The case for growing up and grabbing a broom

[mcjulie]

A New York Times essay attempts to make The Case for Filth:

A recent, large cross-national study on the subject by an Ohio State sociologist found that “women’s housework did not decline significantly and men’s housework did not increase significantly after the mid-1980s in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.” [..] So why

Comments

[kate_schaefer]

Let me simply say: yes. What you said. Yep.

[mcjulie]

Thank you!

[uly]

I did the laundry once.

Does... does that mean I'm gay?

[mcjulie]

No, Uly, it makes you a girl ;)

[uly]

Yay!

...you know, that does kinda explain a lot.

[mcjulie]

Which reminds me, have you seen Frozen? It's pretty much the ultimate movie for your inner 10-year-old girl.

[frelling_tralk]

Urgh yes I hate how men and women equally work at full-time jobs these days, yet inside homes it's still like the 1950s a lot of the time with the women still being expected to take on the majority of the housework, if not all of it

[mcjulie]

Some things are just so much slower to change than other things.

[mcjulie]

All so true! I got really stuck on the way he conflated reasonably necessary chores with hobbies like knitting, but he conflates a lot of other things too -- like the difference between being wrong about how many chores you actually do, vs. wondering how much chores done should be worth

[quixoticfish]

Ha ha. Pony up.

With Jon, I found that if I put the chore in a certain context, he'll not only do it, but with better consistency than I do. Take for instance vacuuming. All it took was getting a neat techy vacuum cleaner and working it into his routine. He's all about routines. Or cat litter. Fear of my passing on cat litter diseases to our unborn spawn, work the duty into his nightly routine of taking out the trash, and boom, it's done. Easy things he can do while playing video games all day but still claiming to do house work, like running endless loads of laundry, boom. Mountain of dirty laundry replaced by mountain of clean, wrinkled, and unfolded laundry. That's not all he does, but it's late. Jon has taught me about routines. X x x x needs to get done before y. It helps when I'm tired and don't know where to start.

I pick my battles. The good thing is that we usually get motivated to clean if the other starts. So we work together and don't really need to nag. We have developed a lot of non-verbal communication because he didn't

[filthwizard1985]

I totally do the running endless loads of laundry whilst playing video games thing.

Although I resent the implication that video games are a childish male-orientated hobby - my wife is the proud owner of an Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo.

Julie has the right idea with monetising the chores - put a monetary value on something and people care more.

[mcjulie]

It's funny to me how the idea of male-oriented hobbies being "childish" somehow gets turned into the service of an ultimately patriarchal viewpoint. It's like the "incompetent commercial husband paradox" -- MRA types sometimes cite stupid husbands who can't manage their own laundry as an example of "female dominance" in the pop culture, but it's actually a characteristic of patriarchal culture. Feminists aren't the ones who think men are widdle babies in need of constant mothering.

[mcjulie]

Kids are little chaos generators, it's true.