J is a slob. Don't know if I've mentioned that before, but he is. Some of his more "attractive" traits:
- He does the guy sniff test. At the end of each day, his clothes go on the floor in a pile by his bed. When he runs out of clothes, or can't find something he likes to wear, he "sniffs" his clothes to decide if any are still wearable (eewww...) And he hasn't done a load of laundry by himself since 2000, when we started living together.
- He collects pieces of paper. Literally. He writes his thoughts down on the backs of receipts, paper napkins, on the margins of papers and magazines. Then he leaves those pieces of paper lying all around the house. If I try to clean up and throw away things I think are garbage, he will rummage through and accuse me of various unsavory acts if he finds one of these scraps of paper with his scribbles on it.
- He won't do the dishes. Or he will, but only when they are threatening to declare statehood for the kitchen. And we have a small kitchen. A tiny kitchen. And no dishwasher.
- And forget about mopping/vaccuming/ dusting and that ilk. He still doesn't know what a swiffer is.
I know that he's not the worst slob in the world (his brother is. No seriously. Just disgusting... double ewwww.) For example, despite the clothing example above, he's actually quite neat in the bathroom. He cleans the shower and the sink after he uses them, he hangs up his towel, he puts away his toiletries, there has never been a "out-of-bowl" situation in my bathroom. And he's meticulous about making the bed every morning (which is so weirdly OCD of him).
I also know that there are millions of women around the world in exactly the same predicament as I. Thus, the recent spate of blog-ticles about the sexiness of husbands doing house chores. I don't have the statistics, but it is clear that even as women catch up to their husband in number of hours spent working outside the home, there remains a great disparity in the number of hours women spend doing family/home related chores compared to their husbands.
We encourage the men in our lives to rise to our level. To share in the burden. To participate.
But my neanderthal of a husband insists that it's my choice to be neat. That my proposition of shared duty is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption that cleanliness is next to godliness. (I'm grateful that he does not have the same view of childcare and that he is, in fact, very much a partner when it comes to Loo and Kali.)
In other words, he refuses to share in these chores and insists that I sink to his level.
As a woman, I feel like this is the anthem of our time. That for me to succeed, at home, at work, at anything, I have to sink to the boys' level. At work, we have to sacrifice our family, we have to play dirty, CYA, lie and cheat, we have to be ready to cut people loose, and we have to win at all cost. In relationships, we have to settle, we have to play games, we have to be both sexually inexperienced and sexually adventurous. And at home, we have to be wife, mom, therapist, cook and maid while being grateful for any hand lent to us.
Even as we make strides in the world, we are still playing by their rules.
I know that things are changing. Every day, I meet couples where the man has taken on a disproportionate (i.e. more than 50%) of home/family related work. It is becoming more acceptable to be a stay-at-home dad, to have the man be the cook of the house, for the woman to be the primary earner. Similarly, there are more and more touchy feely companies (though still a minority, but look at Patagonia) that encourage things like paternity leave, volunteerism, have subsidized childcare and afterschool care. But on the whole, we still live in a society where machismo is king (well, duh!).
But the real question is, is one mode better the other? Is the traditionally feminine better than the traditionally masculine?
Comments