An exhibit at the “Feminist Museum” at the University of Oregon (UO) has attacked hardware stores for selling tools that have been painted pink.

Britt Bowen, a UO graduate student and co-creator of “Feminist Museum” told Campus Reform that fellow student Mattie Reynolds created the project to protest “the way that certain companies will target female customers by painting things pink.”

“I have this huge problem with going into hardware stores and seeing these traditionally ‘male’ tools that companies make applicable to women by making them pink.” - UO graduate student Mattie Reynolds

“I have this huge problem with going into hardware stores and seeing these traditionally ‘male’ tools that companies make applicable to women by making them pink,” Reynolds said in an article published in Daily Emerald, a student newspaper.

Reynolds’ exhibit, titled “The Pinking of Things,” features various objects — including plastic dinosaurs, army men, power tools and guns — splattered with pink paint.

“It’s as if women can’t handle these tools that are so male-dominated, so they just vomit pink on them, make them a ‘women’s’ color so that they can use them,” she continued.

Another piece, “Turn-Ons,” used three papier-mâché sculptures and a video to represent a “very personal change” in artist Cat Bradley’s life.

“One of them is a paper vibrator, one of them is a dolphin that goes, the vibrator has an attachment on it that looks like a dolphin so I made another piece and the third piece was a representational wave,” Bradley told Campus Reform in an interview on Wednesday.

Bradley’s sculptures were accompanied by a video of women speaking in five different languages about five different things they like.

“It also has a piece of paper where the viewer matches up the language the woman is speaking to what the woman is talking about, it asked the viewer to kind of look at what the woman is talking about based on the language that they are speaking,” she said.

The “Feminist Museum” is a project of five graduate students to facilitate discussion about the “severe lack of female representation in art galleries across America,” according to the Emerald.

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