So the ‘real horror’ of ‘Make PINK Not War’ wasn’t that it said nothing, helped nothing, arbitrarily divorced modern struggles from historical ones, made everyone stupider, cost real money for fake pleasure. The sin didn’t belong to the teenager in the café – she’s gone now, I’m alone here with my preoccupations – nor even to those who made and sold her the bag, who were guilty only of greed and lack of imagination (which are of course the same thing). The sin was the belief that children are happy being belittled and infantilized, popular culture(s) that provided only meaningless choices – fashion – and force-fed children mere pleasure at the expense of real joy.
— Waxy Banks rants about Hollister, stupid teenagers, and greed.
“The phrase meant nothing, but neither did anything else, so you could accept it. But the girl almost certainly hadn’t given even a moment’s thought to the origin of the slogan, was unlikely to have had any contact with members of the liberation-sexology counterculture that produced it, probably related more closely to whatever corporate subdivision had co-opted and branded the word ‘PINK’ than to the shift in sexual mores that had helped make such stupid low-grade commercial prurience a key facet of modern American culture.”
Whatever.