My protest posters will be pink

Dear Society,

I’m seventeen, on the brink of adulthood, and for the first time in my life, I’m ready to say a sentence that, growing up, I avoided like the plague. I’m about to type some words that would have seven-year-old me shaking in her little size six Converse, a phrase I knew would only leave my head if I’d gone insane or gotten possessed by some sort of demon.

I like pink.

Not P!NK, the band. Pink, the color.

If you’re wondering why this was such a big deal, and you’re shaking your head, I beg you to keep reading. It took me seventeen years to see this as a bigger story than just a case of favorite colors.

For as long as I can remember, I detested the hue. Cotton candy ice cream, bubblegum shoelaces, fuschia basketballs (don’t get me started on frilly peach dresses)… I didn’t like it. I can vividly remember walking into Justice to spend a birthday gift card and searching the isles, becoming more and more irritated that everything had either glitter or pink on it. I ended up going with a little blue cat pencil sack with a pink zipper, since it was the ‘least girly thing I could find’.

Did you see that? That thought that I had so many years ago, put into quotation marks to hint at how important it is? Because that’s thirteen year old me. Still despising pink, still avoiding dresses and refusing makeup, and never acting in love with a boy, since I couldn’t let myself be so feminine. It wasn’t a reaction to anything my parents said, and it wasn’t from ridicule at school (if anything, the ridicule followed my avoidance of such ‘girly’ things). It was society.

At some point, before even entering kindergarten, I’d come to the conclusion that girls were synonymous with being slower in races. Girls were related to dating and fawning after boys. Girls had no interest in playing sports, they didn’t like to leave the house without makeup, they always wanted to dress nicely, and most importantly, girls always loved pink. Society told me this when I was handed pink-frosted cookies at birthday parties, and the boys were handed blue. Society told me this when Disney released yet another princess film where the girl ends her happily ever after only when she gets a kiss. Society condemned women who strayed from this norm with Ms. Congeniality, reminded us of what we should strive for with the carefully designed costumes for characters like Harley Quinn, pointing out that Hermione Granger would not be accepted socially until she’d dawned that beautiful pink dress at the Yule Ball, changed her hair, and coupled up with a boy who had great social status. Over and over and over, I connected the dots between society explaining that girls either fit the mold, or had to be changed to fit into that expectation of a ‘good girl’, and I tried as hard as I could to push myself away from that.

Have you ever noticed that when someone insults a woman, they typically use the same words, over and over? After all, they’ve been taught by our society that the most harmful and damaging thing you can do to a woman is attack one of three things: her looks, her public personality, and her ability to fit into that expectation that society holds for women. Society, you’ve shown us it’s fine to allow kids to grow up understanding that the worst insults are about a lady’s ability to appeal to men, or her feminine side. You’ve coddled the idea that colors and clothes are representative of the strength of a person, if those colors and clothes are in that ‘good girl’ mold. Why is it so degrading for men to wear makeup or dresses, if you truly think there is nothing degrading about being a woman?

We should not live in a society where being feminine is synonymous with being weak or frivolous or daft. We should live in a society where Rosalind Franklin, Audrey Hepburn, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Austen, Greta Thunberg, Nadia Murad, and other women are mentioned just as often as Leonardo DiCaprio, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Albert Einstein.

I’m seventeen, nearly through high school, and I’ve grown so much since staring at those pink frosted cookies and wishing I could be something other than a girl. When we watch movies, I find myself thinking of the Bechdel test. I don’t mind wearing dresses on occasion (though I always chose my trusty Converse over heels any day). When my friends post pictures of their newest makeup looks, I hype them up in the comments. I’ve changed my mindset.

So, society, let’s make a difference.

No one should be degraded or feel the need to conform to standards set by our society, simply because they’re a woman. I will not tolerate sexism in the twenty-first century- far too many women have suffered to get us to the point we’re at now, and there is no reason to end their work here. Let’s start appreciating women for more than the media or movies have you believe, change the way society sees women, and let’s lead this change with flying colors.

And maybe, for all the times I missed out, my protest posters will be pink.

-Amiah Jared