Real Men Wear Pink / Literature

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• Catullus wrote 16 with this as the central theme. He was apparently accused of being effeminate for writing poems about kisses, so he wrote this to show that such poems do not make him less manly. Notoriously, he expresses this point by using colorful language, telling Aurelius and Furius (his accusers) "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo", which literally means "I will sodomize and facefuck you" (or rather, more loosely, "Up yours both, and sucks to the pair of you!").
• 1632: In a Grantville Gazette short story, downtime experimental aviators tend to wear pink scarfs, reasoning that Jesse Wood, the 17th century's first pilot, made the first aircraft pink because it's the color of courage. The actual reason it's pink, however, is because of the Formica countertop material he used for part of the construction of the aircraft's fuselage, not out of any particular emotional reasoning regarding the color.
• A sailor in The Abandoned is described as "an enormous giant of a man, whiskered like a Highlander, with arms like the branches of oak trees, horny hands with red, bony knuckles, and fingers as big and thick as blood-pudding sausages." He embroiders detailed flowers on linen cloth. When a new sailor ridicules him, Angus punches him out, and the other sailors tell the newbie how foolish he was not because the mockery earns him a blow, but because when the ship docks Angus can take his embroidery to a certain place and get paid handsomely for it.
• This is what happens when Gilbert Blythe pledges a fraternity in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of the Island
  As a preparatory initiation ordeal he had to parade the principal business streets of Kingsport for a whole day wearing a sunbonnet and a voluminous kitchen apron of gaudily flowered calico. This he did cheerfully, doffing his sunbonnet with courtly grace when he met ladies of his acquaintance. Charlie Sloane, who had not been asked to join the Lambs, told Anne he did not see how Blythe could do it, and HE, for his part, could never humiliate himself so. "Fancy Charlie Sloane in a `caliker' apron and a `sunbunnit,' " giggled Priscilla. "He'd look exactly like his old Grandmother Sloane. Gilbert, now, looked as much like a man in them as in his own proper habiliments."
• Butler, a hulking Badass Normal and Battle Butler in Artemis Fowl, claims only to enjoy reading soppy romance novels — apparently, books with action and explosions and helicopters and stuff like that remind him too much of real life. His favorite movie? Not something like Die Hard. It's Some Like It Hot. That said, he's still a giant of a man who defeated an entire fairy strike team on his own, and beat the crap out of a troll with a medieval mace.
• In Patrick F. McManus's story "The Blue Dress," Rancid Crabtree has his clothes stolen while swimming and is lent a blue dress by a widow to wear while he hunts down the thieves. He tells the kids that all he had to wear when he was in elementary school was a "purty polka dot dress" handed down from his sister Clementine. When asked if he got laughed at for wearing a dress, he answers "only once."
• Chris Wohl from Dale Brown's books, a big and fearsome Marine, knows how to look after kids.
• In Captain Underpants, the school football team are such fans of Barney Captain Ersatz Boomer the Purple Dragon that they change their team name to the Purple Dragon Sing-Along Friends. As the author points out, who's going to argue with a bunch of linebackers?
• Gem from the Dancing Shoes series of books is a preteen boy who does ballet. Except he's not gay and a typical boy his age who is the love interest for the main girl Lucy.
• Discworld is full of people who fulfill this trope.
  • In The Truth, Mr. Tulip is a giant bruiser who can barely think, whose every second word is "—ing" (literally), and whose brain is constantly fizzing with what he thinks are awesome drugs, but show him any antique or work of art and he'll be able to instantly identify the period, creator, history and technique, as well as whether or not the particular example is genuine or a copy, and will often burst into tears because of how —ing beautiful it is.
  • In Unseen Academicals, the Dimwell fan colours are bright pink and green. Nutt theorizes that they're a deliberate attempt to pick a fight.
  • Captain Carrot Ironfounderson, a six-foot tall Dwarf, has all the typical Dwarf traits: a dedication to polishing his armour, a great admiration of all forms of craftsdwarfship (from bakery to jewellery to the latest in fashion), and enough upper body strength to drive his sword through a villain and right through the three feet thick marble pillar behind him. More uniquely "Carrot" traits involve starting a youth football club (among the violent street gangs of the world's worst ghetto), setting up a "volunteer" scheme to do things for the elderly (the "volunteer" helpers are violent criminals on a community service scheme) and arresting the rulers of Ankh-Morpork several times (including the Dragon who took over the city and the head Thief of the Thieves' guild).
    • Oh, and one time he tried to arrest Vetinari himself. (For parking improperly. Because Carrot is the only person who's read the laws of Ankh-Morpork.)
    • Although the time he arrested the head thief was an accident; he was new to the city, and once they explained the Guild system to him there was no more trouble with it.
  • Wee Mad Arthur, a three-inch-tall Feegle raised by gnomes who loves ballet, opera, and visiting art galleries and can beat up half-a-dozen regular Nac Mag Feegle single-handed. He also terrifies full-sized humans, and anyone who tries to step on him never tries it twice.
  • In Witches Abroad Nanny Ogg mentions that her gigantic hulking barge of an eldest son, the town blacksmith Jason Ogg, knits socks in the evenings. Of course, he's still, you know, a guy with minivans where his biceps oughta be; the socks he knits are made with the super-tough wool of Lancre sheep, can stand up without feet in them, and can be used to kick down walls in times of incarceration or boredom. He is also known as the kindest and gentlest person around, explicitly because no one dares to mock him for it. Given that the Lancrastian dialect (especially as spoken by Jason Ogg) is Oop North English, this may be Truth in Television; historically the lead miners of Upper Swaledale knitted socks from the wool of fell sheep, often knitting as they went to work with their wool tied to their belts with little hand-carved wooden chains, and these guys were not sissies!
  • According to Lu-Tze's Yearbook of Enlightenment, while the Monks of Cool generally wear black, because black is always Cool, they also sometimes were pink, on the basis that if you're sufficiently Cool, pink can become Cool just because you're the one wearing it. (They don't wear pink to demonstrate they can do this, because feeling they had anything to prove would not be Cool.)
• Aerich in the Khaavren Romances is a stoic, badass warrior who in keeping with the traditions of his "house", is extremely cultured and wears a skirt as part of his battle dress. When not active, he knits for relaxation.
• In Dragon Bones, Gentle Giant Ward takes great glee in renaming his father's fierce stallion ... after a flower. He later rides that same horse and is obviously not bothered by the cutesy name. Played with in that Ward isn't completely above childish ideas about masculinity — he does compare himself to a girl at the beginning of the novel when he gets lost in a cave and panics.
  • There's also jaded, assassin-trained Oreg, who embroiders clothes as a hobby. The only one who knows that is Ward, who doesn't say anything about it.
• While Karrin Murphy of The Dresden Files is obviously not male, she works so hard on fitting in with the boys-club CPD that when Harry finally sees her house — and it's adorable — he can't help but comment.
• Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles side-story Utensile Strength has the royal family trying to find the proper wielder for a literal enchanted Frying Pan of Doom. To do this, they hold a "barbarian cook-off", drawing competitors from across the land. Even after the pan's true wielder is found, the barbarians themselves insist on completing the contest.
• The YA novel Flipside gives this an interesting spin. The protagonist has spent most of his life as a wallflower, and timidity is built into his basic identity. When in female clothing, however, he no longer feels like himself, so he can adopt any identity he wants — and the identity he wants is an assertive, dominating one. In other words, dresses make him more manly!
• Billy Bright, the leader of the hooligan firm in The Football Factory is a florist. Sure it also helps as a front for his drug trafficking.
• In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, C.J. not only teaches them all guns, he does all the cooking — recruiting Dylan, the only other competent cook as backup.
• Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. series has a pair of twenty-foot-tall grolls (half-giant, half-troll) Dumb Muscle brothers named Doris and Marsha.
• Rhett Butler of Gone with the Wind is a pretty badass guy who's known for fighting, messing with loads of girls, and general illegal stuff. He also reads Shakespeare, always knows the latest fashion trends, comforts his daughter when she gets scared of the dark, and often chats with women about parenthood. This book actually lampshades the fact that no one wants to confront Rhett over his 'sensitive' traits because he's so badass.
  • He also takes the opinions of women seriously, treats them as thinking beings, and isn't afraid to ask them for advice. By the standards of the time, this makes him very effeminate- any man who didn't consider himself superior to women was thought by other men to be weak and ridiculous.
  • Ashley may also count. He's a quiet, poetry-reading intellectual who believes that War Is Hell (and gets shouted at by other men for this), but he readily decides to fight in the war and joins the Klu Klux Klan. (Again, Deliberate Values Dissonance.)
• Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby, an Oxford graduated high-class and manly man, wears a pink suit. It sends Tom into disbelief.
• The Great Greene Heist: In addition to being an athlete and High-School Hustler, Jackson is the head of the school's botany club.
• Harry Potter: Thanks to the revelation that Snape is the Half Blood Prince and Hermione's analysis in the book that the handwriting looks more like a girl's than a boy's. Fridge brilliance can now tell us that Snape has girly handwriting.
  • Hagrid is a mountain of a man, with wild, untamed hair, who loves to care for horrifically dangerous beasts. However, he's also fond of knitting and has a pink flowery umbrella. Apparently, the author based his character on the time she overheard a grizzly biker worrying about his petunias.
  • It was revealed in his biography on Pottermore that Professor Quirrell used to press flowers before he snuffed it. He had Voldemort sticking out of the back of his head for a year. This turned a joke from A Very Potter Musical into Hilarious in Hindsight and Ascended Fanon.
• Skif's old gang in the Heralds of Valdemar series didn't consider washing and mending to be women's work. Most of their thieving was of textiles, and since damaged or dirty clothes aren't watched like the clean stuff, they stole from the laundry rooms. Washing and mending the clothing increased the resale value and disguised their hot nature for little work, so they laundered their goods before selling them to the fences.
• A minor character in The Heroes of Olympus is called Butch, a bulky dude with a shaved head and a face like a pile of bricks. His mother is Iris, the Rainbow Goddess, and he has a rainbow tattoo. He's also good with the pegasi. Got a problem with that?
• Benjamin Mayhew of the Honor Harrington books is the Protector of the planet of Grayson. He survives an assassination attempt, saving Honor's life in the process, drags his planet through their own version of the Meiji Restoration, and stands as a rock for the commoners to rally behind. His hobby? Flower arrangement (and the hybridization of orchids).
  • His world is still heavily misogynistic — although being dragged kicking and screaming into the real world — and his hobby is a source of consternation for some... but no one calls him out on it because he is so generally loved.
  • Forgot to mention. Two wives.
• Peeta Mellark of The Hunger Games is an amateur wrestler who carries 100-pound bags of flour over his head without a problem, is deadly with a knife and spear, kills big, tough Brutus during the Quarter Quell and whose masculinity is never questioned in the book. He also loves decorating cakes and bakes flower-shaped cookies.
• Referenced in the thoughts of Nasuada in Inheritance of Inheritance Cycle, who recalls learning from some of the men in her army who seemingly only had an interest in "women, wine and war" how they have a fondness for memorizing romantic poems or petting hounds.
• According to the novelisation of Iron Man 2, Ivan Vanko likes Nu, Pogodi!, and when he fails to find it in America, gets his cartoon fix from Johnny Test amongst others.
• IT: Henry Bowers is a crazy, violent delinquent who wears a pink leather jacket; when a fourth grader makes fun of it, he punches the kid so hard he loses three teeth.
• Jeeves and Wooster: The third chapter of Please, Jeeves opens with Jeeves reading a romance novel instead of one of his "improving books". Because we all knew that that Rosie M. Banks collection didn't really belong to his aunt.
• Zillah from Lost Souls (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite is an incredibly badass vampire who impregnates several women throughout the story, who's always described as "beautifully androgynous" with long hair he ties back with a purple scarf.
• Benet in The Magic Thief is hired muscle for the main character's mentor. He's big, he's quiet, and he's known for glaring angrily at just about everyone. He also makes yummy biscuits (for which there is a recipe included in the back of the book) and knits in his spare time.
• My Princess Boy is one of the first children's books for and about little boys who just happen to like frilly princess dresses and sparkling tiaras. Written by Cheryl Kilodavis and illustrated by Suzanne De_Simone, it was inspired by Kilodavis' son Dyson, who at a very early age told his mother "I am a princess boy."
• Paladin of Shadows: It's revealed in Choosers of the Slain that Mike Jenkins is, in addition to being a badass Anti-Hero, a good cook, and not of simple meals like one would expect of "bachelor chow".
• In the Phule's Company novels, Sgt. Escrima is an exceptionally talented chef and chose his Legion name for his preferred fighting style (involving two sticks), which he teaches to other members of the company. Do not criticize his cooking unless you enjoy pain since he's been known to hospitalize would-be food critics. Notably, Escrima is a Philippino martial art that specializes in the triumvirate of stick, knife, and machete, and as such is a particularly nasty fighting style that generally focuses on finishing fights quickly, since protracted knife and/or machete fights only increase the risk that all combatants end up dead.
• Peter Norton wears a pink shirt on the cover of his 1983 Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, Jack Frost and his goblins like dancing, fashion, and pop stardom, among other things.
• Erik von Darkmoor from The Riftwar Cycle is a six foot plus mountain of muscle, war hero, and badass commando who grew up in the wine country, and therefore drinks wine instead of the more typically macho beer and ale, and feels perfectly secure asking for it in a Bad Guy Bar full of hard-bitten mercenaries.
• Finny from A Separate Peace, in one scene, shows up to a school function in a pink shirt and with his school tie as a belt. This only makes him stand out a lot more.
• A Song of Ice and Fire features many examples of this trope. Knights in Westeros pimp out their armor to show off their wealth, often covering themselves in garish colors. In particular, Rhaegar Targaryen was known for being both an exceptionally good fighter, and very pretty. Thoros of Myr takes the trope literally by wearing his red robes long after they have faded to pink (he also has long hair worn in a topknot, as is standard for Red Priests). He has a flaming sword and knows how to use it well enough to impress The Hound. House Bolton takes the trope to an extreme level. One of their house colors is pink, meant to represent the human skin that they flay from their living enemies. In the Slaver Cities, the warrior caste subvert the trope by wearing ridiculous hairstyles...and leaving the actual fighting to the slaves.
• In Vorpal Blade, former Command Master Chief Miller is working as a florist after leaving the US Navy, at least in part chosen because it's a job where he's not going to wind up meeting people that wind up dead. Later he's shown making a floral arrangement to pass the time while aboard the titular spacecraft.
• In Dean Koontz's Whispers, one of the side characters is a former drug-dealing Scary Black Man who got out of prison and made a fortune designing dresses and other women's clothing. He mentions that even before he was arrested, his girlfriends always got more compliments when they let him pick their outfits.
• In Another Note, Beyond Birthday wears makeup to look more like his idol, L, and eats sweets. He also spends a paragraph gushing over a manga aimed at young girls, and says he loved reading and watching that particular series when he was younger.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Adolin Kholin wears cologne and does his best to keep up with the latest fashion magazines when he's not on the front line of a battlefield or in a dueling ring.
  • Invoked by Dalinar in the third book, when he joins a meeting of Alethi scientists and scholars. In their culture only women and ardents (a sort of cross between priests, monks, and slaves) even learn to read. Dalinar isn't much of a scholar or scientist himself, but he goes to support his son Renarin. As a non-warrior, Renarin often faces mockery for not lining up with his culture's standard of masculinity and doing things like attending scholarly meetings, but if storming Dalinar Kholin shows up to something, no one is going to suggest it's "unmanly".
    • This actually causes a few problems for Dalinar in the fourth book. People are wondering if Dalinar is making a mockery of the Vorin faith he is wrestling with, due to his ex-communication in the previous book and Vorinism's gender roles (strictly observed by the Alethi, not much by other cultures), but these problems are exploited by his niece Jasnah, who is facing similar criticism as Alethkar's first queen (previously a male-only role). She manages to bait out a particularly grumbly Highprince into an outright duel over Dalinar's unmanly new hobbies, and Jasnah's unfeminine role and presence at a war council, which she promptly wins and installs the Highprince's son as his replacement (whom she had previously conspired with to seat in his father's place), intending to create a more equal and tolerant Alethkar for people of all genders and cultures going forward.
• Witcher-styled swordplay is suggested to require proficiency in ballet, what with mentions of pirouettes and such. Justified because professional dancers tend to be incredibly fit, and the type of flowing movements required of ballet can be useful in dodging the attacks of all the monsters Witchers regularly fight.
• The Dark Tower: Roland, stoic, hardened gunslinger that he is, has no problems carrying around his world's version of a purse and referring to it as such.
• The Hearts We Sold: The Daemon is introduced knitting, and does so regularly throughout. He's also an all-powerful monster that can whoop your ass in a second.
• In a slightly downplayed example, Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Living Legend who kinda lives up to the legend, is very affectionate with his wife and son, cuddling with Mara and exchanging good-natured Snark-to-Snark Combat with both. Just don't even think about trying to hurt either of them. Seriously. ''Don't.'"
• There is a Russian story in which a teacher asks her class what they like doing in their spare time. The pupils named such hobbies as photography and collecting stamps, and one boy seemed to be ashamed of telling about his hobby, which happened to be sewing. The teacher said it was a very laudable hobby, for there are male tailors out there and a man should know how to sew.
• Caging Skies: What are the hobbies of Soviet Union fleeing Vodka Drunkenski Russian soldiers Sergey Karganov and Fedor Kalinin? Baking.
• A literal example in The Underland Chronicles: 12-year-old Gregor, who never really cares about masculinity, uses a pink girl's backpack to carry supplies on a dangerous mission, simply because it was the only one available. The Underlanders seem to lack the gendered color associations we have, so nobody brings it up.
• Most of the heroic male characters in The Lord of the Rings including the narrator. This trait is notably lacking in the less heroic male characters, like Wormtongue and Denethor. Sam, who becomes something of a Badass Butler, by the end of the story: is a gardener by trade, and likes cooking enough that he happily does it for the entire Fellowship. Merry becomes a knight of Rohan and has a hand in killing the Witch King, but has a penchant for geneaology (a specifically feminine-coded activity in his culture). Aragorn is a badass warrior who has been killing orcs, and worse, for half a century: but he's a skilled healer (again, a specifically feminine-coded activity in his culture). Faramir displays empathy for his enemies, something that both in the setting and in real life is generally considered a feminine trait. He's also a fearless badass who rides out on a suicide mission to recapture Osgiliath right on the eve of the Battle of the Pelennor fields.
  • Also Thranduil aka "The Elvenking" in The Hobbit. In the summer he wears a crown of flowers. He's also probably the best warrior still alive in the Third Age.
• Logan Bruno from The Baby-Sitters Club. As can be inferred from the series title combined with the trope, he is a 13-year-old boy who babysits. This gets him a ton of grief from his football, baseball, volleyball, and track teammates, who call him "Lois" and don't shut up until the day all seven members of the titular club and a bunch of the kids they sit for come to track tryouts to cheer him on. All of a sudden, being liked by cute girls and enthusiastic kids is pretty cool. Even Logan's father, a manly sportsman who went to a military academy and would like Logan to do the same, is uncomfortable with his son liking to babysit (despite the fact that he has two younger children whom Logan babysits a lot, including a brother with special needs relating to his severe allergies), and rationalizes it to himself as something Logan does to impress his girlfriend, and that makes it okay.
• The title character of the picture book "William's Doll" is a preschooler who wants a baby doll, despite receiving (and liking) more stereotypical toys. He eventually gets the doll from his grandmother, who points out that he is practicing being a father.

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