A feminist reads all the literature, attends all the protest marches, dresses ‘seriously’, and does not engage in the frivolity of a rom-com. The stereotypes are endless and daunting.
When Scarlett Curtis released the anthology Feminists Don’t Wear Pink... And Other Lies this month, I was intrigued by the title. The book — a collection of essays — navigates the murky and demanding world of being taken seriously as a feminist. With contributions from 52 women (including actors Emma Watson, Keira Knightley and Saoirse Ronan), it demonstrates that one does not have to “look a certain way” to be a feminist.
In her essay entitled Cat Women , actor Evanna Lynch reveals that the most feminine woman she had ever met was also (to her surprise) the most feminist. Singer Alison Sudol admits she was frightened by the ‘f word’ because of the “unwavering sure-footedness” it implied.
Curtis’ own essay made me realise how much I had tailored my own personality to fit this feminist bill — right from never letting a man open a door for me, to attending every women’s rights seminar I could find. Feminists, as she writes, “do in fact, wear make-up, shave their legs and love boys (all if they want to). Feminists can also definitely wear pink, a lot of pink.”
Reading the last page, I felt inspired. I too wanted to challenge assumptions. Like the title of Curtis’ book, the scary universe of pink seemed a good place to shed my feminist fears. As Grazia India’s Fashion Editor, Pasham Alwani, points out, pink is a colour often associated with frivolity. “Of course it’s not unfeminist, but, to be honest, pink has had this Barbie Doll stigma attached to it for the longest time.”
And so, to counter that assumption, I wore just pink for a span of 10 days.
Wardrobe check
To start with, even acquiring enough pink clothes was a task. My own wardrobe had nothing to offer, save for an old skirt that I last wore at a school picnic. My colleagues seemed to possess nothng either. “Pink doesn’t appear in many workwear trends because it isn’t considered ‘serious’ or adult enough,” says Alwani. Unless of course, it is Indianwear, which favours vibrant colours.
My pink wardrobe elicited a lot of reactions from my colleagues. “You look so pretty today!” was a comment I heard on loop all week. Some were sure I had gotten a secret haircut, and some thought my make-up was fancier. Was pink making me look softer, prettier? This could not be a coincidence.
What is in a colour?
The one incident that left me with a bad taste in my pink-lipped mouth was a comment from a man I met at a dinner. He nonchalantly assumed that I was the avid reader of a really trashy women’s magazine. When I brought up the incident two weeks later, he told me that I had struck him as a ‘girlie-girl’, like I was ‘into celebrity gossip and wedding magazines’. He apologised for any offense caused.
By the end of the week, I was relieved that I could expand the colour palette of my wardrobe. But I had also become fond of the colour, and have started wearing it more. It was around this time that I read about Radhika Sanghani, a UK-based political journalist who had embarked on a similar experiment over a year ago. She wrote about how she was catcalled, treated with derision by other women, and even mocked by co-workers.
My experience was not nearly as scarring. I mean, sure, I had been taken for a tabloid junkie and a vain woman who kept ‘dressing up’, but none of it seemed as vitriolic as Sanghani’s experience. The experiment clarified that equality meant feeling just as okay about wearing pink (or make-up, or high-heels) as not wearing it. I had tried so hard to look like a feminist, without realising that I already look like, and am, one.
