Iowa's Pink Locker Room

The color pink never has been so accepted by men than in today’s society. Perhaps now more than ever, guys are trading in their traditional blue and green button-ups in exchange for that oh-so-coveted-powder pink polo to match their designer jeans.
And as a whole, women don’t seem to have a problem with this. In men’s eyes today, pink doesn’t represent weakness or femininity, but rather confidence and comfortableness in a man’s own skin to freely express himself.
So naturally then, the fact that Iowa’s visiting football locker room is completely saturated in baby-bottom pink is no big deal, right?
Wrong. Way wrong. Several students and faculty members at Iowa have taken extreme offense to the pink locker room, which has been a tradition, held at Iowa for several decades now.
One such faculty member who took extreme offense at the color of the locker room is Iowa law professor Erin Buzuvis who says, “the pink locker room is a subtle way of painting ‘sissy,’ ‘girlie man’...on the walls.”
I have several problems with this seemingly educated woman’s statement about the significance of the color pink.
First off, she uses the phrase “girlie man” which almost automatically discredits any intellectual insight she might have ever had.
Second, the locker room originally was painted pink because former Iowa coach Hayden Fry, who also was a psychology major, said pink has a calming and passive effect on people, not because he thought the color would magically transform hard-nosed football players into “girlie” men. Fry’s logic makes sense to me. Football is an extremely physical sport, and if pink makes my opponent less likely to turn my vital organs into mashed potatoes, I’m designing new uniforms today that feature Pink Panther helmets and Pepto Bismol-colored jerseys.
And yet, Buzuvis claims in her web blog, “In this context, putting your opponent in a pink locker room is saying, ‘You are weak like a girl,’ or ‘You are weak like a gay man.’”
No. If the locker room had pinned up pictures of Chippendale dancers or had pink fairies playing the harp and dancing with unicorns on the walls, I could see her point.
But pink is just another color. It is a slightly lighter shade of red and is widely accepted in today’s culture as being a neutral color.
And though most seem to be OK with a pink locker room, it’s irrational people like Buzuvis who turn a harmless tradition into a national debate.
So for all those who find the pink locker room so unbearably offensive, go on with your plight towards gender equality. But while you do, don’t get offended by the rest of us, who think you take political correctness too far and need to do something better with your time than take offense to the color of a locker room.
from The Man Eater