On Pink Think and Bad Mean Girls

I should have followed my gut and read “From Badness to Meanness: Popular Construction of Contemporary Girlhood” before I read the intro to Pink Think, if for no other reason than to finish the assignment with a lighter tone going into this blog. However, having read them in the reverse order, I’m struck and stuck with how each piece’s conversation with feminizing practices via media illustrate shaming as a punitive function that helps shape those gendered representations. The language of the cited source material in “From Badness to Meanness,” although twenty years old, is almost shocking to read. The Newsweek article that slyly and rhetorically implicates “equal opportunity” as a “scourge” before it implicates “crimes by girls” as the motivating force of the condemnation suggests that it is almost unimaginable that girls would disgrace their femininity of the male-dominated world of crime, or it would seem any male-dominated world. Semantically, the article foregrounds girls crimes within their bodies when it describes the girls “hiding razor blades in their mouths” after the rather mundane charge of the girls simply carrying guns like their boy counterparts. The language of the quote implies that while the same, the girl’s crimes are really worse because they, the girls, corrupt the female body with their willful choice to be gangsters. Moreover, the adjectives used in the television program, Street Stories, to describe these girls disclose an older, gender-power struggle and anxiety. These crime-inclined girls are “active,” “independent...exercising power in a field dominated by men” (47). In the same way that Jayne Mansfield’s cautionary advice, “be careful who you are with and where,” intends to keep girls from straying too far from what it means to be a desirous, feminine woman, perhaps the media attention on violent girl crime intended to shame girls into acting “right,” in ways “appropriate” for young ladies (18).

Similarly, in chronicling pink an uneasy association surrounds shame, the color, and a woman’s biological function beginning with the pink discreet pad. At the heart of Pink Think’s exploration of pink-ing up products and the conceptualization of femininity is the prevalent message of history: to be a “lady,” the girl must be prettied up, daintier than she started out, and packaged in a way controlled by someone else. I have to admit that I enjoyed reading the Pink Think for its humor and calculating insight into the indoctrination of the feminine. I also loved the George-Hamilton-really-said-that moments, but I also found myself uncomfortably looking around my house wondering if I should wonder or even care that I find conspicuously pretty, feminine hygiene products in my medicine cabinet. What does it say about this small component of myself, still needing a little bit of pink, or polka dots, or eye-catching what-have-you to distinguish “my” products from “his”? How does this need translate to the self that functions in the larger world and picture? After taking the “pink appeal quiz,” I thought about shame in a set of different contextual terms. Is there a present day shame for the girl who scored “five to seven yeses for a few thorns” or worse, seven or more to be the “veritable flower of femininity”? Is it reductive or potentially damaging to shape ideas around “girlhood” or “womanhood” while characterizing femininity as the “other F-word”?