This Christmas women are being deluged with pink gadgets. Forget pink dresses or pink gloves or a nice cosy pink scarf: the geeks who design the kind of technology most of us use every day have got in on the act and flooded the market with pink mobile phones, pink digital cameras, pink televisions, pink MP3 players and pink games consoles. And it’s working: the limited edition Motorola V3 Razr phone in hot pink, for instance, is selling itself.
A buyer for Woolworths told last Thursday’s Radio 4 Today programme that when it comes to pink gadgets it’s hard for the store to keep up with demand: whatever item it is, if it’s pink it flies off the shelves. Cue an irate female customer saying: “I find it patronising. If a mobile phone only came in pink and even if it was the best mobile phone around, I’d still struggle.”
At first glance the creation and availability of these pink devices may indeed appear almost unbearably patronising — rather along the lines of a certain kind of man not bothering to ask what you want to drink and ordering “a spritzer for the little lady”, when the lady in question might in fact fancy a triple Jack Daniel’s (and a lethal weapon on the side, for emphasis).
The idea that “feminine” pink somehow automatically appeals to “feminine” women sticks in the craw in a kneejerk, Guardian women’s page kind of way, and it’s easy to see how people might get cross at the suggestion that the only female-friendly gadget needs to be female-friendly pink. Peter Frost, of the website rethinkpink.com, which looks at marketing to women, said last week: “This is completely the wrong choice of colour. It is lazy marketing. Women can see this sort of tactic a mile off.”
Can they really? Why are they stocking up on every pink gadget they can get their hands on, then? Perhaps they are just very silly and dim, or insufficiently masculine? After all, they’re only women.
Or perhaps they are grateful because clearly the women buying this stuff in their tens of thousands don’t feel remotely patronised. I have one of the aforementioned pink phones myself and I was delighted to come across it: it made a welcome change from the naff, blokey hideousness of most other mobiles.
But it’s interesting, the question of pink. Any mother of a daughter will have asked herself whether it is quite sane to wade through a sea of pink in the way that we do every day: pink bedding, pink curtains, pink clothes, pink shoes, pink hair bobbles. Pink lamps to go next to pink beds. Pink pens and pink folders. Pink nail polish. Pink glitter on everything. Pink food, even, especially on birthdays.
Fond as I am of the colour myself it’s quite easy to reach saturation point. And it is certainly odd, for instance, that while I dressed my boys in all sorts of colours when they were small without thinking twice, there is a part of me that hesitates at the idea of putting my small daughter in top-to-toe navy. Also, whereas I bought the boys PC dollies when they were small (not that they ever played with them), I haven’t yet bought my daughter a construction set or any wretched Thomas the Tank Engine.
Obviously this is to do with sexist conditioning and as such ought to be reprehensible. But I wonder. If we feel patronised by this flurry of pink gadgets and accessories, are we admitting that being manly is preferable to being female, or at the very least that a masculine aesthetic is superior to a feminine one? I’m sure there are exceptions but it is broadly true to say that women like prettiness, and value it, in a way that men do not. A man would be perfectly happy to live in a grey room, with grey things about him; a woman might find it exceedingly depressing and cheerless.
Why, then, should a woman ape the ugly, aesthetically displeasing accoutrements of men and, most ridiculously of all, ape them in the name of equality? There isn’t anything actually wrong with liking beautiful things in beautiful colours, which is why we don’t all trudge around in ugly beige nylon man-suits.
It’s bad enough — and sad enough — that so many women feel that they need to butch up in order to be professionally successful. But it is really pathetic when butching up seeps into the buying of a computer or digital camera, and women are told by other women that favouring the attractive over the commonplace is somehow a sign of girly weakness. There is a really weird kind of double-think at work: be proud of your gender, but be really ashamed of many of its defining characteristics, such as having taste. This attitude, rather than the wide availability of pink technology, is what strikes me as unhelpfully retrograde.
- Over in Ontario, Canada, Jan Luedecke, 33, was acquitted last week of sexual assault because he apparently suffers from a rare condition called sexsomnia. He went to a party and met a woman. They both had a great deal to drink. She fell asleep on a sofa and woke up to find Luedecke having intercourse with her. So far, so date-rapey.
Luedecke claims that he was asleep at the time and had no idea of what was happening and realised that he had had sex with the woman only when he went to the loo and found that he was wearing a condom. Not unreasonably, the woman in question was unimpressed with Luedecke’s excuse and took him to court for rape.
Colin Shapiro, a sleep expert, told the court in Toronto that Luedecke suffers from sexsomnia — sexual behaviour during sleep brought on by alcohol, sleep deprivation and genetics. The court heard that Luedecke, who admitted having sex during his sleep with four girlfriends, is cutting down on his drinking and taking medication. The victim is planning an appeal.
As far as I can see the judge ruled that the combination of being tired, having too much to drink and “genetics” makes it okay for people to rape other people. We have all been tired and drunk, and we all have genes, and yet the majority of us manage not to violate people in our sleep: what, then, makes Luedecke the exception to the rule? Is the judge simple-minded or merely gullible? Sexsomnia was first diagnosed in 2003 in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, handily enough, where it was described as a cross between a wet dream and sleepwalking. Which it may very well be — if you are able to suspend disbelief — in the comfort of a person’s own bed, at home. But as a defence used against an unknown woman who has been raped, it is outrageous.
