Wed May 14, 2008 6:46AM8 comments ›
Wed May 14, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs
In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs
It's All Good #65
I visited my mom's house for Mother's Day, which always seems to include watching baseball, as Mom and I are both fans of the game. No, honest, this isn't another column about sports! It's about pink.
You see, every year on Mother's Day, Major League Baseball provides its teams with pink bats, pink ribbons and so forth. It's all Komen-driven, of course. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the country's largest breast cancer charity due largely to its habit of painting things pink.
And so we watched not only pink bats, but pink-ringed bases and pink home plates and pink wrist bands and pink caps in the crowd and Jose Reyes even had pink shoelaces for the occasion. It was, as always, very cool. It would have been even nicer if the Mets announcers had actually noted the real reason for the pink; instead, the disappointingly misogynist Keith Hernandez said it was for Mother's Day. 'Cause, uh, Moms like pink, I guess, Keith? Seriously, do you know the difference between "for" Mother's Day and "on" Mother's Day at all?
I was surprised to find out that Komen isn't the only charity focused on pink. Apparently a number of other less reputable places engage in "pink washing," where it's not as clear where your breast cancer charity money's actually going. In fact, Breast Cancer Action has a website called Think Before You Pink which reminds folks that "breast cancer is about women's lives, not a marketing opportunity," and that there are a lot of places riding the bandwagon just to make a profit.
Most of the pink products I see, however, appear to be from Komen's "Promise Shop." The author the above-mentioned TIME article quotes is right when she notes that shopping pink for a cause is very seductive. They're right. I love my pink santoku knife so much that I bought one for my Mom too. I'll deliberately stop at a display stand in Bed, Bath and Beyond or Staples if I see a number of pink products that aren't ordinarily pink. Do I really need a pink highlighter or Post-It pad? Why, of course not, but the Komen displays are just so… so… cool! I must need it somehow!
Okay, I fib a bit. I don't automatically buy every cute little pinkish product I see from Komen, although I do ogle most of them. In fact, I'm often torn by this whole pinking thing, because as a second-wave feminist my instinct is to shy away from color coding consumerism. After all, this country (at whose expense other countries are having quite the laugh, by the way) now raises its citizens from birth to believe that "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." Did you know that this wasn't always the case? Even in the last century, pink was considered the proper hue for boys as it was thought to be the stronger color (in the Christian tradition, red was associated as male, so its "little sibling" pink was used for boys; whereas blue was associated with the Virgin Mary and thus was deemed appropriate for girls). Following the first World War, blue was used extensively for men's uniforms, and thus became associated as more of a masculine color. From the 1940's onward, Madison Avenue pushed "think pink" for women. So really, we're talking about a period of time younger than my Mom! And it's not only arbitrary but it's just plain silly. I'm hard-pressed enough to fall for the "dolls are for girls (particularly given how many boys and men collect 'action figures') and tools are for boys" nonsense without succumbing to this completely fabricated hue-based biological determinism!
It drives me nuts when I see "women's auxiliary" sites which feature pink as the colour des femmes, because gearing your site towards, for instance, female travelers featuring practical concerns and such is much harder than simply making your search bar pretty in pink. And getting women interested in home improvement by pink-ifying tool belts and tool kits is just condescending. Unless of course there's a breast cancer charity involved. (But even then, only 10%?)
I'm mostly torn about all this because, yes, I admit it -- pink has been my favorite color since I was a little girl. Oh sure, when I entered my teen years I had my parents repaint my bedroom to lavender (which is, after all, pretty much pink plus blue) because at the time pink seemed just too juvenile. But really, deep down, it's always been pink. Even today, with a wardrobe in a rainbow of hues, I still think I look best in pink. I think my husband would look good in that color as well. After all, our bathroom is pink, and he's secure enough in his manhood to use that!
Unfortunately, I don't think most cats come in pink yet, at least not naturally.
Elayne Riggs blogs here, where the décor is all sorts of orange shades to fool the public. She thinks maybe someday she would like a pink keyboard and mouse. She likes Barry Deutsch's Hereville in part because that comic features pink as an integral part of its palette.
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Comments (8)
Rick Marshall (10:48 AM on Wed May 14, 2008)
Years ago, my family's dalmation had a run-in with a skunk. After reading on the 'Net that tomato and lemon juice were both good for removing the skunk scent from skin, we proceeded to open a big can of tomato juice and douse the dog's coat in it. While it did a good job of removing the smell, the dog was pink with black spots for the next two months.
Mike Gold (5:08 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
That's really cool. Since dog are color-blind, he probably wasn't even embarrassed.
Russ Rogers (3:02 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
This column made me see (RED)! http://www.joinred.com/
Personally, I see nothing wrong with trying to harness our insatiable consumerism to try to attack some of the world's problems. http://ww3.komen.org/PromiseShop/
My favorite (RED) product might be the Apple iPod. http://www.apple.com/ipod/red/
Check it out! It's the SAME MSRP as all the other iPods. It comes in a super cool color. You get free engraving and free shipping when you order through apple.com. AND a portion of the money goes to fight the global AIDS crisis. It's a win-win-win situation. You get a cooler product for the same price. You get to feel even better about your purchase and yourself as a human being. Apple gets a direct sale. And a fine charity gets a bit of cha-CHING!
There are folks on Amazon.com trying to resell the Garth Brooks, Ulitmate Hits CD Exclussive "Pink Edition" as a RARE collectors item for $25 to $40. I say pick yours up for $15 here:
http://ww3.komen.org/promiseshop/ProductInfo.aspx?product...
You can be happy that $10 of the purchase price will be going to Komen for the Cure. Hey, if you buy it through Amazon, $10 will still have gone to Komen for the Cure, but you will just be wasting 10 to 25 extra bucks on resellers. You might as well make that 10 to 25 buck donation straight to the Komen Foundation. The standard edition of the Ultimate Hits (now THERE'S an oxymoron) costs $12 on Amazon. So you are paying a $3 premium to get the RARE "Pink Edition." Think of it as paying just $5 for the RARE CD while also making a $10 contribution to a worthy cause!
Here's a "Think Before You Pink" moment. Linens and Things also sells a Susan G. Komen Kitchen Aid Teakettle for $60. $5 of the purchase price goes the to Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation. This sounds good, right? Wrong. For $50 you can buy the same KitchenAid Teakettle in another color. That means you are spending $10 dollars more to give $5 to charity. That's a rip off. Like buying the Ultimate Hits "Pink Edition" from a reseller. You might as well buy the Red Teakettle and send a check for $7 to the Komen Foundation. You've saved $3 and made a bigger contribution to the cause.
http://www.lnt.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2210008
Paying $10 more to make a $5 contribution isn't a win-win-win situation. The company and the cause do all right by the deal. But the bottom line is the consumer gets LESS for the money. In my opinion, that's not how charity consumerism is supposed to work. At the very least, you should be able to leverage the small amount more you are paying for the product into a larger donation for the charity; like the Garth Brooks CD, where you leverage paying $3 more for the CD into a $10 donation for the cause!
The concept of harnessing consumerism for charity isn't new. Aisles of Smiles for Jerry's Kids has been raising millions of dollars each year for MDA for more than two decades! http://www.mda.org/help/AOS/default.htm
Target stores has been giving 5% of it's income back to the community since 1946! They have a bunch of different programs that both benefit worthy causes AND promote themselves. Nothing wrong with that.
http://sites.target.com/site/en/corporate/page.jsp?conten...
Finally, if we are looking for cool products that help support a worthy cause, let's look no farther than the HERO Initiative! The HERO Initiative is a charity that helps comic creators in need. It used to be called ACTOR and you can still find it here: http://www.actorcomicfund.org/
HERO Initiative has partnered up with a bunch of cool companies. And there are a ton of cool products and comic book tie-in merchandise that helps raise money for their cause. http://www.atomiccomicsstore.com/heroinitiative.html
http://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/c-HERO.html
I'm sorry, this comment is too long and contains WAY too many links to stuff outside of ComicMix. Oh well. Thanks for the column, Elayne. As usual, it made me think.
Rick Taylor (4:19 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
To me, pink is another color choice an not gender specific.
I always enjoyed working with then-editor Michael Golden who was never afraid to wield solid color.
His use of pink, purple and orange gave me a boost when dealing with some of the 'don't use purple' boyz club at DC.
Mike would say things like 'go ahead and use a solid magenta (pink in funny book lingo) background (or logo) on that cover'. Inside I'd smile, it insured the stuff would bounce right off the newsstand.
As a kid I like the fact that Cosmic Boy and Magnus had pink costumes (hell, Magnus had a man-skirt and white boots). In the future they must be less hung up about gender, too. But the Magnus thing was probably 'cuz in the dayz of hand seps they wanted things done the simplest and fastest they could.
Like I say, another color choice/option.
Mike Gold (5:09 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
Don't tell that to Rick Marshall's Dalmatian.
Rick Taylor (5:17 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
Not that there's anything WRONG with that!
Mike Gold (5:19 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
True. I know a few firemen...
Rick Taylor (5:27 PM on Wed May 14, 2008)
I know some cops.
I'll avoid the obvious joke about handcuffs.