Perusing through the aisles of the Northdale Dollarama my eye was caught by a particular item: a pair of pink rubber gloves with the words "I'm a perfect housewife" embroidered on the cuff.
Can I get a WTF?
The epitome of shame to every feminist and really, every WOMAN out there-- is garbage like this circulating our stores. I am not going to take the radical femi-nazi viewpoint here, but I am going to be very critical of what this signifies.
A pair of pink rubber gloves alone signifies a lot of things: pink is the gendered colour for women and girls. Rubber gloves signify cleaning and housework, keeping your hands clean and away from the dirt and grime and cleaning solutions--keeping them pretty and your manicure untouched...ready for presentation.
As if that wasn't enough, a cuff with the embroidery "I'm a perfect housewife" is almost the lull of a drone, a passive cry from a woman enslaved to the house. Housewife is a term to describe a woman who is two things only-- housekeeper, and wife. She cleans and cares for her husband and her house. Her political views, personality and intelligent thoughts are kept out of that equation.
"I'm a perfect housewife" signifies the beginning of the end--the apocalypse of knuckling under to a normative heterogeneity that means nothing but cooking and cleaning for the rest of your life, doing it 'perfectly' which includes no complaining or faltering.
Well, no thanks, but I think I'll be the imperfect home maker! I'll be whatever the hell I want to be! I'll be a slob, I don't care. I don't care about your values which you deem appropriate to push on me with your pink rubber gloves!
As ridiculous as that may seem, all that from a pair of 1$ rubber gloves (which, if you like pink and want reusable gloves, by all means buy them). All that from anything. Notions of feminine passivity and caving 'to the man' are in everything we do, see and touch. Just look for it.
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