Do you find the color pink to be threatening? If so, you're probably a woman. (Not a man.) And who's hurt by your irrational hatred of pink? Your very own healthy breasts. Get it together, ladies.

A new study published in the Harvard Business Review found that even though pink is the color of the ribbons that people wear in order to cure breast cancer, women actually hate it (the color pink) (and breast cancer also, I imagine, although that wasn't directly addressed in the study). But why? Why do women hate pink—subtle pink, soothing pink, pinky pink? It's because pink reminds them of women.

That's right, and that is—not to tell you your business, ladies—so messed up. Despite the fact that a full 100% of lesbians are women, it appears that women do not actually love themselves? Because it's not the color of pink that women hate, according to the study, so much as the fact that pink is "a gender cue" that triggers a "defensive response" among women. This sort of self-loathing behavior is really sad to see among a gender that has produced lots of really quality gymnasts:

When women wrote an essay about gender, just 42% of them said they would donate to ovarian cancer research. When they wrote a gender-neutral essay, 77% did. And those who saw a pink ad about breast cancer were significantly less likely to say that they'd contract the disease than those who saw an ad with neutral colors.

News flash, ladies: if the real world was "gender-neutral," we wouldn't be talking about breast cancer in the first place, we'd just be talking about "chest cancer." Or, more likely, "testicular cancer." Jesus. You could have told us this before we wore that hideous ribbon!

[HBR via Ad Age. Photo: AP]