Pink: The Redux

Ack, again with the pink locker rooms?

I'm not entirely sure why people and by people I mean academics choose to tilt at this particular windmill every so often, but they do.   When they were originally installed in 1979, the color psychology behind the move seemed to indicate that pink was a 'calming' color and then Coach Hayden Fry, who had studied psychology thought it seemed like just the color for the visiting teams locker rooms.   The University kept the pink locker rooms after the renovations to Kinnick Stadium in 2005 and since then controversy seems to have bubbled up now and again.

This year's edition has some obvious flaws in it's argument and it takes a left turn to a deeply trouble assertion about halfway through.  The money quote:

If UI President Sally Mason is really serious about cultivating a campus environment that will eliminate sexual assaults, then she should end this retrograde football tradition.  Every time she cheers on the Hawkeyes from her skybox above the pink locker room, Mason is rubber stamping a hyper-masculine culture that undermines her recent efforts.

If anyone out there thinks that the first step to ending sexual assaults on campus is to give the locker rooms at Kinnick a paint job, they are in dire need of a cat scan.  I also tend to reject notions that put all the blame on any 'hyper-masculine' culture as well.  It's a typical response:  instead of growing a healthier masculinity where rape and domestic violence are never considered acceptable because men 'couldn't control themselves' or 'she was asking for it', academics love to engaging in man-blaming, because you know, making it clear to men that they should be ashamed of themselves and their gender and how they're all potential rapists and abusers is sure to produce the positive outcomes necessary to make real progress on these issues.   Right?  Man-blaming is the new slut-shaming.   It needs to stop.

There's a difference between challenging 'hyper-masculinity' and tearing it down.  I may not have been a women's studies major in college, but it seems to me that the feminism I can get behind is one that favors equality between the genders and not one that favors tearing one down to replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy.

But the more important point is that the pink locker rooms just don't work.   It's irrelevant to the team's win-loss record.  When the Hawkeyes are good, they're good.  When they're not, they're not.  The color of the locker rooms makes no difference either way- which proves, at least to me, that the heteronormativity that the author is so against doesn't work!

Either way it's an entirely stupid thing to argue about and given the amount of rich alumni out there that fill the coffers of the Athletic Department with the Benjamins, it's a quest that's unlikely to succeed.  I'd make a point about refusing to give the University any money if it did succeed, but I already work for them, so they're already getting my time.  They're not getting my cash money.  And needless to say, ending gender violence and sexual assault doesn't begin with a paint job.

P.S. (Oh brother.  There's going to be march.)