Women need a colour revolution

What do you think of if someone says “pink sauce”? For me, it evokes special occasions as a child, when tomato sauce was mixed with mayonnaise and poured over shredded iceberg lettuce to create a fancy appetiser, not that I knew that word as a twoyear-old.

Pink sauce is having a comeback, it seems. Journalist Jessica Maddox wrote for Nieman Lab this week about a condiment of this name that has been going wild on TikTok. Created by someone called “Chef Pii”, it allegedly contains water, sunflower seed oil, raw honey, distilled vinegar, garlic, pitaya (dragon fruit), pink Himalayan sea salt, dried spices, lemon juice, milk and citric acid.

As Maddox notes, however: “The problems started when orders arrived. The colour was off; sauces were lighter or darker than advertised on Pii’s website. When the bottles were opened, some exploded and some had putrid odours.”

Maddox attributes the debacle to “the sign that we’ve reached the next phase in an internet culture that has privileged aesthetic over function for years”.

“Pink sauce,” she writes, “exists at the intersection of the Instagrammable aesthetic, internet virality, and the side hustle economy.”

Which brings us to Women’s Day, or Women’s Month, or any event or activity in which women are foregrounded, which almost inevitably includes some pink in logo, design or ethos.

Pink, incidentally, has not always been associated with women and womanly things. One might think that the offensive Barbie doll is to blame for pinkness, but this colour confusion goes back a lot further than the platinum-haired pornographic cipher she represents.

In 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, a newspaper in the US, published this advice for mothers: “Use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” In 1918, the Ladies Home Journal agreed that pink, “being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl”.

It was only after World War 2 that the gender colour association was reversed.

Pink sidled into the English language in the 1500s, either as the common name for the dianthus flower, or from the Dutch word meaning “small” or “narrow”. A previous English word for the colour was “incarnation”, meaning flesh-coloured.

Women, who are flesh-and-blood human beings, might prefer the earlier definition to the small and narrow one.

During the Holocaust, homosexuals in Nazi Germany had to wear a pink triangle denoting their inferior status. This was an insult not only to gay men but to women as well, indicating that femininity was a state to be derided.

It is strange, therefore, that economists in the late 1990s began referring to the purchasing power of the LGBT community (before more letters were added) as “pink money”. In the UK this was called “the pink pound” and in the US “the Dorothy dollar”.

I think (hope) that this divisive and insulting denomination of lucre has died down, but we are still left with pink as a colour with facile and frivolous not to mention weak and wishy-washy connotations that is still seen to define femaleness, and this is perturbing.

Speaking of left, pink also has the dubious distinction of being associated with communism, again in a pejorative sense.

The online Etymology Dictionary reveals that “pinko” arose as an insult in the mid1930s, as “a derogatory slang form of ‘pink’ in the political sense, used of people whose social or political views ‘have a tendency toward red’ [communism/socialism]”.

Getting back to pink sauce, in the aspirational homes of my childhood this was a cheap way of making something insubstantial look grand. The same seems to be true of the latest must-have social media phenomenon.

When it comes to the very real and imperative matters raised every August about how to make women safer and more equal, we can only hope that the lip service paid to “Women’s Month” is not mere pink sauce.

Women do not need putrid-smelling, offcolour dressing (whether of the window or salad variety) to help us shake off oppression, violence and patriarchy.

Let us not privilege aesthetic over function. We need substance, resolution, grit and real commitment to change from both state and society.

So leave off the pink, please.