Pink Think and From Badness to Meanness

After reading Pink Think and “From Badness to Meanness: Popular Constructions of Contemporary Girlhood” I came to two conclusions.  Growing up in the time of Pink Think must have been one of the weirdest times for young women.  Second, was the bad girl of the 80's and 90's a challenge for young girls to be like boys are better than boys? 

Growing up in the Pink Think era had to having been a difficult time for maturing girls.  Being told that to be feminine one had to follow the advice of all these papers, magazines, even actresses just so they could find a man that they could settle down with and do whatever he wants them to do.  For little girls, if they wanted to play with toys, theses toys had to be pink for them to be girl toys sounds a bit extraneous. With what seems like the entire media force, telling young women that to be a feminine woman, one had to wear pink explains a lot about what could be called an obsession with the color pink in today society.  In elementary school, if you were to ask the girls what their favorite color is, I would expect 85% or more to answer that pink is their favorite color.  If you asked them why, they would say because all of their toys and Barbie dolls are pink.  My little sister was a prime example of this.  Our living room seemed to be overwhelmed with the amount of Barbies that she had.  Studying how the media expects girls to behave helps us understand why they act the way they do later in life.  How many magazines are there out there telling women nowadays how they should dress or how they should act?  What kind of car they should drive?  What kind of make-up they should wear?  Make-up, is what I believe is the biggest feminine, Pink Think, product out there.  If a girl wants to grow up to be a very feminine women, she must learn at a young age to wear make-up.  When did it become common practice for women to cover up their natural figure with powders that are supposed to make them look beautiful and feminine.  And the worst part of make-up are the women who take it over board.  The ones that put on what seems like a mountain of it so when they end up taking it off at night they need two wash rags and a full shower just to get it off.  I dated one of these girls during my undergrad studies.  When we would go out on a date, she would take almost two hours to get ready.  That included a shower, "doing" her hair, putting her make up on, and getting dressed.  I swear I would have to tell her to get ready for a date at 6pm at 3 in the afternoon.  When did that kind of dress become the norm for women?

“From Badness to Meanness: Popular Constructions of Contemporary Girlhood” hits closer to home than Pink Think did.  My older sister was one of those bad girls that had to prove she was just as strong if not stronger than the boys.  Now she didn't join a gang or anything like that, but she was one of the girls that would do anything the boys did because she could do it.  She renounced pink as her favorite color long before I was born and pick anti-pink, aka black, as her favorite color and let everyone know this.  When I was older enough to play with her, she would always want to play sports or rough house and when she would beat me she would declare as loud as she desired that I got beat by a girl which meant girls were better than boys.  Oddly enough, most of the girls I knew from my childhood to then end of middle school who played sports, were the type of girl who had to prove that they were better than boys.  I was like they had a chip on their shoulder from a previous life that they just had to settle.  Granted, these personal experiences are nowhere close to having served in a gang but for me they are mellowed versions of those girls.  The one joining gangs were the ones out the show that they could do whatever they want, no matter what society had to say.  They were in essence, rebels, to the Pink Think movement.

After must thought, girlhood studies matter in academy today so that current and future women, as well and men who are willing to listen, have the knowledge to understand why society expects what they do from them and give them the power to do whatever they decide to do.  Understanding history and learning from it is the only way to move forward.  Studying this is just one way to gather information on the societal functions that coincide with girlhood.