Pinkification? Girls get the blues too...

Pinkification is a concept that every girl will without a doubt be faced with more times than she cares to count. But more than that, many men will also be faced with this theory as well as it affects so much more than just the females it regards. In a nutshell, pinkification is the awful theory that lead to the Labour party thinking that using a pink bus would encourage females to vote for them. It's the concept that colours are gender based, pink being only for girls and blue for males. Ironically, it's a very black and white idea.

 
"This matters for so many reasons. When people meet a little girl in a pink, sparkly dress, they talk to her about how sweet and pretty she looks. If she's wearing a dress with robots or trains on, they'll talk about them instead- that is, about technology or engineering. That opens up her mind, her world and her future." This ground breaking observation is something that we have all noticed but feared to voice. Speaking from experience I had never felt the pressure to be a girl that was "pretty in pink" until I went to a friends Princess Party. The group of girls sat around me dressed as the classic Disney Belle, Cinderella and Snow White, yet I was sat as Sandy from Grease with curtain hoops as earrings because mom hadn't let me had my ears pierced yet! That day, in my mind, we were all princesses at that party but I couldn't understand why I didn't look like everybody else's ideas of what a princess was. I also went to a princesses and wizards day dressed as a combination of Hermione, Ron and Harry Potter. Only to find the other girls all in dresses looking strangely at my Gryffindor scarf and eyeliner scar on my forehead. To me I was dressed as somebody that I loved and wanted to be but the other girls didn't understand why I wasn't dressed like "all the other girls in dresses." That was the first time in my life that I felt different but the most astounding thing was I really didn't seem to care.
 

This idea is something that rocket scientist Elishka Jepson drew upon when she created her graphics for the Princess Awesome dresses that were made by Eva St Clair and Rebecca Melsky. They made these dresses for "a different kind of girly girl because girls shouldn't have to decide between dresses and dinosaurs, or ruffles and robots." But the world is changing as the battle against Pinkification becomes stronger. Even Hamleys have felt the force of the Pinkification party as Mothers complained their blue and pink floors for each aisle of toys that had been gender separated lead to "gender apartheid" that would eventually result in social inequality. This made them reorganise their store completely to eliminate this gender segregation. Well done Hamleys! Even Lego recently launched their first ever set that included a female scientist and Mattel launched a Barbie book entitled "I can be a computer engineer." However there is clearly a long way to go as in the Barbie book she eventually turns to her male colleagues for help after she makes several technical mistakes. Baby steps Barbie, baby steps...




Seriously?



Seriously Barbie, seriously?

 





























Pinkification was something that I always thought only affected girls but recently whilst at work a young boy told me that he liked all of the colours apart from pink because that is a "girly colour." After hearing him say this I questioned his reasoning behind this opinion and "what makes a colour a certain gender?" To this he replied "well everybody knows pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that's what my parents taught me." And this is a crucial part of the development of the opinion, "my parents taught me." I cannot tell you how often I have been in a supermarket and been infuriated by a parent telling their child they cannot have a certain bag of sweets or a certain toy because "that's meant for girls, look at the colour of the packaging." And then continued to identify a gender with the character on the packaging. Children aren't aware of these stereotypes, they are taught them.
 

 

It's our jobs as parents and mentors to help them develop and to be their moral compass. Please make sure that it is always aligned and pointing North, so that we can all move forward, together.

 
Love Liv x
 

Cucumber, banana and Perez Hilton...

It's not very often that I find myself feeling so disgusted at a programme that it will force me to turn it off, I am the Queen of trashy TV. However the word "trash" could in no way even come close to defining channel 4's new bid to be current and appealing to the modern viewers. The horrific series is compiled of three phallic named shows; banana, cucumber and tofu. Although I could only stomach the first two shows before vowing to never watch another second of this awful creation ever again. I found myself to be truly appalled at this medieval portrayal of gay men's lives.
 
For years the gay community have battled with the stigma that they are nothing more than sexual predators with uncontrollable and unlimited minds of sexual provocativeness. Of course we know this to not be the truth yet 'cucumber' opens with a suggestive montage of arousal resulting from every attractive young male that this man sees, all inside a bloody supermarket! It's not only exceptionally far fetched but it also does nothing to minimalize the stereotype that people have fought to forget for decades. I think the thing that I found so awful about this programme is that the main man involved has a very respectable job, yet in the first episode he completely disregards it in order to dance around getting ready to an awful kylie song, (see what I meant about stereotype)! This then results in a suicide, yes you read that correctly, an actual suicide of a colleague because he didn't answer his phone in time to solve the problem at hand. Channel four, what are you doing?
 

The disaster only continues in 'banana' where we see the life of a young gay male who has an accepting family that welcome him and love all aspects of him yet he chooses to lie about this to his peers and pretend that they have kicked him out and condemned him to hell. How's that for a role model performance? He then continues to basically have sex with anything and everything and that's about all his life exists off. He leaves work at the drop of a hat to meet a strange businessman for sex in a hotel room. This being a guy he has stalked on social media for months and fantasised about for even longer than that. The cliché is so strong you can literally smell it as it clouds your vision.
 
Just to put this obscurity of this show into further context I watched this ordeal shortly after seeing "Call the Midwife" which featured a story about a gay male living in post-war London and the kind of prejudice he faced. When his wife found out the tell tale signs that she believed she had missed were the fact that he always smelt nice and had clean clothes, whilst the other men were covered in dirt and grease and the fact that he liked the parlour to be clean. These characteristics being not far from the same details portrayed in channel 4's shows. Have we not progressed at all in our portrayal of human life? And to make matters worse the shows barely even have real speech so the characters have no voices at all for us to hear their true feelings and emotions to understand and empathise with.
 

This, I believe, is the reasoning behind why Michelle Visage found herself so frustrated with the actions of Perez Hilton in the Big brother house. She constantly referred to herself as a "voice" for the LGBT community, much to Perez' dismissal. I found this concept of being a "voice" very impacting. She believed in herself being a presence and a verbal support and when I reflect I believe this to be so much more powerful than actions, especially when trying to impact change. At one point in the series I found myself actually weeping for Michelle as I felt I too was part of her quest to bring a voice to the cause. As she wept in the diary room whilst Perez gyrated against the windows of the house in nothing more than underwear I finally understood what she had been trying to express all along. Actions don't always speak louder than words, everybody needs a voice.
 
 
 
We have the ability of our voice so that we can find the true meaning of it and find it's purpose. We are not objects so why do we need to be classified, stereotyped and labelled?


Love Liv x