“It wasn’t just safety concerns that prompted Drew Born to come from Grand Rapids to Lansing to testify this week in support of allowing hunters to wear pink in addition to blaze orange when they head to the woods in search of deer,” freep.com reports . . .

It was also about ensuring that women look cute when they hoist their guns or bow and arrows.

For the record, the notion that women love pink is completely ridiculous. Maybe I cared for pink as a child (not really, I was a tomboy). But that’s something we “girls” grow out of, like boys with baby blue.

“Women prefer to always look and feel attractive (even while hunting), having pink as an option can help with any insecurities over what they are wearing,” read a memo from Born that was handed to members of the House Natural Resources Committee during a meeting this week on a bill that would allow hunter pink.

“Pink is a color that can immediately identify a female, women don’t want to be mistaken for a man, even from a distance or in the woods.”

The memo prompted an outpouring of eye rolls and outrage from at least one lawmaker and dozens more on social media who found the sentiment both insulting and wrong.

I know, right?

“This has gone from silly to offensive. This memo is so out of touch,” said state Rep. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, whose phone started blowing up after he posted a picture of the memo on Twitter. “I don’t think a bunch of men need to tell women what they should wear to make themselves feel attractive while they’re out in the woods hunting.

“Women across the country realize that men should no longer be speaking for them, not only on their fashion sense, but on more pressing issues in the state,” Moss added. “This borders on the absurd.”

In case my thoughts on the subject of pink camo weren’t clear . . .

Laura Marsh, a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, supplied a typical response on Twitter: “For years men have wondered- what do women rly want? Pay equity? No. Access to healthcare?? Nah… just to feel cute while hunting.”

Comedian and TV personality Chelsea Handler also picked up on the Twitter trend: “Yes, women always love to pink. It’s the only color we love.”

Pink does not make me feel attractive, more capable as a hunter or happy for that matter. In fact, pink can just die.

Fun fact: Some prisons paint their cell blocks pink to calm prisoners. Perhaps men want us to wear pink in the woods to distract them from their anxiety?

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50 COMMENTS

  1. If you’re going to outsource your own argument, here’s a tip: DON’T leave it to Chelsea Handler or any other leftist morons on Twitter.

  2. “Women across the country realize that men should no longer be speaking for them.” Funnily enough, that’s a sexist statement. In this “post-gender” era, men can be women, so why can’t they speak for women? Glamour awarded someone with man parts a women of the year award, so why can’t a man speak for women?

    Besides, everyone knows pink is the watered down color of blood, and therefore, for boys who are not yet men. (This was a real and widely held belief at one point).

    • We’re not really in a post-gender world. TERFs and their rich elitist benefactors (Soros and Bloomy, among others) are the true leaders of Feminism. Co-opting the LGBTQIAA+wtfbbq “community,” socialists, atheists, Black Supremacists, Muslims, pedophiles, etc, is just a tactic to prolong the demise of their movement because they haven’t had anything concrete to fight for in the last 50 years.

      • I’m just trying to be difficult, mostly. Also it kind of illustrates the point that gender does matter, one way or the other. If we agree that one of the sides in this argument is right, either this guy is right and the ladies go gaga over pink, or he is an ass for speaking for women. Either way, gender matters.

        As a side note, at the range today, a man there mentioned his wife’s gun that she picked out. Pink. They aren’t making all this pink stuff because nobody’s buying it.

        God’s honest truth is, I’ll buy a pink gun/camo/whatever if the price is right and it works (it’s gotta work for the price to right, right)? Just ask my hideous orange/red laptop or camo hunting shirt from the women’s section of Academy (the “tag” is pink).

  3. Sorry, but pink makes me think of stomach medicine & Mary Kay sales people. In Mr. Borns’ defense, his heart was in the right place.

  4. I’m old enough to remember hunting in ordinary outdoor clothing. We never heard of “blaze orange” then. Can’t imagine wearing “pink” to hunt in. Absurd. I don’t even like “pink” lemonade. And why does everyone think they should speak for everyone else. MYOB

    • Up North, we all wore red plaid during deer season before Hunter’s Orange became the law. Small game hunting was a ‘come as you are’ party.

    • I think this is a Midwest/East Coast thing.

      I’ve never seen anyone wear hunter/blaze orange while hunting in the west.

      • It depends on what you mean by “west.”

        Eg, Wyoming requires blaze orange whilst hunting with a rifle or shotgun. Archery can go without. Washington tells you that you need something like a minimum of 400 square inches of orange.

        In California, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, etc there’s no requirement for blaze orange. It’s encouraged, but not required.

  5. PInk camo is actually quite effective. Pink increases your safety by virtue of being highly visible to humans, but to the herbivores you’re hunting, it’s a plain gray that blends in well with the rest of the camo pattern.

    In fact, it’s far superior to blaze orange as safety wear. Bright pink is every bit as visible to humans, if not more so. And while deer see orange as a pale yellow that stands out against the landscape’s predominant browns/grays/greens, they see pink only as another ordinary gray.

    Maybe that’s what they should have gone for…

    • Ing,

      Your comment is 1000% true and accurate.

      Furthermore, many trees are the same brilliant orange as “hunter orange” in Autumn which means:
      (1) Hunter orange does not protect hunters in those conditions.
      (2) Florescent pink DOES protect hunters in those conditions since Autumn foliage is NEVER pink.

      There is one down side to hunter pink: a non-trivial number of people are partially color blind and they will also see pink as gray, which means those people will not readily discern a hunter in pink. Apparently the number of people who cannot readily discern hunter orange are an extremely small number.

      Personally, I would take my chances and wear hunter pink if it were an option because I have had deer discern me and backtrack when I am wearing hunter orange.

    • Pink camo might be safer among humans who aren’t red/green colorblind…but I’ve heard it doesn’t work so great for those guys.

      • My dad says green and red both look brown to him, so pink would probably look like beige- not the best color for standing out in a forest.

  6. I don’t really get the whole thing and I don’t know if the ladies actually wear pink camo while hunting (where that’s legal).

    All I can say is that anecdotally I have noted a great deal of women in my area driving large pickup trucks with Browning and other hunting stickers all over the rear windscreen, including stickers that suggest that they enjoy hunting since the stickers say things like “Hunting is for girls!”. Lots of the chicks that jump out of those trucks are wearing something like a pink camo sweatshirt.

    So, around me lots of women 1) Drive pickups, large ones. 2) Would seem to enjoy hunting and 3) would seem to wear pink camo regularly when driving around in town.

    I have not asked any of them if they feel “cute” or “attractive” due to this choice of clothing but I would assume they find something enjoyable about wearing it since they wear it in public.

    • That doesn’t mean crap. People wear camo and cowboy boots and drive lifted trucks with Browning stickers, and might not even hike, much less own a projectile weapon such as a bow. They exclaim “I’m a country girl(TM)!” while blasting Taylor Swift. With 99.99% certainty I can say that they’re just (sub)urban Midwestern thots with no fashion sense.

  7. ““Women prefer to always look and feel attractive (even while hunting),…”

    Plenty of *very* attractive women down here deliberately dress-down grungy and go sans-makeup to reduce being hassled by guys. Their social-romantic lives are doing just fine and they don’t need to ‘advertise’…

  8. “But [liking pink is] something we “girls” grow out of . . . .”

    That’s a pretty condescending thing to write, dontcha think?

    Besides, spend one single day working in a retail clothing store and you will realize that pink remains an extremely popular color among women.

  9. The law says orange. It’s for a purpose. Your not special so your not gonna wear pink, rainbow or any thing else. End of story

    • Rainbow might not be a bad idea. It could confuse the durr long enough for me to shoot them, like dazzle camouflage!

    • Yes, the law says orange. That’s why they are trying to change the law to say orange and/or pink. This is not the kind of law that was brought down from the mountain on stone tablets.

  10. I’ve been saying for years (both here at TTAG and elsewhere) that gun makers need to do more than put some pink dye into the cheez-whiz of modern guns to make them more attractive for female shooters. I’ve been saying things like “How about you make guns that fit women’s hands, their length of pull, etc?” to no avail.

    Maybe you’ll get further than I did with a campaign to eliminate this fixation on making female hunter/shooters’ gear pink.

      • AR ‘adjustable’ stocks don’t adjust what women need adjusting. Like the cant of the stock to fit their shoulder.

        DG, can you tell me *why* there aren’t more adjustable stocks out there available so women can get some degree of comfortable fit? It seems like that would be a no-brainer…

        • For the same reason why there aren’t longer stocks for the increased size of men in the last 100 years:

          Gun buyers in the US buy on one criterion alone, price. They don’t seem to give a rat’s rear end about any other issue in a firearm.

          Couple this with the trend towards making everything tacti-kewl and you get what we have today: Squirt some pink cheez whiz into the mix and you’ve got a “ladies” gun.

          As such, gun manufacturers keep dimensions of long arm stocks and pistol grips the same as they’ve been for 100+ years – until you get into the $2K+ of pricing. This means that you’re stuck with rifles that have a 13.5″ length of pull, plus or minus about a 1/4″. This will mean that rifles are too short for most men over average height (average height of American males is now between 5’9″ and 5’10”, and American women’s average height is about 5’3″. Men above average height will find the 13.5″ LOP too short, and most American women will find the LOP too long.

          If I’m making a long arm stock for women, I’ll take the following factors into account:

          – shorter LOP for many women, esp. those under average size (women in the 5’0″ to 5’2″ height range often find the default LOP to be hugely long, and you can see that they’re uncomfortable when shouldering a rifle or shotgun because the LOP is just far too long for them)

          – in some cases, the comb needs to be a tad higher, to reflect the smaller size of the woman’s face. Since her face is smaller, and women have lighter bone structure in the cheekbone, they need a tad more height in the comb to bring their face up to the sight line.

          – for women who have C cup or larger breast sizes, adding toe-out to the stock removes the “bite” of the stock toe under recoil.

          – likewise, some women like a different pitch on the butt of the stock for the same reason.

          Sadly, the trend in gun making now is to put an AR-15 stock on everything, and anyone who knows anything about gun fitting will tell you that the AR-15 stock (no matter which one we’re talking about) is one of the single worst stocks ever put on any gun, for any purpose. But hey, it’s tacti-kewl, so it has to be good, right? Just make the plastic pink (or some other pastel color) and presto! It’s a ladies stock!

  11. There’s a reason we don’t talk about allowing purple stop signs or blue construction signs. It’s not about self expression, it’s about a simple rule that identifies humans in the woods. Should female road construction crew members be allowed to wear pink?

    • I guess they are some places; I have seen apparently-identifies-as-female road workers in pink reflective vests. Usually flaggers.

  12. I have an idea. How about anybody gets to wear whatever the hell camo color they want, as long as they are clearly distinct from the environment?

    Blaze orange, bueno. Pink, bueno. Bright red, bueno. Brown with antler helmet, no bueno.

    • Well, before the Safety-uber-alles crowd took over US culture, and started putting childproof caps on medicine bottles, dummy plugs into wall sockets and rounding off every sharp corner on anything that was fun in this life, people went into the woods to hunt wearing red plaids. Here’s an example:

      http://www.hnwilliams.com/Johnson-Wool-Checkered-Red-Hunting-Coat.html

      But then, some guys in Massachusetts (where else?) decided that this wasn’t good enough, so they started the blaze orange requirement, which then spread to other states.

      And here we are.

      • The thing is, hunter fatalities have been slashed since hunter orange became mandatory. And that helps guarantee the future of our sport.

        • We cannot point to conclusive evidence that the orange is responsible, because hunter education programs (and requirements to take a hunter ed course before gaining a hunting license) have come into being in the same timeframe.

          Similar drops in hunting accidents have been seen in states where blaze orange isn’t a requirement… which calls into question how much of the drop in accidents is the orange requirement vs. the hunter ed requirements.

          • I’d bet that hunting has also decreased in that time frame, which would be likely to reduce hunting accidents too.

    • Saw a guy hunting deer many years ago wearing brown coveralls with a brown toboggan with the white ball on top. Some folks just aren’t real bright.

  14. “For the record, the notion that women love pink is completely ridiculous. Maybe I cared for pink as a child (not really, I was a tomboy). But that’s something we “girls” grow out of, like boys with baby blue.”

    Liberte. I agree its preposterous for some guy to assume all women are a monolith and all of them like pink. It’s equally ridiculous for you to do the same thing by speaking for all women saying none of them like pink as an adult. I personally know MANY fully-grown women form early 20s to late 60s who absolutely ADORE pink clothing. My mother is one of them. When my dad bought her a pink cammo jacket so she could “blend in with the guys” on an upcoming hiking trip of ours you could have heard the squeals of joy a mile away. Some women don’t like pink and think pink cammo is ridiculous. Thats cool. Some women do like pink and think pink cammo is an adoreable way to give “country” style work clothing a bit of a feminine flair. And thats cool too. It’s almost like women are different and should be treated as individuals, not just stereotyped as a result of their gender. Who knew.

    • “It’s almost like women are different and should be treated as individuals, not just stereotyped as a result of their gender.”

      [To be read in a whiny teenage voice]: But then how can we make snap judgments about people if we can’t judge them based on race, gender, etc.? If I have to evaluate everyone as an individual, that’s gonna take forever!

  15. My daughter loves her pink camo 7mm08 .

    But then she hunts free range deer, on her own by figuring out travel patterns , Identifying or creating funnels, hanging a stand ,hunting the wind , but equally important the thermals .

    The reason pink camo is on store shelves is because it sells .The fact that it irritates some makes it appealing to me as well .

  16. Criminy! Isn’t the real issue having to ask permission from your rulers what you can wear? Where I hunt I can wear a Hawaiian flowerty shirt and a rainbow umbrella hat if I darn well please. Who cares if someone (dude or chick) likes pink? It’s a free market, don’t buy it if you don’t like it. (Most of) Y’all are spending a lot of pixels to completely miss the point.

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