Written by Amanda Craig.
When girls go through their pink stage, it’s the parents who suffer most. I vividly remember my daughter, dressed in various shades of strawberry, saying thoughtfully: ‘Do you think if we fed the dog pink food, he’d leave a prettier mess on the lawn?’
She was obsessed with the colour.
So the news that the UK’s Labour’s Justice Minister, Bridget Prentice, has joined the Pinkstinks campaign, which wants us to boycott shops selling girls’ toys and clothes in the colour, will strike a chord with many of us, especially mums of a feminist bent.
The Pinkstinks campaigners say the ‘pinkification’ of girls is forcing them into a dangerously narrow mindset and teaching them that they should be passive and pretty, valuing beauty over brains.
Mrs Prentice believes that being raised on a diet of pink fairy wings and princess dresses is leading our daughters up a ‘pink alley’, funnelling them into ‘pretty, pretty jobs’ rather than careers that challenge them to their full potential.
Yet, as any parent knows, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Just as boys will fashion guns out of toast crusts, cardboard or yesterday’s newspaper when banned from playing with toy revolvers, so most little girls have an extraordinary and unavoidable addiction to the colour pink.
For a minister to try to change that by government edict is politically correct nonsense of the highest order.
Yes, I hate pink. But you can’t ‘liberate’ young girls by banning it. Besides, if you banned pink, there would be a toddlers’ revolution.
It speaks to their deepest instincts of what is feminine.
A single glimpse of the Sugar Plum Fairy at a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker was all it took for my little daughter to succumb.
Pink, the crack cocaine of female infancy, had taken hold of her.
In vain, I tried to distract her with story books about the brave Wrestling Princess or the clever Princess Smartypants.
But she would listen attentively – then demand I read Sleeping Beauty again, because she had a lovely pink dress.
‘I think it’s a very pretty colour, Mummy,’ she would say. ‘It’s my favourite – just like black is yours.’
Labour’s Justice Minister Bridget Prentice thinks allowing young girls to develop a pink obsession will lead them into ‘pretty pretty jons’
Like Mrs Prentice, I started by explaining sternly that pink was what every clever girl should be against.
It told the female sex that it was only good for staying at home, being sweet and pretty, having babies, while boys went out to rule the world. If she wanted a favourite colour, why couldn’t it be blue?
But all my arguments fell on deaf ears.
In Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, she explained, the fairy godmothers had fought a magical battle over whether her dress should be pink or blue, and Beauty had picked pink. End of story.
So it went on.
I would buy her lovely clothes in every colour of the rainbow, only for her to demand to wear the gaudy, sugar-pink dress – accessorised with pink jewellery – that her Aunt Harriet had given her.
I even bought her a real tutu, which would have been my heart’s desire at her age, but it was lilac so she despised it.
Walking down the street with my little Sugar Plum Fairy, ablaze in an explosion of pinks, I would get looks of knowing compassion from other mums.
‘It’s not so bad,’ I would lie. ‘She spent last year being a unicorn, and speaking in horse’s neighs.’
Occasionally, I would get together with other pink refuseniks at the local mothers’ club.
While our daughters squabbled over whose turn it was to use the glittery pink crayon, we would moan on about the tyranny of this repulsive colour.
Where had we all gone so wrong? If our children are born blank slates, as the scientist Stephen Pinker (no, I haven’t made up his name) claims, then all this mania for a particular colour has to be culturally imposed, an addiction caused by nurture, not nature.
But there was just one problem with this theory: I kept a very close eye on everything my daughter was exposed to.
She wasn’t watching hours of children’s television, or reading copies of saccharine-sweet Sugar magazine.
And her playmates were either boys or solemn little girls who, when given chocolate, were expected politely to put it aside and practise the patient art of ‘deferred gratification’.
She did have a menagerie of toy animals – none coloured pink – but only one Barbie, and she was kitted out in the elegantly-tailored outfits of a sophisticated and empowered professional woman.
But her obsession grew regardless.
One day, she found an old silk scarf, stripped her Barbie of her power suit and wrapped her up in that instead. ‘Now, you look pretty again!’ she crooned. It was, of course, pink.
Not only was my daughter every bit as stubborn as I was, but each time I found a film that seemed to help my cause, there would be That Colour subverting it.
Legally Blonde, a charming fable about a ditsy it-girl who goes to Harvard Law School in pursuit of her snobby boyfriend and discovers she has a brain after all, was a riot of pink mini-skirts and glitter.
And every girls’ book, from the Meg Cabot series The Princess Diaries to Hilary McKay’s Saffy’s Angel, was relentlessly jacketed in pastel shades of rose.
I loathed, and still loathe, the kind of culture that produces WAGs, but whenever I took my fierce little daughter clothes shopping, it would turn into a battle as she attempted to become a miniature version of Paris Hilton.
And being 30 years younger, with a very persuasive smile, she always won.
By the time she was six, we were living in a catastrophe of cerise, a riot of rosiness, a pullulation of pinkness.
At least I wasn’t alone in my struggle. One friend told me that her daughter wanted a pink skateboard and a (real) pink pony.
Another insisted on dyeing her blonde hair a strange shade of coral last seen in the film Strictly Ballroom.
Even so, there were huge scenes every morning as I struggled to get Madam ready for school. Inculcated with his sister’s growing obsession, even my toddler son switched his favourite colour from blue to purple.
Her uniform – a revolting brown – offered a little welcome respite. But then she expanded her pro-pink campaign to our home.
Why couldn’t the exterior of our house be strawberry, like Grandma’s? And why was our front door blue?
Wouldn’t we all look healthier, she asked, if we used pink lampshades?
And if she found a bottle of pink nail varnish, mysterious dots and squiggles would break out around the house like a rash.
But then, after seven long years and a consultation with my long-suffering husband about whether a change of decor would be unbearably insulting to his masculinity, I realised she had beaten me.
There was no way I could fight on against her addiction to pink. I would have to relent and let her have the pink bedroom she had craved for so long.
At my local paint shop, the Farrow & Ball colour chart showed pink shades with sophisticated names such as Ointment and Elephant’s Breath.
I took a deep breath and decided I could live with Ointment.
After all, I adore my children and didn’t want to be a killjoy. All colours can be beautiful, I told myself, it’s just a question of getting the shade right.
And so out came the dust-sheets, the paint-brushes and my handyman. And on went Ointment.
I couldn’t wait for my daughter to return from school and see her freshly painted bedroom. But when she did, there was a long silence as she surveyed it.
‘Well?’ I asked nervously. ‘Actually, Mummy,’ she said, ‘I’ve always preferred black.’
Unbelievable.
At the very moment I had succumbed to my daughter’s childish addiction, she had become a solemn ‘goth’, dressed head to toe in black and with diamanté skulls everywhere. (It was a stage that lasted for seven more years and which was infinitely more taxing.)
So sorry, Mrs Prentice: you are right to hate pink, but it is one girlie obsession we are just going to have to live with. Rest assured, however, that they will grow out of it.
• Hearts And Minds, by Amanda Craig, is published by Little, Brown at £11.99.
Source: The Daily Mail
