I told a friend he had to stop pilfering all of my pens and pencils. He pulled out his new rainbow set of pens and told me I could have a few as recompense. He pointed to the pink one and said “You can definitely have that one.”

Why not the pink one? If he wanted a set of highly visible inks, wouldn’t he have bought some black rollerballs? Is he embarrassed to be seen using a pink pen? What’s so embarrassing about a color?

What is so embarrassing about a color?

Blue is the color of water-bodies (and so much else); its meaning can’t be manipulated much because we already associate it with many things. Pink is fairly uncommon in nature, and thereby is more mouldable by businesses and social movements: without preexisting stuff to associate to pink, people have much more freedom to decide what pink SHOULD mean.

There are not that many naturally-occuring pink things. But there are some:

Flowers
Tourmaline, Spinel, and Other Gemstones
Flamingos
Axolotls
Triboniophorus Affinis Graeffei (aka Giant Pink Slug. Good one, evolution.)
The Pink Lake
Sunsets
Seashells
Apples
Underripe Strawberries
Dragonfruit
Lips, Cheeks, and Other Fleshy Things

…Or, the shorthand version:

Flowers
Fruits
Things in Australia

NPR blamed marketing for gendering pink. But I think pink kind of already had it coming. Pink is tied down to the real world by things of a sensuous nature (sights, smells, textures, tastes, etc.). If pink is inherently sensuous, and we deeply associate feminineness to sensuousness (not that we should, per se, but that we do)…transitive property?

[Aside: Aradhna Krishna differentiates sensuousness from the sexual connotation we often ascribe to it, calling it anything “of or related to the senses.” She deserves credit for my self-discovery as a sensuist: I experience and appreciate sensory experiences more strongly than most.]