Wild Man, Pink, and peer judgement

Wild Man loves pink.  In fact, pink is his favorite color.  He frequently laments the fact that boys' clothes aren't pink.  You see, he doesn't want to wear skirts or dresses.  He is quite happy in his cords and polo shirts, but he wants his polo shirts to be pink.  Or he wants a few of them to be pink.  Archer has several shirts that have pink in them, and Wild Man is having a tough time understanding why his father has pink shirts, but he doesn't.  (As an aside, I have a hard time with this myself.  Why is it okay for a grown man to wear pink, but not okay for a five year old boy?  I'm sure it has something to do with parents not wanting their sons to be too "girly" whereas an adult male has already established his masculinity, but I have no hard evidence to back this up.)  So Wild Man makes do.  He often wears a pink headband to school, especially on days he wants to dress up, and he wears his one pink shirt on any day he deems special.

Recently I've been putting juice in Wild Man's lunch bag for SK rather than water (this is a long story, but suffice to say, he doesn't drink the water and was saying he wasn't feeling well; I decided he was dehydrated, so I started sending juice.  He drinks the juice).  One day he asked me to put his juice in his pink sparkly insulated cup (like this one, only pink and sparkly).  I said sure, thinking "a cup is a cup is a cup," and began putting that cup in his lunch bag every day. 

A few days ago, while I was volunteering in Wild Man's SK classroom, one of the little girls in his class walked over to me during snack time.  She tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Wild Man's mom (this is what all the kids in the class call me), why do you let Wild Man bring a pink cup to school?  Don't you think that it is weird for a boy to have a pink cup?"  While she asked me this question, I looked over at Wild Man, who was sitting 2 tables away, happily drinking his juice and eating the strawberries I had packed him.  He hair was, as usual, hanging in his face, and he had green and pink paint on his pants from an art project he'd worked on earlier in the day.  I turned to his classmate, who was dressed head-to-toe in pink and silver sequined Mary Jane sneakers.  I said, "Well, Wild Man really likes pink, so no, I don't think it is weird.  Why do you think it is weird?"  She said, "Boys aren't supposed to like pink."  At this point, Wild Man overheard our conversation and walked over to us.  He said, "I like pink a lot, so I wanted a pink cup.  Pink is my favorite color.  I think anyone can like pink."  The girl looked at me as if to say, "Um, no, that isn't right," but she returned to her table and resumed eating her snack.  Wild Man continued his conversation about Star Wars, and I returned to the list of tasks Wild Man's teacher had asked me to complete. 

I am very proud of how Wild Man responded, and I'm really proud of how confident he is.  He likes pink.  He doesn't care what anyone else says, and he is clearly capable of handling such comments on his own.  I do have to admit that I was more than a bit surprised that a girl not a boy expressed discomfort with Wild Man having a pink cup.  I've been waiting on one of the boys in his class to say something about his pink shirts, his ties (yes, he occasionally wears a tie to school), his pink headband, or his pink cup.  I wasn't prepared for the girls to say something.  Now I'm wondering what that says about my own conceptions of gender.