Long, long ago, when I was in tenth grade, I was riding the bus home from school. My boyfriend at the time rode the same school bus and was sitting next to me. We hadn’t been dating long and I didn’t really understand relationships, but he said something that must have made an impact, because I’m writing about it decades later.
“I don’t like hairspray,” he said, touching my meticulously curled and lacquered locks. “I don’t want you to wear it.”
I thought he was kidding. I laughed. But he wasn’t. And let me tell you, at 15, you were more likely to find me snacking on broken glass than going around without hairspray, so I just kinda shook my head and broke up with him once I had time to process that conversation.
I grew up in a rural, conservative area where it was, I hate to say, common for girls to take orders from boys. And it’s not hard to see why; many of my friends weren’t allowed to wear makeup and would be grounded or worse if they were caught with so much as a tube of mascara. I’m sure hairspray was also banned. Those families also had a lot of arbitrary rules, like girls weren’t allowed to date until age 16 or 18 or whatever their parents decided.
I’m being generous using the word parents. The directives always came from their fathers and were enforced by both parties. And I’m sure their brothers saw that and applied it to their own relationships without even thinking about how it might be received — or how terrible it might be.
I’m a feminist. I also like “girly” things. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive.
I wear makeup and perfume. I shave my legs. I fuss with my hair. Sometimes I even wear hairspray. These things mean oppression to many people, and I completely understand and respect that. Some of us were raised to do whatever it took to win the approval of the males in our lives — to be pleasant and look nice and be soft-spoken and sweet. If they ended up rejecting that and shunning all that seems patently feminine, yay!
For me, it was different. And although my family didn’t care what I did with my face or hair, wearing eyeliner and lipstick felt like a feminist thing to do — to defy all the adults in my community who felt that a girl should not be in control of her own appearance.
Decades later, here I was, designing a website with my name on it. Should it be blue and gold? Green? Light blue and light green — would that be too girly? And then, as the band Oasis so eloquently put it, a bell rang inside my head.
There are no inclusive colors.
Or perhaps all colors are inclusive — either way, every shade of every color is great. And what I wanted to use was pink. Not just a muted pink highlight, but a bold pink with animated, sparkly stars and cute retro graphics that scream, “That’s right — probably no Y chromosomes around here!”
Do I want to work only with women? Of course not. Do I care if my pink sparkly website makes some men uncomfortable? Nope. But I have to say, those clients are not the ones I want to promote, and they certainly wouldn’t enjoy working with me.
If you’re designing something for yourself, design it for yourself.
