my pinkstincts!

Waiting at King’s Cross for the train to Leeds, every single little girl I saw – not just most – not just the majority – but every single one – was dressed almost head-to-foot in pink! Complete with pink accessories, pink backpack, pink on their trainers and in their hair. I’ve had it with pink!



It was the exact same thing last weekend at the very random Weeton Show we went to. There was a Punch n Judy stall – I had thought that these glove puppets, always disturbing at the best of times, had been abolished in waves of PC hysteria, which apparently waved right over West Yorkshire… Anyway, rippling out from the garish-enough puppet box was a small pond of gory pinkness. I don’t even notice little boys any more because they pale in comparison with their luminescent female versions!



Once upon a time, I had been prepared to accept the what-was-being-voiced-as a ‘re-appropriation’ of the colour pink, as part of the whole so-called ‘post-feminist’ reclamation of what it means to be female. But enough is enough! I honestly can’t take any more. It’s beginning to hurt my eyes! What we have with this aggressive colour coding, which is thoroughly and rabidly exploited by retail corporations, is a conveyor belt effect of perpetually and unfalteringly reproducing one unchanging female model. There’s no room at all for individuality, and no room at all to not like pink!



I don’t have anything against the actual colour. It’s just a colour! It could have been red, brown, green, whatever; it would have caused the same phenomenon if used in the same way. It doesn’t celebrate femininity. It condemns the child to a life of prescriptive gender definitions, held in place by the fear of being ostracised and labelled ‘different’ should she deviate from the prescribed path. There is no possibility of gender exploration when there’s only one road. We have a production line – a conveyor belt – of two possible sexualities. One of them is pink.





gender, pink, pinkness, blinking pink, femininity, production line identity