The Power of Pink

So there’s this sheriff in Arizona called Joe Arpaio, who’s infamous for being a crazy hardcase, making the inmates in his prison live in tents, do hard labor, and exist under a myriad of questionable disciplinary techniques. He’s in the news again for forcing them to repeatedly listen to “patriotic songs.” Most famously, though, he makes the inmates wear pink underwear and handcuffs.

The original reason for dying the underwear was supposedly because the prisoners were stealing them when they were white, which makes sense if it’s true, but I’m not sure what the rationale for the pink handcuffs is, aside from the obvious, as Arpaio notes, “because they hate pink, especially in this county they hate pink.”

In their reporting, Think Progress lists the pink underwear and handcuffs as part of the “degrading treatment” to which the inmates at Arpaio’s prison are subjected—which is how I’ve always seen it referenced. And what I find interesting about that is how it’s just taken as read that forcing a man to wear pink is humiliating, without any examination of context, as if it’s the color itself, rather than its association with women and gay men that makes it “degrading” to men forced to wear it.

It’s a self-perpetuating dynamic in this instance, with a community of men who are largely sexist and homophobic, and an iron-fisted authoritarian exploiting their weakness of character to degrade them, thus further fueling their bigotry. And all of it happens within a microsociety in which dominance is often asserted via sexual victimization—a culture of bulls and bitches and fresh fish.

Much of what Arpaio does strikes me as, at minimum, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, even in prison where life isn’t meant to be fun, but, while I find it rather juvenile and counterproductive to put inmates in pink underwear and handcuffs, I can’t say I find it inherently degrading. I recall stories of judges who sentence shoplifters to stand outside the stores they robbed wearing sandwich boards announcing their crime—that reads to me as inherently degrading, as it would humiliate anyone irrespective of gender, race, class, etc. But pink pants and handcuffs are only a problem if you’ve got a problem with women and gays, only if you’ve given pink its power to degrade.

(As an aside, most of my friends having children now are opting for gender-neutral colors for the nursery—yellow and green, mostly—and, in the last few years, I’ve noticed that I have a much wider selection of infant clothes from which to choose as gifts. It used to be much more pink-for-girls-blue-for-boys than it is now. It’s a good thing to see we’re starting, as a whole culture, to move away from these associations, slow going though it may be.)