Steve posted here about last week's controversy surrounding the pink paint job in Iowa's visiting football locker room. The complaints of Iowa law prof Erin Buzuvis generated a great deal of response, much of it obtuse or flippant or factually incorrect. Even Sally Jenkins, normally a great writer on issues of gender and sport, in gets this totally wrong.

Some of the response was even worse than that. Buzuvis apparently received death threats, and she shut down her blog BuzWords after it was flooded with hostile and abusive comments of the "I hope you die of AIDS" variety.

Through the magic of Google cache, you can still see BuzWords here (for now). And rather than just seeing the media's representation of it, you can read Buzuvis's argument for yourself.

I think there's a reasonably serious argument underlying the predictable hysteria. It goes like this.

A. Pink sometimes signifies female and gay

In criticizing Buzuvis, Greg at SLB says "Pink is not a female color or a color of homosexuals." I'm not quite sure what he means, but you needn't spend more than a minute shopping for baby clothes to see that pink signifies female. (It wasn't always that way, but it is now.)

Pink can also signify gay. The Nazis used the pink triangle to mark homosexuals, and since then, gay groups have used it as a symbol of pride and a reminder of past oppression. And the color itself is still used by the media and others to signify homosexuality.

Of course, pink doesn't always signify female or gay. Straight men wear pink ties, and someone might paint a room pink without intending any statement about gender or orientation. But the semantic associations exist, and a competent communicator may employ them to convey certain meanings.

B. People sometimes employ insults based on gender and orientation

During my high school football days, the coaches would sometimes call us "girls." They didn't mean it as a good thing. It was intended by the speaker and received by the audience as an insult.

The animating principle of the insult was, simply put, that female means lesser. The same could be said for a variety of other terms and phrases: "bitch," "pussy," "you throw like a girl," and the like. Terms like "faggot" and "ghetto" turn on different axes but function much the same way.

Of course, these terms aren't always used as insults. Sometimes they are just flat descriptors, and in some contexts, they even function as terms of endearment. And you can even reappropriate a term and turn a negative connotation on its heads.

But they can be used as insults, and competent communicators sometimes use them as such.

3. There is some evidence that the pink locker room was intended as that sort of insult

The standard-issue media reports say that Iowa coach Hayden Fry chose pink because he had learned of some psychological studies showing that it is a soothing color.

That's true, but it's only half the story. Here's what Fry himself said in his autobiography:

One thing we didn't paint black and gold was the stadium's visitor's locker room, which we painted pink. It's a passive color, and we hoped it would put our opponents in a passive mood. Also, pink is often found in girls' bedrooms, and because of that some consider it a sissy color.

Based on Fry's own words, it's reasonable to conclude that he was (at least in part) playing on the pink = female association, and using that association to hurl a gendered insult at his opponents. Moreover, regardless of Fry's intent, it's reasonable to think that many people would interpret it that way.

You many ask: so what?

The practice of using gendered (or queered or racialized) insults is probably a bad thing worth criticizing occasionally. It sends a bad message, and it teaches the wrong lesson. If they hear it enough, both boys and girls might internalize the message that girls are lesser beings.

That doesn't mean we need to go postal over every example. I don't complain out loud every time a friend says "that's so gay" — but nor do I say it myself, and if anyone ever asked what I thought, I'd tell them.

Was Iowa's visitors' locker room worth complaining about?

That's debateable. Law prof and uber-blogger Ann Althouse, after exposing the weakness of Jenkins's argument, says that Buzuvis just shouldn't have picked this battle.

(As an initial matter, it's not clear that Buzuvis actually picked the battle so much as she fought the one brought to her. It sounds like she said something internally, then a local TV station called her for a comment, then she posted something on her previously obscure blog. It then exploded, quite beyond anyone's control, into the national news.)

Althouse may be right, but the "pick your battles" critique can be overused. Every political battle worth fighting risks loss and backlash; at some point, we need to engage despite the possible problems. And anyway, just because we have bigger fish to fry doesn't mean we should ignore the small fish entirely.