Sometimes they let me ski with them, the twins. They're nearly 13. And ever so smart and frighteningly fast. So when I say ‘‘ski with them'' I mean play catch up, Liz Breslin writes.
Standing in the chairlift line, passing time in conversation, you can sort of feel semi-anonymous, under helmet and goggles and however many thermal layers. Though there's always outerwear for clues.
And judgements. Case in point."Oh hello, Dylan, I didn't recognise you under there. I thought you were your sister. What's with the pink pants?''
Pink, as it happens, used to be quite the colour for young men. A diluted shade of raw, masculine bloody, meaty red. And blue, well, very Virgin Mary. The switcheroo could possibly be blamed on those pesky Royals. When Prince Charles was born in 1948, they lit the water blue in the fountains in Trafalgar Square. Think that's mad? Fast-forward to 2013 and Otago Boys' High School was all lit up blue for the right Royal arrival of Prince George. Wait, what if he's a pink boy too?
But you can't say that casually, can you, even now, because of the way the pink boys were marked out, triangulated, murdered by the Nazis. And how that still plays out in fear, and in pride.
The increasingly marked segregation of blue for boys, pink for girls may well have been augmented by clever marketeers rubbing their greedy mitts at the thought of obligatory nursery makeovers and unhandmedownable baby onesie things. But it is going way, way, way, way too far. Example: Girls' skis and boys' skis. Or maybe I'm being not technically minded enough. I call a ski shop to find out.
Me:"So I'm looking at your ‘fun girl' skis. I'm just wondering. What makes them girls' skis?''
Long pause.
Helpful employee:"Um. The graphics.''
Me:"So nothing technical then?''
Now-slightly-confused-employee:"No. Just a different top sheet.''
Mostly the boy skis aren't even specified as boy-flavoured. They're just default. But whatever. What if you're a boy and you'd rather have a bit of flowery joy in your life? What if you're a more muted tones kinda chick? What if you were twins and you were sick of constant separation on boy/girl lines? With prescribed gender colour boundaries more marked than gang patches, it's no wonder that the balance of being is shifting towards fluidity in the gender mix. There are a lot of colours in a rainbow.
When I was a kid I was none too keen on being a girl kind of child. I wanted short short hair, of which my father disapproved. Wouldn't you rather have one of those nice curly perms? Um. No. No. Definitely no. I did have a dress. One. Brown and lacy in a Jo March-meets-Stevie Nicks kind of fashion. In my dreams. And though I learned how to sit nicely in church and play the part, the label I was mostly assigned was "tomboy'', though I progressed from that to"child of the universe'', which I still prefer. I liked playing outside in the street. We did races. Of course, I wasn't lucky enough to ski. Hence woefully behind in the speed and style stakes. But that's evolution, right? They'll learn much more than we'll ever know, and all that.
As it happens, Dylan's twin sister is in the chairlift line sporting black pants with a blue jacket. Nobody calls her out for collaring the boy end of the colour spectrum. Is that a win for the sisterhood? And anyway, Dylan, yeah boy, what's with the pink pants? Come on? Like he should even have to justify them. But he does.
‘‘It's not a crusade or anything. It's, whatever. I just like pink.''
