn’t realized it was such a widespread phenomenon. The idea that so many young girls have this many internalized feelings about themselves and their own femininity feels indicative of a bigger issue. Why is this such a struggle for so many young girls and why is it boiled down to hating pink? At the end of the day, we know it’s not about pink. It’s about how even when we’re barely aware of ourselves, we’re aware of how the world sees us, sees girls.