Seeing Salmon: A Crusade Against the Nantucket Reds

If you know me, you know two things: that I can text without looking, and that I hate ‘Nantucket Red’ shorts.

My vendetta against the seemingly harmless shorts started off as a mere annoyance: some guy walked past me with shorts of a color that should be reserved solely for cheeks, causing me to double take and trip over a blade of grass.

Little by little, my issue with the shorts went up a few sizes, perpetuated by the fact that seemingly every other leg-possessing male at Connecticut College owns them. That scares me.

Recently, my ordinarily relaxing daily walk from Blaustein or Fanning to Branford has turned somewhat disconcerting with the rise of rosy shorts covering some of the man limbs strolling around campus. Now, I have nothing against the coverage of manly parts — I am, in fact, a huge advocate for it — but I find fault with such coverage being pink. There are plenty of other acceptable colors for shorts. Wheat, for example. Wheat is fine. I’ll still be your friend if you wear wheat-colored shorts.

My walks through life have proven superficial — if I don’t know you, I will not judge you on the color of your skin (that’s lame) or the content of your character (I don’t know you), but the color of your shorts.

Why do I hate the salmon shorts so much?

Firstly, they are not ‘salmon’, nor are they the ever-popular ‘Nantucket Red’, a name that was probably birthed on a yacht and should not be used outside of a description in a L.L. Bean catalog. These shorts, my dear friends, are pink.

Pink, like the Victoria’s Secret line. Pink by any other name still covers the Barbie aisle. If you’re going to wear them, man up. Call them pink.

This brings me to my second reason: “Why can’t men wear pink?” asked Adam Miller ’11. “’Real men wear pink, so why can’t I wear pink shorts?”, all the while ironically eating a pink Starburst. Sorry, Adam, and other like-minded men, but pink is a girl color. No amount of political correctness can prove otherwise. Even referring to them as ‘salmon’, hoping that relating the shorts to food, and thus the way to a man’s heart, won’t legitimize them. It just makes me crave seafood.

Thirdly, THESE SHORTS ARE EVERYWHERE. Quite similar to Vera Bradley wallets amongst our girl population and chlamydia at Conn during the 2008-2009 academic year, they are pervading our campus. Having plenty of brainpower that I choose to use for mundane purposes, I spend my day counting the pairs of salmon shorts that I see. My highest count is eleven — lowered in the event that I saw the same person more than once. In terms of people’s interests, cell phone providers, and varying distances between home and Boston, Conn proves to be a relatively diverse school… except for in matters of shorts. Mix it up.

Thus, males of Connecticut College, I urge you to rid yourself of these wretched articles of clothing, freeing yourself from the tyranny of the yacht-club culture. You look better in jeans, anyway. Salmon is not a good color on you.

If you don’t like it, eat my shorts.

Drawing by Alicia Toldi