Why pink doesn’t stink

Pink is on the brink. According to a new campaign group called Pinkstinks, “the culture of pink invades every aspect of girls’ lives”, and the relentless march of pinkification must be stopped before the nation’s six-year-olds set out, en masse, to shred the last 50 years of the women’s movement by setting their hearts on careers as manicurists and go-go dancers in a rose-tinted haze of glee for girliness.

Justice minister Bridget Prentice has pledged her support to the campaign. “It’s about not funnelling girls into pretty, pretty jobs, but [about] giving them aspirations and challenging them to fulfil their potential,” she said. “We want to say to organisations like the Early Learning Centre that we rely on them to be progressive about encouraging girls to think of themselves as equal, and not to reinforce the old stereotypes.”

This is all well and good, but what’s the colour got to do with it? When I was a child, I loved pink. Couldn’t get enough of it. Granma would dress me in pink frilly knickers. Mum would get me home and change them immediately. At seven, I was demented in desire for a pink Barbie bath set. My mother, a staunch feminist, screamed with her face pressed into a cushion when Aunty Sara bought me one for what seemed at the time my best birthday ever.

But I’m over it. Nowadays I’m working as a journalist – as opposed to queuing up outside Boujis every night on a great, glittering quest to become a Wag – and go to work dressed head to toe in black (appropriate attire for working in an industry so perky right now that one may as well be working in an undertaker’s and taking style tips from Morticia Adams.)

For some reason little girls really like pink. They like princesses and ponies and perfume and pastel and all sorts of other horrible things that make adult feminists wince. But they grow out of it. And shops provide what customers want to buy – not the other way around. No one appears to be suggesting that boys will grow up wanting to be wrestlers due to the noxious influence of the WWE figures on offer for them at Toys R Us.

Yet Emma Moore, co-founder of Pinkstinks, is adamant. “Ask yourself what we want girls and boys to learn from an early age. Is it that pink, passive and pretty is for girls and that blue, bold and challenging is for boys?” Interestingly, until the 1940s pink was apparently used to dress boys as blue was seen as a more dainty and delicate colour appropriate for girls.

What is more worrying is the culture of pinkification in the adult world. As Libby Brooks has pointed out, the appropriation of the colour for breast cancer awareness risks prettifying the disease rather than tackling it head-on: “In her excoriating essay Cancerland, the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich describes induction into the pink and perky world of breast cancer, following her own diagnosis in 2001. ‘In the mainstream breast cancer culture, one finds very little anger … Let me die of anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that [ribbon-branded] teddy bear.’”

But pink itself is no bad thing: Picasso had a pink period; Pink Floyd were a great band; gay pride has adopted pink as its colour; in Thailand it is, apparently, the colour of those born on a Tuesday; Elvis drove a pink Cadillac; and the popstar Pink is held up as a role model for young girls by … uh … Pinkstinks.

The late high priestess of pink, the chiffon dame, Barbara Cartland – who uniquely favoured the colour following a trip to Tutankamen’s tomb in the 1920s, where she liked the tint of the walls so much that she forsook all other colours – didn’t let the dainty shade curb her ambition. On average she wrote a novel a fortnight, and appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific novelist, with estimated worldwide sales of one billion copies in 36 languages. As Christian Dior once noted: “Pink will prevail.”

Bombing Jordan

Thanks to an early morning incident involving a crashed car, a fire hydrant, and a wife wielding a golf club, Tiger Woods – the golfer so proficient on the course that his private life was deemed a complete snore fest – finds himself the latest star with a marriage under the microscope.

Now I’m a fan of celebrities hanging their somewhat soiled, silken g-strings on the line – Heather Mills McCartney is surely the most interesting thing Paul McCartney did since ‘Back in the USSR’ – but it reaches a point where even the most avid TMZ trawler thinks it’s time to turn off. Woods has never forced himself into the gossip columns, paraded his family about or professed undying love for his spouse across endless, gurning spreads in Hello!. Quite why the police have to get involved seems a mystery. He’s surely rich enough to pay for the fire hydrant. But the key point is: celebrity marital strife should be left to the professionals, who can handle it. Like Jordan.

Contrary to popular belief, Jordan, aka Katie Price, has handled her divorce with aplomb. There has been mercifully little angst and handwringing, aside from the obligatory hanky-blowing with Piers Morgan, at the loss of Peter Andre, failed pop star and former washboard stomach. Instead Price has picked herself up and got on with the day job – flogging her equestrian line, shooting her calendar in Ibiza, getting chased about by the paparazzi as she films her ITV2 reality series and claiming a bumper rate for her stint on ITV1’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!. She even replaced the defunct Andre with a younger model. In short, Jordan has taken it like a man.

In the Andre/Price divorce, gender roles have been reversed. Pete has gone down the traditional wronged wife route, crying in public, dangling the children about for the cameras and expressing his inner agony in song, while KP earns all the money and cops all the flak. Whining that his former wife ought to have returned from the jungle earlier because her children miss her (while simultaneously neglecting to point out that she was contractually obliged to be there and though she couldn’t come to them, perhaps he could have brought them to her) it is Pete who has won the PR victory. Most express the hope that Price will now go away. But although there is much talk of Price’s profile being destroyed by the divorce, there is no talk of the ‘Mysterious Girl’ singer having been made by the marriage. If she goes, she’ll be taking him with her.

Jordan’s popularity – or anti-popularity – is so staggering that the Guardian commissioned a full report on ‘Being Katie Price’ recently. However confused you are as to what to make of her, the piece rather snidely explains, ‘at least you’re not Price’. And yet evidence suggests that rather a lot of people would like to be Katie Price. Two million ITV1 viewers departed with her when she left the jungle. Viewers may have been phoning in to punish her, but even so they were tuning in for her. She has been phenomenally successful. She has, in her short career, sold over 2,820,479 books. Her fortune hovers around £30million. Her ambition knows no bounds. Last year she claimed she wanted to launch a Katie Price credit card and a Katie Price budget airline. The woman has ambition. She’s not just doing this for fame’s sake. She’s not just doing this for money. She quite clearly wants to take over the world.

And recent months have shot her into the stratosphere of the literati, where she has been busy getting up their nostrils… That increasingly demented man of letters, Martin Amis, has revealed that he is basing a character on her in his next worst-seller, State of England. In the same interview in which he blamed the women’s movement for his sister’s alcoholism and promiscuity (perhaps forgetting that their father was also a raving philanderer and alcoholic and it was somewhat following in the family pattern), he states: ‘Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can’t be snobbish about Katie Price then it’s the end of the world.’ Fay Weldon gamely followed up with the view: ‘She drinks too much and sleeps with too many people and talks about it too much for common decency, but who of us is perfect?’

Not Fay or Mart for certain, who haven’t written anything really compelling in at least a decade. Meanwhile, Katie Price continues to pull off the art of getting her baps out for the lads very capably.

Books of the Year

It’s that time of year again, where everyone with a book to sell tickles the feet of someone else with a book sell, in order that enough collective snorting and giggling is generated that a foolhardy member of the public doesn’t realise it’s all a mutual love-cackle and actually buys the blasted volume (Private Eyes ad nauseam) so this year I’ve decided to make some GOOD recommendations to YOU the solitary reader of my blog, whoever you are, you Klaus Nomi obsessive come to the WRONG PAGE – for Chrissake go out and buy The Nomi Song – how do you get to the end of this century long sentence?

1. Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Tales. Screw reading anything else until you’ve read this. 60 degrees below, in a tent on the taiga, working to death in a goldmine. Sentenced at 22 years old, Shalamov spent over 17 years of his life in the Gulag. “There was no Kolyma in the House of the Dead.”

2. Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Cloud in Trousers
…Your body
I shall cherish and love
as a soldier
amputated by war,
unwanted
and friendless
cherishes his last remaining leg…

3. Leviathan. It’s about whales.

4. J.G Ballard. Anything. But most particularly … High Rise.

5. Stendhal: The Red and the Black. Has. To. Be. Read. If. You. Didn’t. Already.

6. Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud A Solitude:

“The three youngsters pressed against the wall like periwinkles in the rain, but at the very last moment, when the man had picked up half a chair in each hand and seemed ready for the kill, he burst into song, and after conducting himself in ‘Gray Dove, Where Have You Been?” he flung aside the halves of his chair, paid the waiter for the damage, and, turning to the still-shaking customers, said, ‘Gentleman, I am the hangman’s assistant,’ whereupon he left pensive and miserable. Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holerovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Ricany, then apologised, saying he hadn’t found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse…”