of pink bowling balls and oppression

“You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera. …"Friends don't let friends use pink balls."  Rick Santorum said it, and all us liberals recoiled in horror.  Floating in our mind were a million other examples of this injustice: pink legos used to build nail salons; Tonka Toy commercials aimed at boys and their dads; the friend who won’t let his two year old son touch a purse or put on a princess dress; the school that has separate dress up trunks for boys and girls; and even the trains, tools, and other ‘boy’ toys that only appear as gifts from friends and relatives when there is a boy to give them to. 

We see it as sexism.  As evidence that girls are really hated and seen as weak, and given the lace covered pink and purple leftovers.  We get really worked up and hit out at the deliberate and malevolent ignorance around us. 

I say we, because I do it too.  I see this dated gendered nonsense everywhere, and actively work against it.  I consciously make sure that when I give my children yogurt and cottage cheese, my son gets the pink bowl once in a while and my daughter gets orange even though she insists she doesn’t like orange.  Who cares what she likes, goddamn it she’s going to have an orange bowl for her cottage cheese. 

The truth is, us liberals think about this stuff a lot … a lot more than Rick Santorum and the malevolent sexist Neanderthals.  The truth is, that usually this gender division isn’t done to hold girls down or because they are seen as inferior or weak.  It is done because it is done … because it has been done.  It is done because it is a way to order the world that is familiar to people, and we humans need to bring order to our world. 

The people who stop their boys from wearing princess dresses for Halloween or bowling with pink balls aren’t consciously trying to hold down women or make their sons into narrow caricatures.  The companies that cater to this worldview aren’t doing anything more sinister than trying to make money.  The truth is that the sooner we stop approaching the fear of boys wearing pink as a deliberate evil, the less folks will dig in their heels about it and the more quickly it will change.  If we are interested in changing something, rather than just being able to vent righteous anger, than we might actually change something.  Just something to think about next time you castigate someone for their choice of bowling balls.