Pink: an essay on masculinity, feminism, and putting my money where my mouth is.

This isn't the blog post that I had set out to write this week, but sometimes that's how things go. So instead of of finishing the thing I started about the Conscious Discipline system and how kids are like super villains, I'm writing about pink instead. No, not the Aerosmith song. No, not the punk rocker either. Pink pink. Like the color.

That's right ladies, this much manliness just cannot be contained any longer.

The school year is starting up again! An exciting time of year, especially this year, as I'm enrolled once again in college classes. And so as I embarked on that quest for enrollment, books and school supplies, I looked for a pen. Not just a pen, but "A Pen". The pen.

This pen.

This is the Bic Duo, and it's been my favorite pen for awhile now because it can both write and, with a quick twist, highlight. It's two pens in one! As you can probably tell, it's taken some abuse from being fidgeted with, thrown into bags, lost, found, clipped onto things, re-lost, etc. So far it's still working, but I figure it's only a matter of time before it goes the way of all pens- either dried out, or lost for good (usually the latter). Plus I have a few notebooks that I use on the go a lot and I like to keep a pen with them, so going into this semester I wanted to have more than one. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that Bic no longer makes the Duo. I found a few places online where I could buy them in bulk, but since $500 worth of pens didn't seem like the best use of my financial aid money I decided it was time to start looking for a new pen.

Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

So I started looking for a new writing utensil that combined pen and highlighter functionality. And behold, at my local Target store, I found one! A pen made by Post-it that had a pen, a highlighter, and those little Post-it flags for marking your place in a book all rolled into one! It was wonderful! It was fantastic! It was like the hydra of pens! And it was also pink.

But you probably already saw that coming, didn't you my clever and observant readers?

I rifled through the rack, looking to see if there were other colors to choose from- nope, just pink. I started to set it back down, annoyed that my search for the ultimate note-taking pen had been foiled. And then that annoying little voice popped up in my head:

     "Dude, you tell the kids all the time that pink isn't a girl color."

I stopped. My stupid conscience was right- working with kids, I'll occasionally have a little boy who doesn't want to use a pair of scissors because they're pink, or one of the kids will comment on a boy coloring with a pink marker, and I'll tell them "It's ok, boys can use pink too! Colors are for everybody!" And then pat myself on the back for being such an awesome feminist guy, changing the future one rose colored pencil at a time. And yet here I was, having that same argument with myself. This pen will write just fine, it has the features I was looking for and then some. If it was any other color, I wouldn't have even thought twice about it. But it wasn't any other color, it was pink. What would my classmates think? What assumptions would people make when I went to a coffee shop to study? Would they see what an awesome Voltron of a pen this was, or would they see a dude writing with a pink pen?

Like this, but you write with it instead of fighting giant space aliens or whatever it was Voltron did.

But I knew that not getting this pen, just because it was pink, would be saying that boys CAN'T use pink. Every time I told one of my kids that pink is ok for everybody, I would feel like a hypocrite, and that's something that I have tried really hard not to do. I even ate a snail this summer because somebody used the magical words "try a no-thank-you bite" that I use on the kids when they don't try a new food. Escargot is still not on my list of "things I would eat for a dollar", but now when one of my kids doesn't want to try their peas I can say "You're right, trying new things is hard, just try a 'no-thank-you bite,'" with a clear conscience.

I tried to explain that anything I would tell the kids not to eat off the playground wasn't fair game for "no-thank-you bites", but they didn't believe me.

So I picked up the pen... and then I walked back to the other school supply display I knew Target would have set up, to see if there were any other colors. "I'll just take a look and see if they have any other colors," I told myself. "I mean, I would prefer green. That's my favorite color. Or yellow, so it highlights the same color as my other pen. It's not like I CAN'T use pink, I just... want to find my first choice."  I'm not proud of that. It was a dirty lie and I knew it, and they didn't have any other colors anyway. So I had a choice- I could probably find another color online, but they'd be more expensive, take longer, and I would always know the difference. Or I could buy two pink pens, today, in Target (because it was buy one get one 50% off, and like I said, I lose pens a lot). So now I have two awesome, Voltron-esque Post-it pens, and they are pink. And that's fine, because this pen is exactly the sort of pen I was looking for, and it's ok for boys to use pink stuff.