Can We Please Stop Writing Articles Speculating if Men are as Good at Housework as Women?

There was a post on Jezebel yesterday deconstructing an article by Ruth Marcus on whether or not men are as effective at housework as women are. Marcus posits that the reason for disparity in the amount of household tasks (including child-rearing) has to do with women’s high standards. “We cling to our multitasking as much as we bemoan it,” she says. She goes on to suggest that maintaining an attachment to domestic chores is comforting, in a way: “there remains an impulse to live up to the standards of our stay-at-home mothers even as we race out the door each morning.” 

Now, Marcus does admit that perhaps younger women do not feel this same tug towards housework. However, I’m still bothered by the assumption that most women of her generation do, and the implication that it’s for the best, since their husbands do a crap job at it anyway (and yes, the heteronormativity is annoying. God forbid a gay or lesbian couple have to figure out their housework dynamics without the helpful guide of their anatomical differences). If she is to leave the household tasks to her husband, Marcus complains, she will also “have to accept that pasta with store-bought pesto equals dinner,” and deal with “creatively-folded shirts.”

This article reminded me of nothing so much as the Dirt section of Laura Kipnis’ book The Female Thing. I read a review of this book recently by a young reader, who cast is aside because of its gendered assumptions, specifically the one that women care more about housework than men. Of course, Kipnis’ style is polemical, suggesting that she doesn’t actually subscribe to those assumptions, but has recognized a pattern wherein women’s liberation hasn’t freed women from doing the brunt of the housework, only allowed them to voice their complaints about it. The amount of articles always forthcoming about these issues seems to corroborate her point. 

Kipnis recommends nothing in particular to solve this problem (the downside of polemical writing is that more often than not you’re left with more questions than answers), but I have a sneaking suspicion that in this case, time will prove the ultimate solution, since, as Marcus points out, many young women do not have the same complicated relationship with housework as perhaps their mothers do.

However, the amount of home and mommy blogs written by young women seems to bemoan this point. So what about all of you? What is your attitude towards housework? If you live alone, how much time do you spend making your home pristine? If you live with a partner, is the share of housework mostly equal, or does it skew in one person’s favour? How did you come to these conclusions? Was it a discussion, or just a natural progression?

For my part, I live with my boyfriend. Before we moved in together, he was certainly not neat, and did almost no cooking. He did do the laundry though, including whatever clothes I left over at his house. In the months since we have moved in together, however, he has taken on the bulk of the cooking duties, still does the laundry on a regular basis (I find our basement is creepy, but that’s really just a guise for how much I hate doing laundry in general), and takes out the trash. I do the dishes on nights when he cooks, pay the household bills, and take care of outside the house duties like going to the bank, taking care of the dry-cleaning, and bringing the dog to the vet. We split the rest of the housework, like cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floors, on biweekly housecleaning days. We came to these conclusions the way I would imagine most people do, through a combination of falling into roles naturally (I can’t fold a shirt to save my life, but I do have the flexible work schedule to accommodate outside-the-house tasks) and talking it out (hence, our agreement that whoever didn’t cook dinner has to do the dishes).

For the most part, this has resulted in an amiable cohabitation. However, I’ve noticed that when the house does get messy, I am the one to get quickly annoyed about it. For instance, when my boyfriend gets home from work at 7 on a day that I didn’t go in to work and finds a sink full of dirty dishes, he doesn’t seem to mind (even though I feel vaguely guilty). However, when I return from class at 9PM to find that my living room has apparently exploded, leaving rubble mostly composed of half-full water glasses, junk mail, and crumpled-up receipts for $4 worth of Arizona Green Tea from the bodega across the street, I feel a self-righteous rage in the vein of a working mother who comes home to find a dirty house, kids that haven’t been fed yet, and a husband on the couch watching football. The reality of our situation is that my boyfriend probably does more housework on a daily basis than I do. However, because I had one of those Martha Stewart mothers who not only made a complex meal every night but also did the dishes afterwards (I never fail to point out this disparity to my father every time I visit), I have a more complicated vision of housework than he does. When I leave it for him, I feel vaguely guilty (what would my mother think?). When I do it, I find myself fuming (of course I have to dust the coffee table, ’cause I’m a girl and apparently men don’t know how to pick up a microfiber cloth and some goddamn all-purpose cleaner). The solution, I’ve found, is to keep doing what we’re doing – we clean the house when it gets dirty, or when people are coming over. He cooks dinner, but if he doesn’t feel like it, I do (or I order takeout, which is pretty much the same thing). He takes out the trash, I pay the bills. And the more we can do this without thinking about what this means for gender roles, the better off we will be. Until we have kids, and then it starts over again. My solution for that? An IUD and a savings account dedicated to the vasectomy we will be purchasing when that expires. Some dilemmas I’d rather just avoid altogether.