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?

I should mention that I like coffee, I like cake, I like talking to other women, and I have had cancer. I believe this qualifies me to comment. But being ‘naughty’ by ‘indulging’ in cake? Communicating with other adults via something called ‘chitchat’? Try to imagine the male equivalent of this poster. No? That’s because there isn’t one. Call a man ‘naughty’ for eating cake and he’d wonder if you didn’t have undiagnosed mental health problems. And everyone knows men don’t chitchat – they talk. Only women chitchat, like the witless birdbrains that we are, giggling over our ‘naughty’ cake.

This is not to knock the well meaning efforts of a charity keen to raise money for a disease we can all look forward to. It’s just an example of how women are repeatedly, unendingly pigeon-holed and infantilised. Pink technology, in case black would blow our minds. Girly cars, smaller and with short daft girly names that end in ‘a’. Girly books, pink-jacketed and illustrated by a handbag, a shoe, a champagne flute. Even football supporting has been pinkified – at my local team’s shop, there is a special pink section. Scarves, strips, bobble hats – in case we ladies can’t handle the actual non-pink colours of our team.

Guess what, marketing people. Women don’t all like what you think we like. Adult women are not 12-year-olds with credit cards. We don’t all care if our bum looks big in this, or if we are getting the most from our shampoo. And as for fashion, some of us think it might be, in the words of graphic artist Peter Saville, “mass mind control and triviality that enslaves people to consumption.” Just sayin’.