So, I live at West 27th Place with my brother. The apartment management team had promised us free rental bikes if we were to rent an apartment here, but they're terribly evil people and they lied. They're known for being a certified eco-friendly building that loves animals and saving the world. That's there thing. But really, the only green they care about is money. I never got that free rental 'cause it would be to expensive for them. So I had to get a bike somehow. I ended up calling my dad and asking him if he could buy me a bike (I really needed one because it was taking me 20 minutes to get to class and I was almost always late). The next day he showed up with this white, sparkly bike. I was all, "thanks dad..."
It's interesting how a collection of colors can be "feminine." If this thing were all black no one would be laughing at me. Also, the fact that it's a women's bike makes it, well, womanly. I've seen this bike all around school and I think I'm the only guy who owns it.
And so here I am, slightly ashamed of my means of transportation all thanks to some group of people who chose what colors are girly and what colors are manly. Colors are weird. Whatever, I'm gonna keep riding it.
It's interesting that colors/things we associate with "man" can often be accessed by women without much stigma. A girl may not feel the kind of knee-jerk shame you speak of if her mom had given her a black bike. The toy industry knows that girls will watch cartoons with boy main characters but (gender-conformant) boys, or rather their parents, will usually resist watching shows with girls as the main character. Does femininity taint the object? We will read a piece by Joon Oluchi Lee in October, "The Joy of the Castrated Boy" (in the Reader), which you can read now if you'd like, which relates to this. He talks about embracing the "castration" we associate with "girls" instead of thinking of it as a cross to bear, or a problem to manage, avoid and project onto others.
ReplyDeleteI'm also wondering what it means for a father to give a "girly" gift to his son. A gift, as you know, always comes with an expectation of a return: what is the son expected to give back?
This goes back to the whole "tough guys wear pink" thing that we were discussing the other day. I really dont think that when colors were made, they were designated for any particular gender. It was the clothes designer (as well as designers of other products) that pretty much distributed the colors to each gender. I really dont think it should matter if a guys's bedsheets are pink; it's just like any other color.
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