The colour ‘pink’ is taking a bit of a hammering right not. Pressure group ‘Pink Stinks’ http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/ is urging parents to boycott shops that sell pink toys and clothes, and it’s recently been backed by a government minister.
Jordan and the Early Learning Centre come in for some particularly harsh criticism.
At the heart of the group’s issue is what they call the ‘culture of pink’ – from the media’s obsession with celebrity and body image to the paucity of ‘positive’ female role models that result.
Low self esteem is an issue for young girls, but to link the start of the whole process to the ‘pink stage’ many girls go through seems to me to be taking things too far.
For starters there is scientific evidence to suggest young girls of a certain age have a natural predilection for the colour pink. Certainly if my four year old daughter is anything to go by, you betcha! We haven’t in any way pushed dolls, princesses, or pink on her but - like it or not - pink is her favourite colour and she wants a princess fairy tale castle for Christmas.
At the same time she also likes construction toys, playing on the computer, playing the piano, colouring, painting and drawing. (By the way, my little boy at her age liked breaking things and shouting.)
Therein lays the problem. Her love of pink/princesses/make believe is part of her very creative nature and this ‘pink phase’ seems to me to be nothing more than a highly imaginative and very innocent period in her life. Is this really the start of her long slow slide into low self esteem? The evidence before me suggests not.
For me the bigger issue is not ‘pink’ but conversely it’s the speed with which we are forcing girls and boys to grow up these days. When she packs all her pink stuff away, chances are she’ll be moving on to a much less innocent phase that probably involves pubescent pop stars and... boys!
What’s more even if you really believe pink is an issue, surely the answer isn’t to demonise it but reclaim it?
In China pink is all the rage among girls at university. And the pop star Pink... does she really lack self esteem?
In the end, I don’t think it’s particularly useful to oversimplify the complicated subject of gender stereotyping and girls’ self esteem to an individual colour. It may make a nice slogan, but it doesn’t feel the right thing to hang these problems off.
So even though I know she’ll grow out of her pink phase, I’m in no hurry whatsoever to make it happen.
Pink doesn’t stink. The fact that our kids are growing up far too quickly does.