VALENTINE'S Day seems as good a day as any to talk about pink.
Poor, maligned, outcast, prejudged pink.
Think pink, think what? Well, girls, for a start. That's just basic - pink for girls, blue for boys. And, as with so many things, the parents are to blame.
In the 19th century there was no such compulsion to emphasise the gender of children. Boy or girl, wee ones wore white dresses until the age of six, the age also at which the first haircut happened.
Long-haired, neutrally dressed children ran amok until the 1920s when Time magazine printed a chart of all the leading department stores' suggestions for sex-appropriate colours for girls and boys.
In New York City, Best & Co. decreed pink to be a fine colour for little gentlemen, not as delicate as blue, as did Filene's, just up the Highway in Boston, Marshall Field in Chicago and Halle's in Cleveland. Britain followed America's lead in the trend.
By the 1950s this fashion had flipped, pink was the dominant colour for girls and there it has remained.
Everyone knows a mother who has stuck a pink floral headband on the bald sphere of a baby girl's head, ensured her Barbie was kitted in pink, her doll, her plastic kitchen set, her first bike. Pink, a childish colour, the childish pink smells of Germolene and calamine lotion.
Sadly, as we grow, we fail to put away pink. It dogs us from childhood to adulthood, an easy, lazy signifier of female.
So when Labour needed an easy, lazy signifier for its women's campaign, who could blame them for plumping for pink? A jolly, glossy, magenta minibus to ferry around deputy leader Harriet Harman and Shadow Women's Minister Gloria de Piero. Patronising! cried the masses.
At least you'll see them coming. The van's great benefit is that it makes Harman easy to avoid, should you want to dodge her.
Why is a Labour women's campaign patronising for opting for pink, yet Cancer Research's Race For Life (with its obstacle course, Pretty Muddy) isn't? Politics is a serious business, is not cancer? Glasgow Women's Aid's colour is pink. Politics is a serious business, is not domestic violence?
Speaking of domestic violence, women's aid services are facing funding crises Scotland-wide and it's a battle to find more than passing a mention in the press yet this issue, a bubblegum bus, is headline news.
The bus is a metaphor, run the arguments, for the fact Labour doesn't value women, it doesn't understand them, it sees them as a homogeneous mass.
Of course, all the people gasping outrage at Harriet's pink bus have been vocal about the Pink Stinks campaign, to persuade retailers and manufacturers away from gender-specific toys. It couldn't possibly be that they just dislike Harman or feel resentful of Labour trying to talk to women.
Women are obviously anything but a homogeneous mass. Women are a vivid and varied and complex bunch. Not one pink, but ombré. However, there are issues that are marked out as women's issues. They shouldn't be: children should not be a women's issue. Care (child, kinship, elderly) should not be a women's issue. And yet they infuriatingly are.
One hundred years ago women were fighting for the vote. Now female politicians are rolling around in pink painted vans, desperate to engage with the 9.1 million women who couldn't be fagged casting their ballot at the last general election.
I'd like to be innervated by the existence of a bright pink lady bus but I'm more innervated by this: ladies, this is what politicians think we want and if we're offended by it then we should be doing something more proactive about it than tweeting #pinkbus jokes.
There are plenty of issues that deserve real ire - Page 3, street harassment, domestic abuse, the burden of care.
Pink? Pink is the least of our problems.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article