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Even in the absence of obviously gendered toys, without anyone urging her to be ‘a good girl’, with her only peers encountered fleetingly on the playground, and with limited (though burgeoning) verbal skills, she’s figured out that pink is for girls, which is something she wants to be. My daughter cares about pink because she’s attuned to these norms.
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Colours encode aesthetic norms that run straight through to style, personality, culture, and class. Pink matters, then, because it is bound up with ways of being in the world that are partially aesthetic, but also personal and political. And those styles, in turn, fit with different personalities: sassy, sweet, elegant. They are allied to, and in tension with, other colours in ways that make them suitable components of some overall styles and not others: hot pink fits with zebra stripes and metallic-silver stars ballerina pink with tulle and hearts dusty rose with gingham or Art Nouveau flowers.
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It turns out that the ‘pure’ phenomenal property is anything but: pink – or rather, various pinks – are imbued with thick, sticky, if largely intuitive, cultural significance. But they continue to nag, tugging at the corners of my mind. She’ll just cover it in paint and apple sauce anyway. I’ve tried telling myself that none of it matters. These are thoroughly aesthetic judgments, though I have a hard time telling where they come from, or what could justify them. Some make her look cute and spunky others washed-out and dumpy. Some go nicely with blue or grey leggings, while others demand white, or maybe stripes. While some pinks strike me as tacky, flat and one-dimensional, others look delicate, or resonant. My daughter seems not to differentiate among these pinks, generally adopting a policy of ‘more, more, more’ but I find myself repelled by some and attracted to others. But the various donation streams present different pinks reflecting their different socioeconomic origins, ranging from the all-American hot pink of a cardigan from a mass-market label such as Carter’s to the dusty rose of a dress from a more select collection such as Tea’s. Most of her clothes are hand-me-downs, and pink is heavily represented. The daily ritual of dressing has become a pink-suffused, intensive negotiation. I often wonder, how can she be so inexorably drawn to pink, even before having any peers to mimic? And why am I so irked by pink? Why should I even care what she wears? My daughter’s passion for pink is, most obviously, a form of comeuppance visited upon me by an irony-loving universe, since I’ve always steered away from it myself. I have a daughter who recently turned two and is quite vocal in her opinions, especially concerning the glory of pink and the intrinsic goodness of things that happen to be pink: for instance, that strawberry ice-cream is maximally delicious, in virtue of its colour. Lately, I’ve been thinking about pink a lot.