Liz.teubner

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait suggested that maybe women could get over their disgruntlement over doing more housework than their male partners by just ... well, by just doing less. Or as he put it:

Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it.

Wrong supposition the first: "Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do."

Tidiness and gender are not linked on the X chromosome. Your attitudes about order and cleanliness are likely shaped during childhood, and a lot of them are situationally based. If men's affinity (or lack thereof) toward housework were genuinely a sex-linked trait, they would not exhibit the kind remarkable adaptive behavior that leads to things like "men's participation in housework in U.S. families has nearly doubled in the past 40 years, and their amount of time spent on childcare has tripled."

Chait goes on to point out that people who clean more do it because neat homes make them happy, then suggests ...

Wrong supposition the second: "The housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it."

So rather than look at the reams of evidence noting that people in marriages with a more equitable division of household labor  are happier and saying, "Hey, I could keep the counter clean and keep my wife happy -- win-win," we have someone saying, "Suck it up, lady who is happy in a neat house. Sink to our standards."

In other words, what's a little lady-specific happiness in the face of not having to wipe down the booster chair after every meal?

This whole "You'll be happier if you just like what the guys like" argument reminds me of my favorite passage in Gone Girl, where one of the novel's central characters -- a Gen Xer like me who hit the dating pool right around the time noted public health researcher Jenny McCarthy burst into pop culture as the girl to date -- delivers a gimlet-eyed appraisal of what it means to adopt the male-approved "cool girl" personal:

 Needless to say, the character concludes, men don't feel the need to reciprocate by spending a weekend binge-reading Bronte.

And I feel like this, "Learn to love a little squalor, lady!" argument is basically the Cool Girl pressure brought to domestic labor. Why should the men bother, amirite? Why can't you be cool about a mountain of dishes in the sink? Or visible crumbs in the carpet?

(I had to take a deep breath to even type those last two sentences.)

The entire "Just do less housework, duh" argument is so dismissive. It devalues the tidier partner's desires for a calm and orderly refuge, and it devalues the actual labor that housework entails.

And while I'm ranting, suggesting that the only reason women care so much about housework is we confuse the contents of a glossy magazine with reality is pretty damned dismissive too, especially when the concluding passage suggests that raising young slobs is an empowering message about achievement.

No, it's a message that you're not responsible for your own space or things, or for respecting the wants and feelings of people who share your home. And if you can't cultivate basic executive-function skills at home, where the stakes are comparatively low, where and how will you develop them?

Housework is not some shelter-based version of dressing up and playing princess, it's not an exclusively female phenomenon and it's not something that just goes away with a little rhetoric about equality.

Housework is, at its heart, about demonstrating a fundamental respect for yourself and your loved ones by valuing your shared stuff, your shared space and your shared time enough to take care of them as precious and limited resources.

If you can't cultivate an ethos of respect in the most intimate environments ... well, then, you've got bigger problems than whose turn it is to rinse the food out of the dish drain.