TLC Reaffirms Traditional Gender Roles, Shames Husbands

TLC's Honey Do, which premiered last night with two back-to-back episodes, comes to the public with a few immediate deficits. First, since the network is also home to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, it risks confusion with that show (though frankly that could only help it). For another, though I doubt that Dr. Phil McGraw was the first person to coin the phrase "Honey Do List" (as in "Honey do this, honey do that"), it was from his pushbroomed lip that I first heard it, so I'm prejudiced. And while outside of context, a "Honey Do List" could be prepared for any person of any sex, in at least these first two episodes, here it's presented in a way that doesn't leave any sex looking particularly good. ...I mean, the shirtless guys look okay, as you can see. Everyone else looks bad.

The concept of is this: a couple applies to the show in order to solicit the aid of "a dream team of hunky handymen" in knocking home repair items off on member of the couple's "Honey Do" list. I assume it goes without saying that we're talking about straight couples; that the wife is the one whining about the list; and that the lazy, neglectful, or (worst of all!) non-handy husband is the one who's derelict in his duties. Along the way, the handymen teach the husband how to fix shit around the house, in between various kinds of pampering lavished upon the wife. The dudes also work shirtless a lot, for no reason but to volunteer their abs and pecs for the female gaze, which I guess also counts as a form of mostly passive pampering. Alt title: Beefcake Handyguy For The Worthless "Guy."

The Honey Do climax is standard for a home makeover show: there's a triumphant reveal, and the homeowners are thrilled. The twist (such as it is) is that the dream team of hunky handymen have encouraged the husband to undertake a project of his own and helped him pull it off, handing him back his balls in the process. And while I think it's great for the show's format to include skill-building that may prove useful again one day, I'm less thrilled that there's no effort taken to teach such skills to the wife. Instead, the format feeds the victim story that led to her making the list of jobs the husband's failed to accomplish in the first place as opposed to either doing any of them herself or taking the initiative to outsource them to professionals if they were so goddamn important to her. "Let us shirtlessly show your husband how to be the right kind of man while you put your feet up and relax because no job is harder than being a wife and mother!" I'm paraphrasing.

I guess I am risking letting down my fellow practitioners of opposite marriage by admitting this, but I married someone (a man) who is not particularly adept at fixing shit around the house. But since I am also not that handy, when we need things done, we pay an expert to do them. Are some of these tasks so minor that one or both of us could learn to do them ourselves? Sure. But we also don't cut our own hair or do our own taxes or (let's be real) clean our own home either. I don't consider Dave to be a failure as a dude because at some point western society decided it should fall under his purview to replace a garbage disposal, much as I assume he doesn't consider me a failure as a lady because I don't physically scrub my own bathtub. And when we couldn't afford to have others do those things for us, we shared the load according to our actual abilities, not the division of labour established by postwar propaganda.

Of course, the Honey Do concept falls on the same continuum as commercials for dishwasher detergent or floor wax or whatever other domestic products have decided will sell better if they portray husbands as morons who don't understand homekeeping the way their sardonic wives do. But treating men like dopey children doesn't actually elevate women by contrast. Where TLC could have taken the opportunity to have a mix of sexy handypersons teaching both halves of a couple how to do light home maintenance, it went the laziest possible route with some real-life Homers and Marges that somehow exist in 2013.

Finally: it goes without saying that the Honey Do concept is deeply heteronormative, though I think that's actually a blessing in disguise; I can't imagine how much more offensive it would be if the show found a gay male couple and tried to figure out which one was the husband who deserved to be shamed for his lack of experience with construction tools and which was "the wife" who deserved a private yoga lesson.