Oi! Llewellyn-Bowen. No!!

Our efforts at being sincere, committed, non-sexist men here at C&S have every now and then failed to protect us from the implicit prejudices of our era, class, generation, and society to the extent that even this contributor, a former sociology lecturer in a college of higher education, has made phenomenally atrocious errors along the way: The most embarrassing of all has to be the occasion when I attended a moderating conference of fellow sociology lecturers where, during a break for tea and biscuits, I took hold of the teapot in an effort to be considerate and committed the most impressive faux pas of my entire life by turning to all and sundry and saying “Shall I be Mother?”

Thanks to writers like Donna Haraway, we can refer to this form of abject stupidity euphemistically as a sign of the “gendering of domestic technology.” Plenty of empirical research has been done on British home life to show that the TV remote control is a strongly masculinized object, which is to say that it’s usually the blokes who keep control over it, whereas the teapot, the iron, and the telephone are, to a greater or lesser extent, feminized objects. But what brought back to me that awesome blunder, cringe-inducing even at a distance of 15 years or so, was a conversation with a colleague of mine who has just bought her first home and is in the process of renovating it. Rightly proud of her work to date (she is somewhat of a tyro on the interior design scene) she has provided me over the past few weeks with a detailed description of the entire project, describing how she got the builders and electricians to get the job done on time, how she obtained discounts on the floorboards and curtains, and how she drafted in a gang of friends, on the promise of free booze, to paint her kitchen pink.

Yes, that’s right. Pink. She’s painted her kitchen pink. Bathroom, I can understand; bedroom, yes, that’s acceptable, too; but kitchen? Who cooks in a pink kitchen except Barbie? Yes, Barbie. Not Ken.

You see what I’m saying? Good. On aesthetic grounds alone she should be ashamed. For her crimes against morality, I await suggestions for a suitable punishment. Ironic ones only, please.