Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Like most mums I'm sick of the pink plague, but should Labour REALLY be trying to ban our daughters' favourite colour?

Amanda Craig writes for The Daily Mail

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 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.'

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