[ed. I have to say, there are some things in this article that sound like pure BS to me. I like a clean and orderly environment despite my sex, and am more than willing to expend the effort to make it like that. But there are other interesting observations here too, so take it for what you will.]
Despite its apparent banality, housework has always been an intellectually confounding problem. The idea that the chores are a series of repetitive tasks undertaken to preserve the health and hygiene of the living space is an easy assumption to make. Nothing could be further from the truth; housework is as complex as the connection between our emotional life and our material life, as subtle as all intimacy. (...)
You may have had this argument yourself: Should housework be measured by the time spent on the task, or by effectiveness? What is necessary work and what is puttering? Should work that is physically taxing, like yard work, count more than work that isn’t, like the dishes? Questionnaires and housework diaries generally deal only in repetitive tasks like sweeping, doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. What about planning summer vacations? What about figuring out which washer to buy? And what about that far more important but far vaguer business of caring? We all know families that are held together because a woman knows who likes what in their sandwiches, who can or cannot read on a road trip, who needs cuddles after a hard day at school.
The million tendernesses of “emotional work” all require effort, often thankless effort. In one Canadian study, “What Is Household Work? A Critique of Assumptions Underlying Empirical Studies of Housework and an Alternative Approach,” the researchers had the intriguing idea of asking women what they considered their chores to be. A surprising array of answers emerged. For one Iranian woman, it involved calling her sister every day because their mother couldn’t get a visa out of Turkey. Several nationalities mentioned prayer as a household task.
It’s not easy to tally up emotional support, in all its forms. But none of these methodological difficulties should let men off the hook. According to calculations from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, even the domestic tasks that can be replaced directly through hired labor amount to 25.7 percent of America’s gross domestic product, and the bulk of that inordinately falls on women. If anything, a more expansive idea of housework shows how much more women are doing and how much of it is simply not registered in the accounts of what goes into the day. But the “moral dimension” to housework, as some scholars have called it, complicates all merely economic readings of the situation.
Housework is intimate drudgery. Understanding its intimacy is at least as important as understanding its drudgery. In an essay in New York magazine on the subject of housework in his own marriage, Jonathan Chait defended male indifference to housework as a question of having different standards than women. The truth of the matter is that it’s far more complex and darker and more intimate than “standards.” Even the most basic housework proves ethereal on inspection. The mechanism of emptying the dishwasher in my house is typically elaborate. When I cook, my wife tends to be responsible for the dishes. But she hates removing the cutlery from the dishwasher. (To figure out why she hates removing the cutlery would require decades of deep analysis. I do not know.) Therefore emptying the cutlery is my responsibility. So if I unload all the dishes, it’s a gift to my wife, but the cutlery is not. It is my marital duty. Every well-managed household is full of such minor insanities.
These minor insanities can be general as well as particular. Here’s one: In some countries, women who make more money than their husbands tend to do more housework. An Australian study described a U-shaped curve: As women approach income equality in their relationships they do a smaller share of the housework, but past equality they do a larger share. It’s not just income that matters, either. A 2012 study published in the American Journal of Sociology showed that housework can be a reaction to “gender deviance” in the type of the work involved as well: “Men and women perform gender through the routine activities of male- and female-typed housework and this performance appears to be undertaken in part to neutralize the gender deviance created when men and women are employed in gender-atypical occupations.”
The natural question is how long this situation can last. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was a gender-bending phenomenon. Now not so much. Nonetheless compensatory performances, intimate, tucked away, continue to affect daily domestic life. Like everything in marriage, the division of domestic duties ultimately boils down to sex, the fundamental struggle to achieve regulated passion. In what seems like one of the most widely reported sociological studies in history, a team of researchers in 2012 discovered that men who do more housework have less sex than men who don’t — but that men who do more traditional male housework, like yard work, have more sex. That old chestnut of sex advice columns, that tidying up the kitchen will get your wife in the mood, is sadly inaccurate.
Despite its apparent banality, housework has always been an intellectually confounding problem. The idea that the chores are a series of repetitive tasks undertaken to preserve the health and hygiene of the living space is an easy assumption to make. Nothing could be further from the truth; housework is as complex as the connection between our emotional life and our material life, as subtle as all intimacy. (...)
You may have had this argument yourself: Should housework be measured by the time spent on the task, or by effectiveness? What is necessary work and what is puttering? Should work that is physically taxing, like yard work, count more than work that isn’t, like the dishes? Questionnaires and housework diaries generally deal only in repetitive tasks like sweeping, doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. What about planning summer vacations? What about figuring out which washer to buy? And what about that far more important but far vaguer business of caring? We all know families that are held together because a woman knows who likes what in their sandwiches, who can or cannot read on a road trip, who needs cuddles after a hard day at school.The million tendernesses of “emotional work” all require effort, often thankless effort. In one Canadian study, “What Is Household Work? A Critique of Assumptions Underlying Empirical Studies of Housework and an Alternative Approach,” the researchers had the intriguing idea of asking women what they considered their chores to be. A surprising array of answers emerged. For one Iranian woman, it involved calling her sister every day because their mother couldn’t get a visa out of Turkey. Several nationalities mentioned prayer as a household task.
It’s not easy to tally up emotional support, in all its forms. But none of these methodological difficulties should let men off the hook. According to calculations from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, even the domestic tasks that can be replaced directly through hired labor amount to 25.7 percent of America’s gross domestic product, and the bulk of that inordinately falls on women. If anything, a more expansive idea of housework shows how much more women are doing and how much of it is simply not registered in the accounts of what goes into the day. But the “moral dimension” to housework, as some scholars have called it, complicates all merely economic readings of the situation.
Housework is intimate drudgery. Understanding its intimacy is at least as important as understanding its drudgery. In an essay in New York magazine on the subject of housework in his own marriage, Jonathan Chait defended male indifference to housework as a question of having different standards than women. The truth of the matter is that it’s far more complex and darker and more intimate than “standards.” Even the most basic housework proves ethereal on inspection. The mechanism of emptying the dishwasher in my house is typically elaborate. When I cook, my wife tends to be responsible for the dishes. But she hates removing the cutlery from the dishwasher. (To figure out why she hates removing the cutlery would require decades of deep analysis. I do not know.) Therefore emptying the cutlery is my responsibility. So if I unload all the dishes, it’s a gift to my wife, but the cutlery is not. It is my marital duty. Every well-managed household is full of such minor insanities.
These minor insanities can be general as well as particular. Here’s one: In some countries, women who make more money than their husbands tend to do more housework. An Australian study described a U-shaped curve: As women approach income equality in their relationships they do a smaller share of the housework, but past equality they do a larger share. It’s not just income that matters, either. A 2012 study published in the American Journal of Sociology showed that housework can be a reaction to “gender deviance” in the type of the work involved as well: “Men and women perform gender through the routine activities of male- and female-typed housework and this performance appears to be undertaken in part to neutralize the gender deviance created when men and women are employed in gender-atypical occupations.”
The natural question is how long this situation can last. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was a gender-bending phenomenon. Now not so much. Nonetheless compensatory performances, intimate, tucked away, continue to affect daily domestic life. Like everything in marriage, the division of domestic duties ultimately boils down to sex, the fundamental struggle to achieve regulated passion. In what seems like one of the most widely reported sociological studies in history, a team of researchers in 2012 discovered that men who do more housework have less sex than men who don’t — but that men who do more traditional male housework, like yard work, have more sex. That old chestnut of sex advice columns, that tidying up the kitchen will get your wife in the mood, is sadly inaccurate.
by Stephen Marche, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Golden Cosmos
