Sink the pink
Pink mobiles, pink BBQs, pink planes ... A single colour is infantilising half the population
Barbara Ellen
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer
Before I tell you about the Pink Junkies (that growing tribe of otherwise sentient women who can't resist pink) I should admit that I'm not a very 'pink' person. Too apologetic a shade for my liking, too passive, too 'Don't worry, I won't bite.' In my experience, good men enjoy being worried; they quite like a woman with bite. However, even I have to accept that these days, pink is everywhere - mobiles, barbecues, music systems. There are even pink Handyman tools, and Fly Pink, 'A boutique airline designed especially for women' that has its very own pink aeroplanes. It's like a pink Midas touch - everything that can be touched (or, more to the point, merchandised) is turned pink, and the pinker it is the more women clamour to buy it. In this way pink isn't just a colour any more, it's a lifestyle choice. Where the Pink Junkies are concerned, one could even call it a drug - hen-party heroin for the masses.
One cannot help but wonder who allowed this to happen? Who let pink back in? For the longest time, pink was frowned upon as the colour of gender conditioning, the hue that would make Barbie dolls of us all. Pink was also the working woman's Kryptonite - wear it and you were corporate toast. Then slowly, imperceptibly, the rules fell away, and a good thing, too. What's so awful about little girls loving pink? Ditto the teens, staggering out of Claire's Accessories with armfuls of pink sparkly everything. Much more worrying is that, these days, it's not just young girls, it's grown women who are turning our pavements into churning oceans of girly pink. How often recently have I seen groups of women, in their thirties, forties and beyond, sashaying along in baby-pink velour tracksuits, or hot pink leggings, shrieking into bubblegum-pink phones. Everywhere you look, grown women dressed up as little girls. Horrifying. And bewildering.
It's not even as though every woman looks so pretty in pink. (It's a fine line between dewy youth and the full-blown Baby Jane.) In fact, only an elite set of women (and the occasional style-smart gay man) can do pink with aplomb. One example is Jordan, whose wedding was such a display of pink 'shock and awe' one could only applaud. The only surprise was that she didn't have Peter Andre dyed pink. Here was a woman, one of the very few, to make pink seem ultra-sexual and powerful: 'You want pink, big boy, I'll give you pink.'
Sadly, with most women, pink has entirely the opposite effect - neutralising them, taking away their edge. And maybe for some of these women, that's the point - as if, in this gender-blurred times, pink has become a short cut to expressing old-style softness and femininity. It could even be that extremely tough women use pink to deflect attention from their true colours - ruthlessness, ambition, drive. As in, 'Yes I just broke your balls in that business meeting, but I'm wearing pink, so I'm lovely really.' Certainly, Katie, that conniving Macbethian hag from The Apprentice, seemed to favour lashings of sticky pink lipstick, in a shade not seen since Melanie Griffiths in Working Girl, from which to spew her bile. But maybe that's just the good news.
For, delving into the cod-psychology of pink, questions must be raised. Could it really be the colour of choice for those women who yearn to be like little girls again? Is being infantilised in this way the new female bliss? Tellingly, maybe, they're rumoured to be shifting an awful lot of pink merchandise to divorced and separated women. What does this say - that when reality bites hard, so hard it draws blood, it's time for a woman to reach for the pink stuff? Because then you are transported back to a time when everything is fluffy and pretty, and there are no monsters under the bed (or in it).
In which case, maybe one should call time on the tyranny of the pink junkies. One hears that some women have taken to hiding their pink phones when they are doing business, proving that there may be such a thing as 'pink shame'. And so there should be. After all, when was the last time you walked down a street and encountered armies of grown men decked out in sailor suits, sucking their thumbs and wailing 'Mummy'? The female of the species had better put pink in its place - just a colour after all, and hell on earth to keep clean.
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