The power of pink

The 'pinkification' of little girls their clothes, their bedrooms, their toys is a very recent phenomenon. So why did the launch this month of a campaign against the colour's dominance cause such uproar? The Guardian, Saturday 1 !ecember ""# Towards the end of the great war, in $une 1#1%, &merica's most authoritative women's maga'ine, the (adies' )ome $ournal *it still e+ists,, had a few wise words of advice for fretting mothers. -There has been a great diversity of debate on the sub.ect,- it wrote, -but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.& few years earlier, the Sunday Sentinel had been of the same opinion/ -use pink for the boy and blue for the girl,- it said in 0arch 1#11, -if you are a follower of convention.- So accepted, in fact, was this convention that as late as 1# 2 Time maga'ine was observing, on the obviously disappointing birth to 3rincess &strid of 4elgium of a daughter rather than the infinitely preferable son, that the cradle had been -optimistically decorated in pink, the colour for boys-. This is, as you may have noticed, no longer the case. 5or maybe the past decade or so, little girls have inhabited a universe that is, almost entirely, pink. 6t is made up not .ust of pink princesses and fairies and ballerinas and fluffy bunnies, but of books, bikes, lunchbo+es, board games, toy cookers, cash registers, even games consoles, all in shades of pink. This 7hristmas is no e+ception. There is a pink globe, specially for girls. Scrabble has been repackaged in pink *the tiles on the front of the bo+ spell 5&S)689,. 0onopoly has gone pink, with the dog, thimble and shoe pieces replaced by flip:flops, a handbag and a hairdryer, houses and hotels becoming bouti;ues and malls, and utilities turned into beauty salons. 6n at least one ma.or supermarket chain you can now buy slices of bright pink ham, cut into heart shapes and called 5airy )earts. Something, plainly, has changed. -There's been,- says &bi 0oore, a <%:year:old freelance television producer, -a wholesale pinkification of girls. 6t's everywhere= you can't escape it. &nd it needs to change. 6t sells children a lie that there's only one way to be a 'proper girl' and it sets them on a .ourney, at a very, very early age. 6t's a signpost, telling them that beauty is more valued than brains= it limits hori'ons, and it restricts ambitions.The power of pink, however, is not to be trifled with. >ighteen months ago, 0oore launched an anti:pink *or rather, pro:some:alternatives:to:pink, campaign with her twin sister >mma, a senior voluntary sector worker. 5or some time, the pair had been struck by how different their respective houses were beginning to look/ &bi has two boys aged seven and three, >mma two girls born at almost e+actly the same times. -6 was coming back from filming an interview with 9aomi )alas, this remarkable woman scientist who's developing a new treatment for cancer,- she says. -&nd 6 landed, and the media, all the media, was .ust completely obsessed with 3aris )ilton's release from prison. 9othing else. &nd 6 .ust cracked.-

The campaign, 3inkStinks, started out with the aim of offering girls positive alternative role models, says >mma, -women who do ama'ing things. Scientists and sportswomen and musicians and businesswomen and activists.- Trying to reverse the seemingly unstoppable tide of pink was simply another way, they felt, of challenging what they saw as rampant and unacceptable gender stereotyping, from earliest childhood. Then, two weeks ago, they devised a 7hristmas campaign denouncing the oceans of pink on show at the >arly (earning 7entre, which claims in its own publicity that its toys are designed to -help children e+plore the boundaries of their imaginations and creativity, make learning fun help children be all they can be-. &nd all hell broke loose. 3inkStinks has since featured in hundreds of television and newspaper reports, in countries around the world, from &rgentina to South &frica and not always in a good way. 6n 4ritain, one paper derided the 0oore sisters as -dour and humourless feminists-. &nother was considerably ruder. Sky 9ews had presenter 9ina 0yskow dress entirely in pink to interview them and even the 447 ?orld Service, says &bi, wanted to put them up against @andra Ahodes. They've been most shocked, though, by the emails. There's been support/ -6 am nine years old,- wrote one girl, -and 6 think 3inkStinks is my voice. Birls like me shouldn't be forced to like pink. 7an you think of a good name for girls who don't want to be girly girls but aren't tomboys?- 3lease, said another, -carry on and make it easier for girls like me to try different things without feeling like an outsider.- &nd where, a young mother asked, -are the toys 6 remember from my childhood non:gendered, and educational? ?ell done for raising this issue and giving us parents a focus for change, to raise our daughters to aspire to dignity, goodness and e;uality rather than big boobs and tiny waistsC4ut there has also been vilification= hatred, even. -!o you sell campaign T:shirts in pink?- one respondent writes. -&nd do you have any with '6 am a leftwing communist loony trying to brainwash girls'?- &nother calls the sisters -lesbians- who -can't leave normal young girls alone-. & third -pities your children-. &nother/ -So much going on in the world and yet you start this crap. &ma'ing. Sorry, white coats needed for you.The sisters are at something of a loss to understand why an innocuous, low:key campaign should spark such vitriol. -?e've tapped into something that's clearly very deep and very powerful,- says >mma. -Some people plainly feel attacked.?hy should that be? 4ack in the 1%""s, most children were dressed alike. Bender differences weren't really apparent until they could walk, or later/ boys and girls both wore dresses or skirts until they were si+ or so. 4y the end of the century, as the (adies' )ome $ournal noted, boys' and girls' clothing styles began to diverge. &ccording to 3rofessor $o 3aoletti of the Dniversity of 0aryland, pink emerged as an appropriate colour for boys because it was -a close relative of red, seen as a fiery, manly colour-. 4lue was considered better suited for girls because of its associations, in art, with the Eirgin 0ary. 6t wasn't until after the second world war that the colour code was reversed. 6n 1#1%, as the author of an authoritative item in the 7hicago Aeader notes, -royal watchers reported that 3rincess >li'abeth was obviously e+pecting a boy, because a temporary nursery in 4uckingham 3alace was gaily decked out with blue satin bows-.

Some claim the tide turned for innate biological reasons. Aesearch into colour preferences in monkeys have apparently shown that females prefer warm colours such as pink or red, perhaps because the pink face of a baby primate brings out the mother's maternal instincts. & widely reported study at the Dniversity of 9ewcastle in ""2 asked "" men and women to choose their preferred colour from rectangles on a computer screen. 6t found that women showed a distinct preference for reddish colours. The researchers speculated that the gender d ifferences may be genetically determined/ ->volution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours red, ripe fruits, healthy, reddish faces-. 4ut the study failed to take full account of cultural factors/ the enormous combined impact, for e+ample, of parental preference, peer pressure and, above all, consumer marketing. The feminist writer and broadcaster 9atasha ?alter, whose book (iving !olls/ the Aeturn of Se+ism is published ne+t year, argues that the scientific case that such preferences may be biologically determined is -far from proven. 6 was very struck, when 6 had my daughter she's now nine by the way girls seem to be e+pected from birth to live in this world of tutus. 6 was brought up in the late F"s and early 2"s, with a mother interested in gender:neutral education, and 6 had .ust kind of assumed that things would have moved on from there. 6n fact, they've moved backwards.& kind of fatalism, ?alter says, seems to have crept in. -The view seems to be/ '8h well, people tried, in the F"s and 2"s, they tried all that non:se+ist, anti:stereotyping stuff, and it didn't work. There's obviously nothing we can do about it, it's all laid down in our genes.' ?hereas in fact that's not true/ we never got the e;uality we set out to achieve. &nd now we all have to accede to the notion that little girls are naturally drawn to pink, and you're old: fashioned and over:serious and boring if you suggest otherwise.Some are more e+plicit. -6t's as if the women's movement had never e+isted,- says >d 0ayo of 7o:operatives DG, former head of the 9ational 7onsumer 7ouncil and co:author of 7onsumer Gids/ )ow 4ig 4usiness 6s Brooming 8ur 7hildren for 3rofit. -6t's staggering, the e+tent to which parents are now having to trade off their own values against the commercial interest of companies. Today's marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference.&ll this happened, 0ayo argues, -with the emergence of a children's market, and the need to differentiate between boys and girls/ the need to make more money, basically. This isn't something that's genetically hard:wired, it's culturally created, and therefore it should be open to ;uestion.- The children's market has now reached the stage, he says, where -it's no e+aggeration to talk of a gender apartheid.?hy, though, does pointing this out, as &bi and >mma have done, strike such a raw nerve? -Built,- says Sue 3almer, education writer and broadcaster and author of To+ic 7hildhood. -The obvious reaction is denial. ?hen you don't buy into the whole competitive consumerist status ;uo, you have to be dealt with and that's done by either bullying you or mocking you into submission/ you're either mad, or a lesbian.7ommercial marketing, 3almer insists, is behind pinkification. -?hen you're two and a half or three,' she says, -you have two key instincts. The first is towards inclusion/ the overpowering need to be part of the group. &nd at the same age, children become aware of gender. So there's this deep emotional need to be part of a group, and the group you want to be part of is

your gender group so that's how you capture them. Huite simply, the medium for catching girls is pink. The marketers have been at it, driving gender stereotypes, for " years= it's immensely insidious and it's mostly gone on under parents' radar.4ut is it really so important? !o little girls really graduate from playing with pink princesses to wanting to be a ?&B? There is, certainly, evidence to suggest -se+ualisation- makes girls not .ust aspire to a particular kind of thing, but actually changes the way they think. & study by speech therapists in !urham found small children able to identify the colour blue, but saying -4arbie- when shown pink. & highly regarded DS study indicated that an+iety about appearance can compromise brain function/ young girls who had been asked to try on a swimsuit in a private dressing room before sitting a maths test performed notably worse than those who had been asked to try on a .umper. -6n the late #"s,- says &ngela 0cAobbie, cultural theorist and co:author of The &ftermath of 5eminism, -feminism became repudiated and disparaged, as old hat, anti:fun. 6n this new era, girls and women are assumed to have gained e;uality, so feminism's no longer needed. &t the same time, consumer culture has penetrated deep into the childrens' sector, and introduced a renewed, hard:and:fast form of gender difference. 7onsumer culture is e+ploiting the disappearance and devaluation of feminism actually, it even claims to replace it, by being a 'champion of girls' in some respects, all the while creating new and younger markets.So pinkification matters, 0cAobbie says, because it marks -a return to the past, but with the full force of contemporary marketing. 6t is so embedded in children's culture that it penalises the non:feminine child. 6t turns small five:year olds into one:dimensional fashion ;ueens, and it narrows their realms of interest, and imagination. Shellshocked by their recent ordeal, the 0oore sisters agree. -3eople say it's all innate they think we're attacking something natural, within them, - says &bi. -4ut there are tremendously powerful forces out there. This is about money and marketing. That's worth challenging, isn't it?-