Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Hey! Women Can be Sexist Too!

And it's not about the election either! Nope, WSJ article is just random sexism.

The article is about women and tools. (insert funny pic of Chris Matthews or Billy Bush here) Hardware stores are marketing towards women and their nifty notion that they can fix things too! Guess what the color du jour is.
The clever "Ms. Hymowitz" calls this trend "the pinking of home improvement," "the pink hammer brigade," and "the pink hammer revolution."

Newsflash: women have been fixing things for a long time. But advertisers and marketing departments have only just caught on. And everything's going pink-ass frilly. Of course! All women want a pink screwdriver!

According to Hymowitz, if that is her real name, single and divorced women are becoming more self-sufficient out of necessity. Or possibly because they've been called a nag too many times by their "loving" husbands. But watch out, Hym-ey isn't buying any of this "empowerment" shit:

"The only thing to give pause in the pinkhammer revolution is the occasional whiff of ideology that emanates from its leaders. Hang around the movement's Web sites and before long you'll hear rhetoric that implies that learning to install a dimmer switch is not simply a practical means of increasing domestic pleasure; it's a Radical Statement for Women's Progress. "It's more about Empowerment with a capital E," reads the toolgirls.com manifesto. Most of the rhetoric is more Oprahesque heavy breathing than Steinem-style fuming, but it still may not be the most suitable tone to take around people preparing to take up potentially lethal tools. "My true desire is to inspire women to become more self-reliant and confident in their abilities," Barbara K! writes on her Web site. "We all have 'it' within ourselves to do things we never imagined we could."

Well, maybe. But the truth is that while women may want a lovely home, most of them would also like a good man to share it with. You can be sure that, unlike their female counterparts, few single men are spending their weekends restoring the crown molding in their living rooms. Men's domesticity has always been a group affair; they fixed the faucets and built the shelves not for themselves but for their wives and children. Women ought to know that selfreliance isn't everything."

Translation: It's okay to bone up on your handy-woman skills, but make sure you don't do it for yourself. Do it for your future husbands. Imagine how much they'll want to marry you when they see you with that pink hammer! Yeah!

Ugh. I'm gonna be sick.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the pink tools are really cool looking....but I don't give a shit about a woman being able to fix stuff. I don't even want to fix stuff...that's what money is for.