Like Genghis Khan–Only Pink
Kay Sexton

 

When I was first at school, which was a pretty long time ago, I noticed something . . . we girls waited to be called upon by our female teachers, while the boys bounced in their seats, waved their arms, and yelled “Miss, Miss, I know the answer!”

Fast forward a decade—my fifteen-year-old self sees that the girls are still sitting and waiting to be asked, but the boys are now lounging around, staring at the ceiling or carving their initials on the desk. Any teacher who calls on them receives a yawn at best. Even so, our teachers—all male now—still tend to ask the boys first.

Fast forward two decades—I’m running an international charity and teaching a weekly adult education class about Conflict Resolution. The male and female students respond about equally to questions, and I make an effort to call on both sexes in the debates. I congratulate myself, and the world, on freeing education from gender stereotypes and have occasional daydreams about one of my students winning the Nobel Peace Prize and thanking me for my inspired teaching.

Then a colleague dares me to do something shocking for charity. As a Quaker attendee, I always have found dyed hair to be very risqué and exciting—on me at least—so I volunteer to wear pink streaks in my brown bob for a month. After shrieking whenever I walk past a mirror, I fall in love with my new look and by Wednesday, when I’m due to teach again, I’ve almost forgotten about my candyfloss appearance. Not so my students.

The first thing I notice is that the men smile more.

Why are they grinning at me? Do I have something stuck between my teeth? Is there a rude notice on my back? I know my skirt isn’t tucked into my knickers because I’m wearing jeans—and a quick check reassures me that my zipper is zipped. So why this outbreak of beaming smiles?

The second thing I notice is that the women aren’t smiling as much.

The evening continues like this—the men talking more than usual, the women somewhat less—until coffee break, when I corner my top student. Sami is a Tamil-born social worker—she’s as tough as they come. She has to be to hold down a full time job and look after her diabetic father and three children, while supervising the somewhat erratic work history of her charming ne’er-do-well husband.

“What’s going on, Sami?” I ask.

She stares at me, incredulously. “Your hair,” she says. “It looks too . . . girly.”

Girly? Me? Am I not the woman who has just returned from the hinterland of Somalia, where warlords have been cutting off other people’s heads with rusty bayonets? Didn’t I once spend several months on the edge of the Sahara, living in a tent and cooking over a fire made from dried dung? Girly?

“But it’s only hair,” I protest.

“Yes, but it’s pink!” she hisses.

“And?” I say.

“You look like a Barbie doll. And men are flirting with you!”

So just a little bit of pink undoes all my hard work. The years I’ve spent in war-zones, the hard-earned degree, the respect of my colleagues and students—all wiped out by a few square inches of the color between red and white.

Surely not.

But it’s true. Over the next few weeks I notice that men smile at me and women don’t. Male strangers approach me in shops or talk to me in bars. Female strangers, on the other hand, ignore me or sniff disapprovingly as I pass. For the first couple of days, I blush and panic. I think about ducking out of my bet and removing the pink streaks before the month is up. I feel like a gender traitor. But then I toughen up. I remember the idea that girls would wait quietly to be called on and boys would be noisy and get picked first. I remember how that changed, slowly but definitively, and I wonder why I shouldn’t have pink hair if I want it.

When we rebelled against the expectation that females would be unassuming and well-behaved, we didn’t reckon on having to give up our personal preferences too. But over the past few years I’ve spoken to women who feel they shouldn’t wear nail polish, or skirts, or drink sparkling wine, or wear earrings, or—of course—have too much pink about their persons.

But why can’t we be girly? What’s wrong with pink hair? If we give up what we like, we give up the best of ourselves, to pander to an expectation that’s just as bad as the “girls are quiet and polite” straitjacket women wore for decades.

If pink is your thing, be pink—and be proud of it. When I describe my hair these days, I say “Like Genghis Khan—only pink.”

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Kay Sexton

KAY SEXTON is an associate editor for Night Train journal and a Jerry Jazz Fiction Award winner with columns at www.moondance.org and www.therundown.co.uk. Her website www.charybdis.freeserve.co.uk gives details of her current and forthcoming publications. Her current focus is ”Green Thought in an Urban Shade” a collaboration with the painter Fion Gunn to explore and celebrate the parks and urban spaces of Beijing, Dublin, London, and Paris in words and images.

Contact Kay at: kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk
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