Pink stinks less than viral marketing.

So, most people have at least peripherally noticed that over the last few years, really lazy marketing departments have been pushing versions of popular products in pink: iPods, radios, yes, even pink scrabble.

It's lazy marketing because it follows insane logic of "We don't have enough market penetration with female tweens, they like pink, let's make a pink version." I guess it worked well enough to keep it going for a while, and the appropriation of pink for breast cancer let them shift more pink crap with an air of piety...

But I'm guessing that they didn't shift enough, because out of nowhere the Pink Stinks campaign has appeared.

Pushing a really pathetic claim that all this pink crap oppresses little girls more than, say, the constant judgemental attitude of the press towards women's bodies (and I notice that Gok Wan, who seems to think empowerment means getting naked on national TV, is backing the campaign), Pink Stinks by some miracle seems to have got a really good press officer just in time for the christmas rush.

And all over the press, the blogosphere and twitterscape, lots and lots of manufactured stimulus response outrage from people who are NOT going to be dictated to, they WILL face down the PC brigade and BUY MORE PINK CRAP FOR THEIR LITTLE GIRLS THIS YEAR.

Because, you know, you fight DA MAN with consumerism. That'll show 'em.

And Pink Stinks will go away again until the next time the buyers overestimate demand for pink crap.

(Historical note: for Victorians, pink was for boys, blue was for girls. Honest. I've seen very silly evolutionary psychologists trying to explain why girls "naturally" prefer pink, because it couldn't possibly be a social construct. They are wets and weeds and I diskard them uterly.)