Strollerderby : housework

Post-Election, Women Hate Sexism Almost as Much as Feminism

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:34:00 GMT

A recent survey on post-election attitudes to sexism reveals that a majority of Americans live in La La Land. For starters: While most men don’t believe there is gender bias in the media or at home, almost half (4 in 10) “freely admit to having sexist attitudes towards a female president.”

Espousing similarly mind-boggling contradictions, the vast majority of women believe that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were treated unfairly by the media—but would be mortified to call themselves “feminists.” Only 20 percent of women identify as feminist, and even fewer (17 percent) would be supportive of their daughters’ using the label.

Merriam Webster defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” In other words, most women are embarrassed to label themselves as people who believe in gender equality, but are outraged over the media’s coverage of Palin’s hair. Only 48 percent of women believe that the media treated Clinton fairly, and far fewer female respondents (29 percent) believe that Palin got fair treatment. (Perhaps Palin seemed to get harsher gender-based media coverage because Clinton wasn’t, say, buying $150,000 worth of clothes on the GOP’s dime?)

Sure, some high-profile activists may have given the term “feminist” a more extremist connotation than many women would like it to have, but that doesn’t necessitate rejecting the whole theory. I don’t agree with many of PETA’s over-the-top tactics, but that doesn’t mean I stop calling myself a vegetarian.

Ready for more oblivious sexism? 39 percent of men feel that the role of president is more “naturally suited” to a man than to a woman. I guess that explains why so many more men than women (two-thirds to less than half) believe there is gender equality in the home—the wife just does all the housework because she is more “naturally suited” to it.

On the upside, the poll was relatively small, with 1,000 respondents.

Photo: Jezebel

Dudes for Palin: Vote for the Hot Chick!

Greenhouse: Mean, Green, and Clean

Amy Kuras — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:03:00 GMT

For the first time since our little guy was born 11 weeks ago, we're havin' ourselves a party this weekend. A not-so-big one, and mostly family, but involving people who are Not Us coming over to our house.
And that means cleaning. Real cleaning, beyond the daily food gunk removal and periodic slapdash vacuuming of pet hair off floors and bathroom scrubbing we've been doing just to keep the place from being condemned. I hate cleaning, I mean like really loathe it with every fiber of my being to the point just about the only thing I can think of when I am cleaning is how much I hate cleaning.
So I am a sucker for tips to make it easier, which is at odds with my desire to be more environmentally responsible. Seems like the more toxic something is, the better it works.
Here are a couple of things that have come into the Strollerderby Command Center lately that I thought were interesting:

How to make your own laundry soap. Mod Cottage, which I've never seen before and is so ultra cool, has a whole category on "green-ish" living. Cheap – less than half the cost per load of commercially available stuff – and earth-friendly. The same post has a recipe for laundry rinse. None of the people in my house can use any commercially scented products because our skin will go insane, and I miss nice-smelling clothes, so I may give this a shot. And laundry is the only houseworky task I kind of enjoy, so hurray.

Howotodothings.com's Green Living Guide. This site needs some major copy editing, but some of the tips are cool (use lemons for cleaning!) or just plain intriguing (use urine as fertilizer! — and no, I could not bring myself to click the link. GAH.)

Wish me luck, peeps, and any advice on getting it done fast and greenly are appreciated.

5 Reasons Wives Do More Housework

Cole Gamble — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:00:00 GMT

A recent study found wives do seven times more housework than their husbands. As I write this post my wife is folding laundry, and I wonder, can this be true? Do wives really do more housework? Nah, crazy talk. Oh honey, while you are tackling that mound of freshly laundered clothes, could you grab my coffee mug? It’s sooooo far away.

Okay, okay who thinks this comes as a big surprise? It's a stereotype, a running joke, a real screw job for women, but I think I have some legitimate reasons why women do more around the house.

First, let me give you a little background. I am actually quite domesticated. I grew up in a house where the father cooked more than half the meals and definitely did his share of chores. It's funny, because I thought this was normal. I think many guys of my generation grew up under similar circumstances; homes where both parents work and so the men were needed to pitch in to a greater degree. So in an age of more enlightened men, why do women do more? Here are my theories:

Old Fashioned Sexism. Not until I met my in-laws did I discover some people really see a difference in “women's work” and “men's work.” Dishes, vacuuming, windows—my father-in-law won't touch them. The only kind of chores he'll consider are those masculine enough to present a potential for physical danger (i.e. changing lawn mower blades, knocking down a hornet's nest). I would suggest he wash all the knives in the house after having five or six whiskey sodas if he requires that Fear Factor element, but I don't think he would buy it.

Men simply have a different tolerance for disarray than women. I see it whenever my wife goes out of town. Am I disgusting when I am left to my own resources? Do I allow plant and animal life to flourish in pools of spilled orange juice on our counters? No, but I certainly don't do much in the way of housework but every other day (a thought that cause's my wife's throat to close up and sends her into coronary palpitations). Where am I saving time? Oh, I suppose one could start by not making the bed in the morning (I'm going to mess it up in fourteen hours anyway). Simple corner cutting practices like this streamline my life when I am on my own so I can literally drive to work still half asleep. When it comes to finer cleaning like water spots on the mirror or dust on the bookshelf, women might think men just don't give a damn. Not necessarily true, we are just unaware of it. When my wife says, “This place is a dump” I look around and see a perfectly ordered house with everything in its place. I literally can not see the squalor she sees. For a man to see the dust, it has to be within six inches of his nose, so unless he finds himself trapped under a collapsed bookcase, said bookcase will not see Mr. Pledge until the dust is as thick as a dictionary.

Women don't like how men do it. I mentioned my wife is folding laundry. Help was offered by me but Nicole declined it. She usually does, as did my step-mother when I was a kid, because both women can't stand how I fold laundry. I honestly don't know what I am doing wrong; there is some kind of perfect geometry to underwear folding I apparently can't get my head around.

Some chores have higher point values. My wife has zero interest in cleaning the cat box. Who does? So the job falls upon me and because of the sheer grossness factor of the chore we've agreed my turd sifting contribution is worth three of her preferred tasks.

Women just want to take care of us because they love us so much. Do I really mean this, or am I just baiting for comments?

Photo: www.theage.com

Nesting Nutcases or Pregnant Powerhouses?

Amy Kuras — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:03:00 GMT

Oh, those crazy pregnant ladies, with their hormones and their funny little out of control emotions.

That's the tone of this New York Times story about the, shall we say overacheiving nesting taken on by some pregnant women. It profiles several women about the wide-ranging house renovation projects they took on during their pregnancies.

One of those is actress Angela Kinsey of "The Office" who comes across as only slightly less control-freaky (but with a lot more self-deprecating humor) than her character on the show (a severely uptight accountant). She hired someone to enlarge windows in her house, among other things. Windows.

While the attitude of the writer and the contractors interviewed is more than a little infuriatingly patronizing, I have to say I've been through this twice and found myself nodding my head along with some of the women. I so clearly remember bumping my enormous full-term body along my hardwood floors shortly before my daughter was born, cleaning every baseboard in the house to within an inch of its life. My (insanely clean) mother-in-law was coming and I was sure she was going to judge me (some more). My girl is three and I think the baseboards have been cleaned once since. I thought I didn’t nest this time with my son, but then remembered The Kitchen Project of Imminent Divorce and accompanying ruthless organizational spree around the beginning of my third trimester (my marriage did survive, barely).

Nesting might be a little crazy –but when else is a busy mother supposed to have time or energy for that stuff?

Dads Aren't Slacking, Are Getting Some

Kelly Mills — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:29:00 GMT

There has been a glut of "guys do housework, get laid" stories out lately, and some of them frankly sound like a bid to get laundry help. You know, men who do housework are hot, if women aren't tired they feel more in the mood, and so on. If it doesn't make you feel like a low-paid call girl, I suppose you could even work out some sort of direct exchange of chores for hummada hummada, but I doubt either party really wants to feel like there's an ulterior motive behind the acts of cleanliness and love.

No matter how you look at it though, a new report says guys are pitching in on housework and childcare more, and possibly getting laid for it. They cite that men's contributions to housework have doubled since the 60's, and pitching in on childcare has tripled since 1965. Great. Maybe now people will stop asking dads with kids in tow, "Oh, are you babysitting?" And if there's a happy ending (in every sense) to this more equitable division of labor, then three cheers for parents today.

Weekly Check-Up: Messy House Making You Fat?

Kelly Mills — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:31:00 GMT

Hmmm, is it just a coincidence that two of the first things to go when many people have kids are standards of house cleanliness and, well, the ass? Oh please. Apparently one of Oprah's special friends believes an untidy home can keep you fat. "Clutter expert" (do you need a Master's degree for that) Peter Walsh says he was stunned to discover that when people got organized, they also started making healthy food choices. I suppose a skeptical person could point out that our society's current fixation with obesity might make "it helps you lose weight!" a key selling point for all kinds of stuff, like, say, a book on home organization, but we can't find our skeptics under all these piles of papers and empty fast food containers.

So, how exactly does clutter keep you heavy? Well, er, that part isn't real scientifically clear, something about loving yourself and clearing room to do away with emotional eating and having a nice, clean space to cook healthy foods and exercise. Totally. Did anyone mention that housework burns calories? Why, it's all so clear! Feel lighter when you do away with extra junk in your house, and those extra pounds won't be far behind at all. They will just fall away. Now, if only my habit of exercising somehow made my house neater, I'd be stoked. And incidentally, I could go a million years without ever having to hear the phrases "healthy food choices" and "the real you" again.

Even More On Sex and Chores (and Chore Sex)

Kelly Mills — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:26:00 GMT

If there's a theme emerging on the Derby and in the rest of the news, it's that women want guys to do more in the way of housework, and doing the dishes or folding the laundry is essentially foreplay. There's even this article on the hotness of a man who knows how to wield an iron (some ladies made a "porn" book of photos of guys cleaning, hee hee). Now, I'm gonna bet that some guys already pick up the house without being told, maybe even as the neatnik in the family. But the bottom line is this: If you and your partner aren't necessarily compatible in the standard of cleanliness you require for sanity, the messier of the two is probably going to have to pitch in even when they don't want to, because that's part of being in a relationship. One person doing the lion's share is a recipe for trouble unless that's an agreement both are on board with.

That said, of course the same goes for sex. You have the clean(ish) house, it also seems fair to me that if one person has a stronger libido, the other person may need to do it even when they aren't begging for it themselves. After all, why should one person have to constantly tamp down their desire because the other one is rarely in the mood? Obviously there's extenuating circumstances (illness comes to mind) at times and maybe some work has to be done to make the experience more interesting for both parties. But either way, any natural incompatibility is probably going to necessitate compromise, and the solution probably can't be living in a pigsty and only having birthday sex, or giving in to the other person's requests for chores or sex with complaining or eye-rolling. Love is lots about giving, and not being an asshole about it.

If the idea of having sex makes one person resentful because they are tired from doing everything, or the notion of chores pisses someone off because they are treated to shabbily and never even get any, maybe it's time for someone to call truce. But if you are the clean one and the libidinous one, well, we'll find you some different porn.

Strollerderby Playdate: Home Ec 101 for Those of Us in the Back of the Class

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:27:00 GMT

I'd love to tell you all with confidence and honesty that I am a good housekeeper, a neatnick, a clutter-clearing wizard. And I'd love to to tell you that the fact I edited and wrote some content for a mom's organizational book last year means I have some kind of (ahem) expertise in the area of putting away all that stuff in piles on the dining room table, dressers, desks, couch and any other reasonably flat surface. Alas, I do not. I try. Lord knows, I try. As I move away from my marriage, the refuge of my parents house during my separation and blaze into life as a single mama, I feel even more committed to trying to be one of those people with clean counter tops and organized closets who is not afraid for visitors to pop by or worried that bills are tucked into the bins of plastic trucks and puzzles. To get there, I will need a lot of patience, a good chore schedule and to send up lots of prayers for mercy and guidance from these domestic demi-goddesses:

Bad Bad Ivy and Heather at Home Ec 101, I bow down to you. You cook, you clean, you sew, you save money. And the best part of all? Your advice on reigning over the household is all realistic and wise-ass and wonderful and devoid of pretentiousness, primping or judgment.

You do not make me feel inadequate for (heretofor) having a minefield of a home with only a path through the toys and laundry and notes from interviews I did three years ago. You just offer up a handy chore chart with no-nonsense tasks (like using the broom to pull down the cobwebs from the ceiling corners on Tuesdays) to take or leave as I please.

Then come the Ms. Fix It tips and sink-shining goodness that I love putting to work (and that allow me to unabashedly wear a cape and deflector bracelets while I wield power tools and make my own repairs). You follow that up with an easy peasy stew to frugally fill the whole family's bellies and simple strategies for keeping tidy, cleaning up, saving up, planning menus, saving water and time -- you know, all that stuff you should have learned from a high school class or your dad or some afterschool special but didn't because, well...you were busy cutting school or watching Tron on a beta tape or not listening to your father.

Home Ec 101 does a sparkling job of keeping the tasks simple and accessible and the talk straight, sassy and smart. Reading it actually (gulp) makes me want to be (look away, mom) more domestic. Or at least, ask Bad Bad Ivy and Heather if they know of any great housekeepers I can call. Just for a jump-start, I swear.

Earn More, Buy Your Way Out of Housekeeping

Amy Kuras — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:04:00 GMT

I hate housework. At the risk of sounding like some stereotypical female "humorist" I seriously hate every minute of cleaning, dusting, ridding surfaces of pet hair, etc. My husband does his share, after I explained to him when we were getting married that my possession of a matched set of X chromosomes does not automatically translate to being fulfilled by household drudgery, but we'll both take just about any excuse to not do it. I have family members and friends who happily anticipate an uncommitted Saturday as one they can spend cleaning, but I think that's just weird.

So perhaps I need to rethink my career choice and go be a soulless corporate lawyer or something – according to a study done at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the more a married woman earns, the less housework she does.

Previous studies showed that the more a woman earned in relation to her husband, the less housework she did, but this study shows that the connection holds regardless of the husband's earnings. Women who earned $40,000 per year or more did one hour of housework per week less than those who earned less than $10,000.

The study's author surmised that women are buying their own earnings to buy their way out of less-pleasant tasks such as cooking or housecleaning, instead of having their spouses pitch in more.

"The negative side of it is that it shows just how divided households remain by gender. It emphasized how much housework is the woman's responsibility," said study author Sanjiv Gupta.

Secret to Happy Marriage? Shockingly NOT Children

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:16:00 GMT

With all the fuss made about kids completing a couple's relationship or bringing a sense of purpose and focus to marriage, it should probably come as no surprise that it is in fact shared housework that makes the difference between "peh" marriages and those filled with joy (or at least minimal resentment).

Of course, once you have kids the amount of cooking, cleaning, and toilet cleaning goes up dramatically. Cutesy little jokes about socks on the floor aren't delivered with the same deadly angry seriousness that stepping on a small sharp Lego at 2am evokes.

Also important? A good sex life, shared interests, and a nice house. In other news, women don't like being told they have a fat ass.

[photo credit: Daily Mail]