The pink flash drive: a philosophical dilemma

I’m not woke. It’s common sense!

People were not joking when they said that Melbourne had four seasons in one day.

Luckily, my work bag was big enough to carry everything I could have possibly needed during the day, even when I only worked in a basement and sat on a bus.

Do you miss home? - It’s a dangerous business, Barbs, talking Italian over the phone.

What was in my bag:

• Sunnies and a brolly (that’s sunglasses and an umbrella, in Australian).

• Disneyland keychain and a key for the boyfriend’s parents’ house, but not to the front gate, as I lived in the Bluebeard fairytale.

• A wallet with cards, band-aids, bobby pins, and definitely not a leaf from a university graduation laurel wreath, which would be considered organic material and destroyed by airport security.

• Some make-up, sunblock, and a handful of perfume samples.

• Hand sanitiser, tissues, tampons, eye-drops, cough lollies, nose allergy-spray, painkillers… After all, I was approaching the wrong end of my 20s.

• A notebook, a pen

and

• a pink flash drive.

I have to take a detour back to my university days to explain why mentioning a pink USB thingamajig was so important.

The origin story of my pink flash drive

During my University years, there was this aesthetic philosophy professor. Let’s call him Silver Fox. I had a bit of a crush on him and attended his classes each year, slowly discovering how he was rarely prepared on any topic except himself and his academic achievements. One time, he delivered an hour-long rant about the dilemma of morality in art after attending the opening of an art exhibition where the Pope publicly labelled one of those pieces blasphemous for portraying a crucified frog (a sculpture by Martin Kippenberger).

I still completed my internship as a project officer in his department, and he became my first dissertation mentor.

This is where the flash drive comes in.

The first time I handed him my thesis in draft form, he said: “Did you save your thesis on this pink thing? I feel ashamed for you, I don’t even want to read it. It can’t be good!”

I stood there, holding my pink rhinestoned USB stick, not knowing what to answer. I just mumbled that it was a present. The more I thought about it, the more disappointed I became with myself. It was indeed a present from my mum, and a darn useful one. Why did I try to deflect and distance myself from it? Why was I ashamed? I could have easily chosen it myself because, let’s face it, it was cute as hell.

It was an object with a function: storing data in a portable device. Would a black flash drive have improved my logic or my writing?

What a marvellous space engineering project my thesis could have been, if the thing were metallic! What a missed opportunity to redefine politics and warfare if only it were blue. What if it were green? Climate emergency resolved? The mind boggled.

Alas, mine was just ‘girly’ and, subtly paraphrasing what

Arabelle Sicardi

wrote in this perfectly fitting article: we both know it’s not about the flash drive but what it represents; you think pink has no place in philosophy. Even aesthetic philosophy.

Imagine this, but covered in rhinestones. Marvellous. Courtesy of Canva PRO.

Thinking ‘if it’s pink then it must be stupid’ was, frankly, disappointing.

I understand how a certain type of person would have rigid preconceptions about appearance, but this was a seasoned and well-travelled professor. How can someone who talks about art and beauty for a living criticise creativity in the name of authority and intellectualism?

Sure, I could have extracted a grey flash drive from the jumbled mass of cables in my tech drawer, but that was my best one by way of storage capacity and reliability. An aesthetics professor, accustomed to the intertwining between appearance, morality, ethics, and logic, should be able to detach a tool’s colour from its content, meaning, intention, and function.

Did he forget about the crucified frog?

He laughed at how the Pope could not experience the work of art for what it was, a creative expression, craftsmanship, and many commentary layers that go beyond the story of Jesus. He never criticised the objectively questionable manufacturing of that crucified frog or the presence of a simple upside-down urinal in a museum, nor the confirmed incompletion of Michelangelo’s Pieta’ Rondanini. They were works of art because of the intention, the unseen, not their physical form.

What hurt me the most was that I fell straight into his tiny reality, just like the Pope reduced the frog to a mockery, he dismissed an object under patriarchal prejudice.

There, I said the P word. You can figure out which one.

What if I wanted to make a statement with my choice of tech? What if my intention was to call out the widespread association of pink with childishness, as a philosophical exercise?

What if my flash drive were the tech equivalent of wearing funky socks? Functional and whimsical.

I don’t get when people are dismissive about beauty or creative expression in general, even less so in the context of aesthetic philosophy. It indicates a dismissal of a part of life that is crucial: our perception of the world and artistic endeavours. To quote

Artemisia Writes

' essay on art and intent: art cannot exist in a vacuum; it has always been and always will be a product of its times, for its times.

Feeling threatened by people liking pink or glitter is more a reflection of someone’s mindset than a flaw of the pink-wearing person. I could have foreseen this outcome, after all, any creative contribution belongs to its audience more than its author. I believe Silver Fox’s monotone and elbow-patched existence made him feel superior, yet how he reacted to my flash drive and never even commented on my gothic lolita attire was confusing.

Thanks to him, I have unsubscribed from the idea that only plain people could be smart and professional. Since then, I let my inner dreamer choose my flash drives (and my work bags): it’s my daily act of social rebellion.

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Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence dated way before 2015, when these events took place:

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When I wanted to live in a fairy tale I never thought of Bluebeard

Bonus: My graduation day in (many) pictures