It's a cliched life for girls caught in a toy story

Marketers are using pink to inflate gender stereotypes. It's about time it was reclaimed from all that "passive princess" nonsense.
ENTERING the girls' wing of Target's toy section is like tumbling into a vat of fairy floss. Grotesque baby dolls with gnome-like faces are sporting pink bonnets and bottles.
The Disney Princess wooden kitchen is pink, as is the pots and pans set (with pink spatula), the Dora guitar and the toy laptop. Barbie has a pink bathtub and a pink stove, and drives a pink ''glam convertible''.
''Let's pink it up!'' enthuses a sticker on the Barbie beauty set - and toymakers are doing their best. It's the same in clothing, where pink - and its pallid deputy, mauve - dominate. Boys get dark colours that won't show dirt: green, brown, navy.
''Girl toddlers everywhere are hideous in pink,'' Germaine Greer wrote recently, ''which they wear as a uniform confirming sexual identity.'' I don't find pink hideous. I quite like it in small doses. But as a parent of young girls, I'm staring down a rose-coloured contagion that infects almost anything. (A pink motorised jeep? Hell yeah. A pink computer? What else?)
Kids like to fit in and young girls soon suss out what's expected of them. Parents trade stories from the colour wars with weary resignation: the toddler who won't leave the house unless she is wearing her favourite pink skirt; the girl who must wear pink from head (hairclips) to toe (shoelaces). Most will outgrow these fetishes. But the linking of pink to frippery continues into adulthood. ''Rule the pink carpet,'' is the ad slogan for Vera Wang's new Glam Princess perfume...... read more