More than a quarter century ago at the University of Iowa, the legendary football coach Hayden Fry decided to paint the visiting locker room pink as a psychological strategy, so the story goes, intended to calm opponents and curb aggression. After the university rebuilt its pink locker room in 2005 as part of a $90 million stadium renovation project, two then-law professors who objected that the color scheme carries demeaning implications for women sparked an intense and often ugly national debate involving death threats and hate mail. It at last died down after the former president, David J. Skorton (now at Cornell University), determined that he would not take any action related to the pink room. Today, one of those professors is revisiting the (until now) dormant debate. After protesting the pink locker room at a Hawkeye home game in November, Jill Gaulding plans to file a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, now that a new Iowa presidential administration is in place.
“This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy,” says Gaulding. “It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl.” Gaulding’s lacking sense of tradition and humor is almost funny, until you remember all of the real atrocities against women that feminists could be fighting. Perhaps Gaulding should direct some of her outrage toward the Saudi judges who ordered “that a 19-year-old woman be lashed 200 times and jailed for six months after she was kidnapped at knife-point and raped by seven men, twice by each.”
