I like Pink. Pink as in Alecia Beth Moore, the American singer with a penchant for performing whilst suspended on a trapeze 100ft above her audience. She rocks. She's great.
That's as far as liking Pink goes.
The colour pink is another matter altogether. The colour pink has been hijacked by toy manufacturers, accentuated, intensified, re-packaged in impossible-to-open plastic and spewed onto the shelves of every toy emporium on the planet. If it's a toy aimed at girls, or an item of clothing aimed at girls, it's pink. Either hallucination-inducingly vivid fuchsia, a.k.a. 'Barbie' pink or 'what's this stuck to the sole of my Manolos?' bubblegum pink.
And it makes me angry. And nauseous.
When I was growing up back in the dark ages or the 1970s as they are more commonly known, there was no assumption that in order to appeal to girls, things must be pink. In fact the best-selling doll in the 70s was not Barbie, but Sindy, who's trademark colour was a rich warm yellow, accentuated by the 70s favourite shade of brown. She wasn't exclusively blonde either, but that's another argument entirely. Jamie Summers the $million woman had dark hair and wore a blue boiler suit. Wonder Woman was brunette and wore red, white & blue. My doll's pram was blue. My bike was red. I had a toy zoo and a toy farm, both full of realistic animals - not cute My Little Pony or Sylvanian Families facsimiles of animals. Apart from the pigs, none of them were pink. But my favourite, favourite toy of all was my Matchbox Racers race track and cars.
These days if you want to sell a race track and cars to girls, they'd better be putrid pink or little Amelia will walk straight past and head to the perfect pink My Cutie-Pie Kitchen so she can practice being a good little wife for when she grows up.
I thought that we were emancipated? I thought that the sexes were equal these days? Aren't we supposed to be sending the message to little girls that barring the obvious physiological differences, they're just the same as boys - able to do anything a boy can do, be anything a boy can be, have anything a boy can have?
Ah, but not if it's blue. Or red. Or yellow. Must be pink, or girls just won't be interested.
There's an article in the Daily Mail about a young woman who was very unhappy working as a Disney princess on a cruise ship. 'I couldn't get a tan because Belle can't have a bikini line': Former Disney Cruise actress reveals what her 'dream job' was REALLY like' screams the headline. Really? Your 'dream job' as a grown adult was to dress up as a princess and entertain over-indulged kids on a cruise ship? I despair at the depths to which our aspirations have plunged.
When I was growing up I wanted to be a teacher, a racing driver, a chemist (in a lab with test-tubes of brightly coloured chemicals), a pilot, an archaeologist, an artist, an architect. I became none of those things, ultimately, but I had dreams, aspirations, ambitions to be anything I wanted regardless of my gender.
In primary schools up and down the country, the walls are adorned with cute drawings and wonky handwriting declaring "When I grow up I want to be .....". The boys ambitions are to be firemen, scientists, explorers, train drivers, policemen, pilots, engineers, skateboard champions. The girls? Well, there's the occasional teacher, a few ballet dancers, very, very occasionally a scientist or solicitor. But mostly, what little girls in 21st Century Britain aspire to be is ...... a Princess. Their heads are stuffed so full of fluffy Disney pinkness that their only ambition is to wear lovely (pink) dresses and a crown and waft about all day being beautiful and adored. Nice work if you can get it but if we're restricting ourselves to British royalty there's only Harry available and I don't see him going for the pink wafty type if I'm honest.
It's all very well to joke about this but it's actually deadly serious. If women want to be taken seriously and treated as equal to men then we have to stop the pink princess culture that limits our daughters' ambitions so much. It's not cute, it's not innocent, it's damaging. Women, once again, are our own worst enemies. Women are the ones who go out and buy all the pink tat for their daughters. Dads wish they could buy little Amelia a football and some Hot Wheels but they know that Mum will tut and put them away, handing Amelia a Barbie doll instead.
Wake up, ladies. Stop sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Boycott pink. Do it for a year. Send a clear message to the manufacturers that their target market isn't 'girls', it's children and all children should have equal opportunities in this day and age.
Now, it has just occurred to me that most toy manufacturers will be dominated by men - aren't most boards of directors almost exclusively male? Could it be that the patriarchy are deliberately strengthening gender stereotypes to preserve the jobs for the boys and keep the girls out? Interesting thought. C'mon, let's do it. Boycott pink.
Just imagine the potential if we stopped holding girls back. Look what we've achieved in a society that still discriminates against us, still makes assumptions about what we're capable of, what is suitable for us. Take away the pink restrictions and find out what girl power can really do.
Boycott pink.
*There are no images in this Blog because that would mean searching for - and having to look at - pink princesses. Or it could be because Blogger is being a pain and won't upload photos from URLs. Or the pink thing.... You choose.
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