12 July 2009

Ladies Household Toolkit (PINK! PINK! PINK!)


Sorry about the rotten image quality, I took this on my phone and my heart was pounding! I was entirely convinced a sales assistant was going to ask me to leave or confiscate my phone and interrogate me in a back room of Myers (active imagination, I know).

Anyway I saw this product this afternoon while looking at teapots with my mum. It's a normal toolkit in every way except... it's pink... like the berries my lady ancestors picked (according to evolutionary psychologists, the discipline that failed sci-fi writers take up.) And personally I'm chuffed that masculine things like (big, swinging) tools finally come in pink, because now I can pursue the gendered pass-times I enjoy without having to fear that I will be considered less of a woman or somehow deviant, an exception to the universal rule of femininity.

It's just so pleasing to my little lady self that, according to the packaging, I can remain feminine while hanging a plate on the wall of my kitchen (it is Where I Belong, you see.) I can appease the male gaze AND hammer nails, all for the low price of $34.95! SCORE! This is exactly what I had in mind when I first decided to educate people around me about feminism and women's liberation; small concessions to women who want to engage in activities and domains traditionally the exclusive right of men, under the condescending, narrow and paternalistic conditions of PINKNESS and BE A PRINCESSES and CONSUME UR SASSY & SUBVERSIVE FREEDOM GURL!

Ironically I saw the Ladies Toolkit about 4 minutes after mum pointed out something like this:
...an old fashioned laundry wringer that some visual merchandiser though would look good in the towel section. Hint to the toolkits who thought up the 'just-add-pink' Ladies Toolkit; we've been engaged in backbreaking physical labour in the domestic sphere for fucking centuries. In fact our dirt cheap/ unpaid domestic labour has been alternatively exploited and targeted by companies, so please don't be hugely fucking condescending by offering us a little bit of Girl Power (not Woman Power, oh no... dropping the infatalisation concedes a little too much power) in shocking pink. Especially when it's in such a vile consumer context; it was often poor, uneducated women and women of colour who were forced to do this domestic labour and were employed by upper-class women. Honestly I'd be surprised (though tickled pink) if sweat shops weren't involved in the production of the Ladies Toolkit, ensuring that the price of some women's lessened oppression is the continued oppression of other women.

Thanks heaps, capitalism!

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