Day 11 of 365: Do It HERself

I've spent the better part of the last five weeks drilling, sawing, spackling and priming. I cut holes in drywall and fed cables and drills things on or off their respective locations. I've primed a grand total of three rooms (not including spot priming on spots that were spackled/mudded. Yesterday, I ran out of primer, so I made my way to my local Home Depot (a place that, thanks to all these projects, has seen way too much money from me).


Just outside every Home Depot is a list of various workshops you can take. How to put up drywall, how to make a stone pathway, how to make your garden grow. Instead of ignoring the wall like I usually do, I decided to see what they had to offer, as our next big project was finishing the basement by ourselves and neither my husband or I know the first step in doing that.


They had the usual stuff: how to fix a leaky faucet, how to make an effective vegetable garden... And then I see in bright pink marker: "Do It HERself: How to Make a Chore Chart."


Maybe I was on a Rosie the Riveter kick, but I found that little workshop horribly offensive. Let's first start with the pink marker: I have issues with pink being relegated only to females. I don't like how female sports merchandise always comes in a pink option (why wear a regular Red Sox cap when I can get the pink one and be super cute lol!!). I don't like how anything sold primarily to females comes in pink (like pliers and wire cutters in crafts stores). This is not even getting into how infantile pink is. Pink does not say "woman". It says "little girl".


Secondly, it was the only workshop dedicated to just women, and it was something as asinine as making a chore chart. So while whatever male of the house is busy fixing pipes and cutting wood and doing other manly things, you as a woman are delegating chores to your children.


Lastly, I don't appreciate the exclusionary attitude toward men. I know, when talking about disparities in retail, we tend to only discuss how such "pink" tactics pigeonhole women. But acting like a "chore chart" is primarily a female task assumes that fathers are incapable of running a house and seeing to the various chores. We're halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first century. Are we still pretending like life mimics those Bounty commercials, where men make messes and stare at them dumbly until the wife shows up?


I can't really control what the Home Depot puts on their workshop list. I can choose to not go to them, but that's about it. The only thing to do is to keep doing what I'm already doing, and keep my eye out for actual home improvement workshops that strike my fancy. And I pray to God that, when I attend the "how to install drywall" workshop, I'm not the only female there.