Pretty in pink


This story is just nuts.

The University of Iowa has a bit of a controversy on its hands over their pink visitors’ locker room.
Several professors and students joined the call Tuesday for the athletic department to do away with the pink showers, carpeting and lockers — a decades-long Hawkeye football tradition.
Critics say the use of pink demeans women, perpetuates offensive stereotypes about women and homosexuality, and puts the university in the uncomfortable position of tacitly supporting those messages.
“I want the locker room gone,” law school professor Jill Gaulding told a university committee studying the athletic department’s compliance with NCAA standards, including gender equity.
For decades, visiting football teams playing at Kinnick Stadium have dressed and showered in the pink locker room. The tradition was started by former Iowa coach Hayden Fry, a psychology major who said pink had a calming and passive effect on people.

Yeah, right. I’m sure it has nothing to do with trying to make the opposing team feel like a bunch of girls. (Cause girls are icky!)
Apparently the current pinkness of the locker room wasn’t quite enough:

But as part of the stadium’s two-year, $88 million makeover, athletic officials took the former coach’s interior decorating ideas to another level, splashing pink across the brick walls, shower floors and installing pink metal lockers, carpeting, sinks, showers and urinals.

Wow. Why don’t they just draw vaginas all over the walls?
Now, I’m sure folks will criticize those opposed to the pink locker room, saying that it’s not a such big deal. But get this: a professor who objected to the locker room on her website got death threats. Over a locker room. Now tell me it’s not a big deal.

Join the Conversation