Tuesday, December 08, 2009

CLANNGG !

Amanda Craig (who she ?) in the Mail bemoans the tyranny of pink (for those of you who've been rightly ignoring it, some (childless) Labour dimwit called Bridget Prentice (nee Corr) thinks pink stuff for girlies is just socialisation by the partriarchy) :

Occasionally, I would get together with other pink refuseniks at the local mothers' club.

While our daughters squabbled over whose turn it was to use the glittery pink crayon, we would moan on about the tyranny of this repulsive colour.

Where had we all gone so wrong? If our children are born blank slates, as the scientist Stephen Pinker (no, I haven't made up his name) claims, then all this mania for a particular colour has to be culturally imposed, an addiction caused by nurture, not nature.

Alas, commenter Harry Storm of Vancouver (I think he made that name up) puts his finger on the flaw in the above :

Since Amanda Craig obviously hasn't read "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker, she shouldn't be using it to make her point. In fact, the entire point of Pinker's book is that we're NOT born as "blank slates." Since she thinks it says the opposite, there are only two possibilities: a) she hasn't read the book, in which case she shouldn't use it to make a point, as it makes her look silly; or b) she's an idiot who doesn't deserve a column in a daily newspaper.

8 comments:

Squander Two said...

There's also the somewhat inconvenient fact that pink was for boys and blue for girls until the 1940s, which rather implies that this imposition of these colour preferences by the patriarchy has coincided exactly with the collapse of the patriarchy.

Blognor Regis said...

Girls' "baby blue" comes from the Beloved Virgin Mary who is always depicted in the colour.

Why boys' pink though? The Giro d'Italia's Maglia Rosa didn't come into being until 1931 (after the colour of La Gazzetta dello Sport's pages) so it can't be that...

Anonymous said...

I knew a young woman who used to wear pink. She was ace. Everybody loved her, even in a non-sexual way!

Anonymous said...

Harry Storm overlooks the possiblity that both a) and b) are true.

TDK said...

Ross picked up the Blank Slate howler first here

Anonymous said...

Tend to agree, but why do Spanish women have such deep, gravelly voices?

Anonymous said...

Briget Prentice was my english teacher!

There was a definite tension between the teachers who were lefty and the headmaster - who was old school.

Squander Two said...

> Why boys' pink though?

The version I heard is that pink is just a pale red and red is traditionally a strong masculine colour, being the colour of blood and therefore violence and warfare. Have to say, when you hear it put that way, it actually seems really bizarre that it's considered a girly colour.