I’m really seeing red — over all this ‘girly pink’

THE other day, at a motorway service station somewhere forgettable, I nipped into the loo before paying three times over the odds for a substandard espresso to get me through the last hundred miles of traffic-choked hell.

Anyway, on the back of the loo door was an advert which read “Be Naughty And Nice”. Underneath was an invitation to “Indulge in coffee, cake and chitchat”, by organising a coffee morning in aid of a cancer charity. Now, maybe it was because I had been driving in heavy motorway traffic for too long, or maybe it was because I am naturally cranky, but that sign irritated me to the point that I wanted to phone up the fundraising genius who wrote the copy, and ask them just who they thought their target audience were. Morons? Dipsticks? Halfwits?

No, women. Obviously, given that the poster was in the women’s loos. But what kind of women? Do adult women really want to be ‘naughty’, other than in the bedroom, and then only if they are that way inclined? What is this infantilisation of female grown-ups? And why is it to do with food?