In the quiet solitude of her room, Emma found solace in the vibrant hues of pink that adorned her surroundings. But was it a deliberate choice, a conscious effort to cloak herself in a color that seemed to define the expectations placed upon her? As she reflected on her own identity, she couldn't help but be reminded of a line from her favorite childhood movie, "Shrek," where the protagonist jokes about compensating for something with grand displays of wealth.
In many ways, Emma felt as though she too was compensating. Her outward appearance exuded a sense of tomboyishness, a demeanor that clashed with the societal norms of femininity. She found herself navigating a world where her masculine tendencies were met with raised eyebrows and whispered assumptions.
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/04ad15_917a539203e149bdb0b511680cdd1e03~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_980,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/04ad15_917a539203e149bdb0b511680cdd1e03~mv2.jpg)
(Tool: deepai.org | Promt: sexually repressed pink tomboy person of colour)
In truth, Emma longed to conform to the ideals of femininity that she admired in others. She yearned to embody the cisgendered women she saw around her, the likes of whom raised and befriended her, but the fear of being perceived as something she wasn't held her back and she grappled with the knowledge that her appearance, coupled with her preferences, would inevitably lead others to label her in ways she found suffocating.
It was in the color pink that Emma found refuge—a subtle yet powerful tool of self-expression. From her earrings to her notebooks, every aspect of her life was tinged with shades of pink. Yet what she once believed was the innocent choice of a color preference had now been kneaded into her internal dialogue on the politics of her sexuality, believing now that it may be a proclamation to stay within the narrow confines of societal expectations in exchange for a sense of belonging, and that beneath the facade of femininity lay the deeper truth that she grows weary of confronting, amidst the harsh realities of a world that still struggles to accept those who dare to defy its expectations.
Emma longed to shed the weight of societal judgment, to break free from the constraints that held her back. She vowed to refuse to bend to the will of a world that sought to categorize and condemn her based on outdated notions of gender and sexuality, desiring only to embrace her own identity, unapologetically and authentically. All of this she vowed as she scribbled her thoughts in her pink notebook, with her pink pen.
Authors note:
Hi, my name shall remain a mystery till the end of time, and it's a pleasure to have you read my stuffs. I’m an artist investigating the potential of generative AI to improve writing and readability and in all my works I use a combination of my writing + Chat GBT #fortheplot.
The writing in Black is everything AI generated and the writing in orange is my own
Here's the original writing and prompt I used for this story:
Promt: write a short story for my friends blog based on what I share. The story is about how the main character uses the colour pink as a cover for their repressed sexuality
so I'm assuming two things from you as a reader. 1 . You've watched the first Shrek movie, 2. You've rewatched it as an adult and been blown away at all the adult themes that was littered throut the script. One of my favorite lines is in the scene where shrek and donkey arrive at Lord Farkward's (fuckword's right!? his name meant the literal F word!) castle and its so big and tall and shrek goes "haha you think maybe he's compensating for something?" i.e. a tiny penis - although we soon come to learn that everything about him is on the shorter end.
This one instance in the movie wholley summs up the main idea I'm trying to explore here. which is that I use the color pink in everything I do, everything that i am and choose to be, so pervasively, because I'm compensating for my repressed sexuality. The truth about me is that I'm rather boyish in my demeanor. I do the most boyish things, react in what i supposed can only be perceived as masculine in everyday terms. I ooze tomboy, I can barely recall the last time I wore anything other than jeans + sweater/crop top on my more feminine days. I'm by all accounts a tom boy and in my frustration at the effortlessness in which I can comfortably appear atypical of my gender, the fear that I'll be a percievable target of social ostracisiation and abandonment that I may appear as a desire manifest to embody a sexuality beyond that which is god bestowed, I quake.
Fuck I wanna be straight, I want to look like the cicgendered women I admire but I worry that people take one look at me and go "that's a pussy eater if I ever saw one in the flesh" And they’re not wrong! I’d drink the waters of the river of life anyday but there’s more to me than that and I worry that if it were not for my pink earings. or my pink hoodie. or my soft pink nikies. If it weren't for my pink pens that I insist to use on all forms of my writing, whether academic or creative. If it weren't for my distinctly pink notebooks. If it weren't for my pink toothbrush. My pink comb. My pink hair ties, lotion, toothpaste ffs! everything must have a hint of pink with me because christ maybe if I use enough of it, it will be enough to dispel the idea that I'm fruity enough to become the object of hate in a very Christian right wing society that just wants to fucking kill the gays and subdue the women and disenfranchise the blacks. Fuck me if I embody all three of those things and live to tell the tale. I mean I've made it this far. But only this far.
I don't want to be helbent on the idea of changing my identity to fit into a world that wouldn't love me if i became the antithesis of everything that i am. because things always change anyway and so will peoples ideas of good + bad + ugly + killable + rapeable + disposable. I'm not interested in fitting into a society like that, but here i find myself writing this in my pink notebook using a pink gel-X pen in a hoodie and sweats, mohawk on my head. And I can't help but contemplate the validity of that statement.
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