"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,' " Buzuvis wrote in her blog.
Now, I'd hate to think we have to start painting over or dyeing anything pink. What would happen to carnations? Or Cadillacs, or cardigan sweaters? Or Barbie Band-Aids? Bubblegum? Birthday cake? The effects of a proposed ban on pink are especially depressing to contemplate when it comes to alcohol. No pink champagne? No cosmopolitians?
You have to try awfully hard to take offense at what's implied in a color. But it's not hard to take offense at what Buzuvis implies, or her insulting line of reasoning. She buys into the very sort of discrimination she alleges. What she implies is that locker rooms are full of large unfeeling men who can bench press a refrigerator and hammer nails with their fists, and therefore they must really be ashamed to be naked in a pink room, because pink, after all, is a girly color, even a queer one. And therefore putting those men in such a room for a couple of hours is a dire insult to girls and homosexuals, who can't help it that they have closets full of pink bathrobes, a color that no real man would ever like.
You better know who you are if you walk into that room. Otherwise, the pink could shatter you.
It's so 1968. What's missing from the picture is merely 40 years. What's also missing is the recognition that male and female athletes alike have been deconstructing and subverting pinkness for years quite cleverly. Joe Namath put on panty hose. Roosevelt Grier did needlepoint. Herschel Walker took ballet and used moisturizers. Fry understood something Buzuvis apparently doesn't: The people most likely to be undone by pink walls are not straight men, women or gays, but misogynists and homophobes.
No man is scared of pink today, or woman, either. Grier had a girly hobby, and he could also snap the head off a fire hydrant. Namath wore white cleats, because he enjoyed proving that it doesn't matter what color your shoes are if you can fire a ball 70 yards and land it on a salad plate. The Princeton women's rugby team won a national championship a few years ago, and then wore their black eyes to a formal campus ball. Pink was merely the color of their bruises. The great thing about a playing field is that stereotypes tend to melt away on it. Accomplishment trumps sexism, bigotry, or any other lousy generality.
If you are not offended by Iowa's pink locker room, it may be because you recognize a joke, a tease, and a riff. You realize that contact with the dread color pink does not actually make a man weak, or a woman, either.
And if any of the opposing teams visiting Kinnick have a problem with their locker room decor, I have a suggestion for them. Tape up with pink tape. And every time one of your players lays a guy out with a forearm hammer, lean down and whisper, "Think pink!"
