And a more in-depth article from the Guardian - “PinkStinks: The Power of Pink”
Commercial marketing, Palmer insists, is behind pinkification. “When you’re two and a half or three,’ she says, “you have two key instincts. The first is towards inclusion: the overpowering need to be part of the group. And at the same age, children become aware of gender. So there’s this deep emotional need to be part of a group, and the group you want to be part of is your gender group – so that’s how you capture them. Quite simply, the medium for catching girls is pink. The marketers have been at it, driving gender stereotypes, for 20 years; it’s immensely insidious and it’s mostly gone on under parents’ radar.”
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“In the late 90s,” says Angela McRobbie, cultural theorist and co-author of The Aftermath of Feminism, “feminism became repudiated and disparaged, as old hat, anti-fun. In this new era, girls and women are assumed to have gained equality, so feminism’s no longer needed. At the same time, consumer culture has penetrated deep into the childrens’ sector, and introduced a renewed, hard-and-fast form of gender difference. Consumer culture is exploiting the disappearance and devaluation of feminism – actually, it even claims to replace it, by being a ‘champion of girls’ in some respects, all the while creating new and younger markets.”
So pinkification matters, McRobbie says, because it marks “a return to the past, but with the full force of contemporary marketing. It is so embedded in children’s culture that it penalises the non-feminine child. It turns small five-year olds into one-dimensional fashion queens, and it narrows their realms of interest, and imagination.
