The Power

Caroline Leaper, fashion editor at the Telegraph is declaring "pink is the power color to wear in the office".  The headline in my Google News had an eighties vibe the second I saw it.  But the picture....

...is a full sized flashback to the age or spiral perms and doing the locomotion.  And not in an ironic-cool-hipster way. The point of the story seems to be that pink is now post-eighties and gender doesn't matter any more--or more specifically "as personality now prevails over gender, why are we still afraid of looking sweet?"  A statement that could hardly be more tone deaf, as the news bombards us with CK cornering people to masturbate over them and a 32-year-old politician "dating" a 14-year-old girl... and celebrity of the week pointing his dick at inappropriate person of the week ad naseum. The common thread being, men do this more than many people want to believe and uncooperative victim's careers suffer.

And in a dizzying flip the the very next quote in this article destroys its own thesis with: "‘it’s disarming’: ‘People almost don’t expect you to present a killer strategy just because you look ‘cute’’, thus allowing her to strike them by surprise." Which explicitly admits that feminine dressing will in fact make some people think you are less competent.  Leaper seems to be trying to contrast her pro-girly-color rah rah fest to the eighties, but actually that's just how the eighties were. Beloieve me, I was there--Fido Dido T-shirt, stone-washed bubble skirt, sequined headband and all.

I remember very well being told women were equal now and to celebrate being a "girl", but wearing heels is compulsory and don't expect to get promoted.  Girls can do anything, but will get paid 80c on the dollar.  Sexism existed then and it exists now--and it is time for people to stop pretending otherwise even in the smallest of ways.  All that changes is how it is expressed and what we do about it. Looking "sweet" affects how people see you.  Dressing into that stereotype is a choice to make carefully and strategically, not because you think your "personality" is all that matters because that's just fucking naive.