Is A Pink Gun For Boys Or Girls?

Jason Thibeault of the Lousy Canuck blog recently wrote an entry about a petition on the White House website about requiring all guns be painted pink. It is easy to realize that putting forward the idea that pink is only a girls' color and guns are boys' things are damaging to both women and men. Not all women want to be associated with the color pink, and not all men want to deal with the toxic masculinity a firearms and trying to be seen as the ultimate in macho.

Jason Said:

There’s no denying that guns and gun culture are toxically macho. They are tied into masculinity to such an absurd degree that some of the most iconic figures in popular culture that men are expected to identify with are gun-toting maniacs: Tony Montana, for instance, or Rambo, or any of a thousand other power fantasy men with a “license to kill” and a womanizing bent. Hell, real-life examples abound, even intersecting with entertainment: Ted Nugent comes to mind immediately.

So I get the idea of doing something to “sour the milk”, so to speak, for the hyper-macho gun culture advocates. I really do think that changing gun culture would go a long way toward fixing a society that tries to blame VIDEO GAMES for rampant murder sprees, going so far as to blame games like Mass Effect for the massacre at Sandy Hook. But this is another example of “pinkification” — preying on the well-propagated societal construct that women like pink, and that men cannot, lest they be seen as unmanly. Homosexual, even.

 And he has a point. There is no way that this can be seen as anything other than the pinkification of something and leveraging existing stereotypes, I'm not sure that is a bad thing in this case. If there is a clash between these two stereotypes, one of them will loose. Perhaps, and hopefully, it will be the idea that everything pink is girly. Perhaps it would end the rational that to create something for girls, all you have to do is take something created for boys and color it pink instead.

Ultimately this could be a boon for reducing the tired old cliche that women are nothing more than a color. And if it goes the other way and guns aren't seen as the super macho be all and end all of masculinity, then that would work too.

I am a little hesitant to write about this since I realize that I am coming to the table at a disadvantage. Since I and my entire family are colorblind, the stereotypes about pink being for girls is completely wasted on us. Generally I have no idea what color something is, and I rarely care. My only real exposure to the pink is for girls trope is from seeing other people that have a problem dealing with it.