Campaign against pink toys for girls enjoys rosy outlook

When two sisters launched an "anti-pink" campaign two years ago to liberate girls from a toy industry dedicated to churning out pretty princesses for girls, they had no idea of the fuss it would cause.

"Colour didn't come into the nursery until around 1900 and, when it did, pink was for boys and blue was for girls," says the author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. "This profound fetishism of pink is very recent and is a market-driven construct. Princess is the only game in town."

Pinkstinks argues that the toy industry increasingly makes products for girls that centre on being pretty, passive and obsessed with shopping, fashion and makeup. Its second, smaller campaign successfully challenged Sainsbury's over the labelling of children's dressing-up clothes, whereby doctors' outfits were labelled as being intended for boys and nurses' and beauticians' outfits were tagged "girl". The end point, they say, is a narrowing of girls' choices and aspirations.

The Guardian, 18 December 2011

there's more than one way to be a girl from PinkstinksUK on Vimeo.