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I feel like I’ve hurt Jesse Singal’s feelings, which wasn’t my intention, so I wanted to let him know that yes, you can be a man disagreeing with a feminist and not be labeled sexist. Also, I would like it to be known that I didn’t label Jesse “sexist”, and it’s not generally my policy to label well-meaning liberal guys “sexist” even if I do think they’re experience ye ol’ blindness of privilege. On the subject of marriage, which is what my obnoxious post was about, I do think it’s probably ill-advised for a liberal man to simply dismiss a woman’s concerns about whether or not the institution itself has the power to turn perfectly serviceable heterosexual relationships and make them into gender Republican* nightmares. It fails to take into account how much power a man has in a heterosexual relationship simply by virtue of being the man, no matter how feminist his or his partner’s politics are.
I did detect a defensiveness about marriage in Jesse’s retorts both to Courtney and to me, and maybe I’m wrong, but I suspected that he was invested in the idea of getting married himself one day, which brings to the plate a great deal of privilege and power for men in our society. Which probably wouldn’t bother me, except that it often does so at women’s expense. We know that married men have better mental health, physical health, and financial well-being than single men, and we also know that married women have higher rates of depression than single women, and getting married doesn’t do squat for your income level, but it can increase the pressure for you to become financially dependent on a man. You don’t make more money, but if you’re a wife, you do get to work more---7 hours more a week, to be precise.
But I won’t bore you with all that, because it doesn’t matter, since everyone thinks they’re the exception to the rule anyway. Why I’m a frustrating person, I suppose, is I refuse to honor most people’s opinions that they’re something extraordinary. I don’t think I’m extraordinary, so I hold that belief with all fairness. I think, having lots of experience in that department, that it’s very easy for the inequalities of heterosexual relationships to take over even in well-meaning people, and I think it’s hard for liberal men to reconcile the fact that their wives are doing more housework, more childcare, and taking on more of the social pressures with their own views of themselves as good guys. Anyway, a lot of the shit women have to put up with is invisible to men, so really they can’t even be expected to know what it is. Many, many, many liberal men think nothing changed when they got married, and it’s because they’re not the ones who are expected by society to turn into wives now, with all the attendant baggage. They no more see that then they can see how cat callers on the street treat women, because cat callers rarely ply their trade when their victims are accompanied by men. And women play a role in helping men be blind to this stuff, because really who wants to be the bitch who burdens your genuinely kind, loving husband or partner with garbage that will make him feel guilty or defensive, to probably no productive end?
Haley at Pushback articulated it well:
Jesse’s gender is relevant to this discussion not because of his penis, as he suggests, but because of his life experience as a dude.
The heart of Jesse’s criticism of Martin’s argument seems to be that he can’t imagine why the simple legal status of being a man’s wife would threaten a woman’s sense of equal standing in any progressive relationship.
Well, whether he can imagine it or not, there are a lot of entirely rational women who seem to fear whether they are capable of this very resistance to the historical sexism of an institution. The truth is, most men will never experience the same social or even self-inflicted pressures to be a certain person once they have that ring on their finger. It’s incredibly difficult for women to single-handedly redefine what being a wife is or what being married means, even in their own minds, because the traditional, sexist definitions are so deeply ingrained not only in society but in our very psyches.
Read the whole post; it’s so well-written.
Why it’s really hard for men to see, and it’s not their fault is well-established in my canonical example of the proposal. (Which is probably as far as my imagination takes me, since I’ve never been married, but I bet many married women can come up with really good post-wedding examples.) Men don’t deal with the no-win situation that is waiting for a proposal. They can literally ask when they get to the point that they want to get married, and they can often expect to have a luxurious time after deciding to ask to work up the courage to do it. Women are stuck in a double-bind if they decide they’d like to get married but the proposal hasn’t happened yet---ask, and you feel like a loser because he didn’t ask first. Don’t ask, and you have to wait for him to do it, all while anxious about whether or not he’s actually going to do it. Decide to strike the middle ground and set an ultimatum for his proposal, and you’re a bitch. I’m not denying that it’s hard for men to ask, but they do have a ready solution that’s under their control. The only way for it to be easy on a woman is for her to be remarkably free of social pressures and ask without being fearful of what that means about what he thinks of you, or for a man to ask at the exact right moment that it occurs to her that she’d like to get married. Unlikely for most of us.
I like the housework wars, because it’s something I have direct experience with and can speak to. Women are kind of fucked, as we’ve gone over time and time again. We’ve internalized the idea that a) a neat house is necessary for peace of mind and b) that no one else will do that for you. Some men are neat people and feel the same, but it’s clear that in many, probably most houses, men just don’t have these same pressures. Unless a man goes out of his way to do 50% of the work, then, women are going to be stuck with most of the housework. Women get angry, and then men say, well just let it go like I do. Half of those men are full of shit and will start complaining as soon as they see how messy things really can get, and the other half just don’t understand how cruel it is to tell someone that her peace of mind just isn’t that important. Is that their fault? Are they bad people? Are they sexist? Well, only so far as most of us are, but I’d say not really. They just haven’t walked in your shoes and they don’t know what it’s like.
To be fair, I do think feminist-minded men are pretty much stuck on this one. If you protest marriage for feminist reasons, people are going to think you’re a cad who’s hiding behind feminism to excuse your refusal to commit. If you want to get married, you’ve signed up to the various powers and privileges you’ll directly have over a woman and that’s likely part of the appeal for you. Ideally, you luck into a feminist woman for a partner with a well-articulated position on this and you can follow her lead. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for feminist men to cede that authority to women, and I say that having learned from watching men do it and argue articulately for that themselves. Which is why I singled out Jesse for criticism---it’s great to have an opinion, and you can disagree or bring up examples. But the line in the sand that I see---and mind you, it was with the help of feminist men that I’ve seen this---is when you start telling a woman that her own discomfort with institutions and power plays in heterosexual relationships is wrong. There’s a lot of stuff about being a straight woman that has to negotiate romantic partnerships with people that automatically have more power than her that’s not visible to the people with more power.
*Phrase coined by Katha Pollitt.
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Posted by
Amanda Marcotte on 04:35 PM •
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Is that a knitted brain slug?
Yes. Because brain slugs are awesome.
If you protest marriage for feminist reasons, people are going to think you’re a cad who’s hiding behind feminism to excuse your refusal to commit.
Above and beyond the obviously sound feminist reasons not to want marriage that you’re much better able to articulate than I, the fact that some people will think that I’m just hiding behind feminism to excuse my alleged “refusal to commit” is itself another reason I’m not particularly interested in marriage. Consider it my personal little passive-aggressive “fuck you” to the forces of anti-feminism.
I was having just this conversation with a gay male friend the other day. His position was that long-term relationships, in every possible gender configuration, are hard on everyone. My position was, and is, and always has been, that being a straight woman in a long-time relationship with a straight man grinds you down. I don’t know how else to phrase it. It just does. No matter how delightfully enlightened or progressive the man, no matter how communicative and clear the woman, the very fabric of the dynamic of marriage and marriage-ish interactions is that women bear the ultimate weight of all the things that glue two people together.
Men can talk about their own progressiveness, about how many dishes they wash, about how they were stay-at-home-parents for forty years, whatever, but ultimately that talking says the self-same thing to me that the yodeling ("Not ALL men do _________!!!11!") Nice Guys™ and nice guys do when the topic of rape comes up does:
“I am privileged, it makes me uncomfortable, I can only view criticism of our patriarchal society as a direct criticism of my self as a male, and therefore what you feel, believe and say is simply not reality. This is what the reality is..”
and then you get the anecdote about how this one time they gave their partner four Os in a row and then changed baby’s diaper and then put the silverware away.
I don’t understand. What’s wrong with asking a man to marry you?
Don’t you love the complexities of life? And Amanda hasn’t even left the easy world of heterosexual, same race, same religion plane.
As half of an interracial, queer (were both queer identified but of opposite sexes), inter-"faith" relationship (jewish and non-jew agnostic). Sometimes I think we sounds like a bad joke, or the KKK’s worst nightmare, but alas.
As a male I’ve found the whole question so very complex and my fear of my subconscious privilege has driven my rejection of marriage (as well as the lack of equality). However, the more I evolve and hunt down my privilege the better I feel about marriage on a micro level (though my mate wishes I was more comfortable with the idea). However, given the larger implications I have found it hard to move on principal.
I think I may be coming around to the idea and taking her cues is critical (but it also helps that I’m a cleaner and and tireless cook). Yet, issues of power are not so easy, no? Not being a white male I’ve a bit of an understanding of how unknowable the inherent power differentials can be. And so I spiral into the opinion that nothing can be done for marriage, but as a natural scientist I’m not always equipped for the most esoteric musings that come as a result of my thoughts on the issue. Alas, I have no answers but more questions and so marriage remains a social negative for women and my support of it fails to materialize.
Having my GF move in with me really brought home how much more women are expected to do. I figured “great! I’ve been living by myself this whole time, so I’ll just clean up after me and she’ll clean up after her, and I’ll clean up after my cat...”
About a month into it, I realized that she was doing about 2/3 of the work. Having someone else in the house gave me permission to be _lazier_ than I’d been before, and without either of us meaning to, she ended up bearing the brunt of the housework…
BABH - “ask, and you feel like a loser because he didn’t ask first”
And more importantly, everyone else subtly acts like you’re overaggressive and not attractive enough to have gotten a proposal from the man.
Exactly. I accept that it’s easy for some women, but I don’t see how it would work. If you ask, and he didn’t, you live in a world where the stereotype is that women want marriage more than men, and therefore you come across as needy and grabby. Maybe some women don’t care about that, and I think that’s awesome, but I do. I’ve been told I was “needy” before, and my reaction was basically, “Never again.”
We’ve internalized the idea that a) a neat house is necessary for peace of mind and b) that no one else will do that for you.
I get hung up on why some of these things get so viciously internalized, and others don’t. Yes, women definitely get subjected to a barrage about keeping a clean house, and men really, REALLY don’t. But women also get subjected to a barrage about having babies, getting married, dressing femme, and any number of other societal messages, just as heavy-handedly if not more so. And lots of women reject those outright, turning them aside with a big saucy smile. They feel these patriarchal pressures and bravely do what _they_ see fit. Why is the neatness/housework imperative that much harder to reject? This particular internalization has puzzled me in every episode of Pandagon Housework Wars. (It’s probably been answered, too...)
As for the marriage question, sure, it’s a patriarchal construct. Private property is a patriarchal construct too, but we still buy and own things, hopefully as fairly and ethically as possible. Those of us who choose to work within these frameworks need to be vigilant about falling into well-worn patriarchal grooves or ratifying privilege, and face the fact that we’re going to fall short, a lot, and we need to call ourselves out for our own shit rather than waiting to have it called on us by our partners.
You’re right Amanda. A lot of us liberals like to think we’re the exception. I see it in comments of lots of blogs.
I’m married to a wonderful man who is a feminist, and does more than half of the house work (I try, but I truly am just a whole lot messier and it takes me longer to notice messes). But the thing is, it’s never what HE does that makes me feel like an oppressed wife. He’s the only one who hasn’t changed. It’s everyone else we know who changed around us. Like, his parents now wanna talk to me instead of him to make family appointments, even when I HATE THE PHONE, and every aquaintance we see asks me when I’m having the first baby, and nobody EVER talks to me when he’s around, unless it is to tell me how lovely I am (bullshit!) and when people come over they ask ME what’s for dinner, or I get stuck with the other “wives” talking about wifely shit (you know they’re all thinking the same thing I’m thinking, but nobody will be so declassé to stray from the mandated wively convo) or immediately assume I cooked or compliment me on how clean my apartment is… OK, it’s a compliment, but why does it suddenly feel like these people think I cook and clean around here?
And then lots of times people assume that I’ve taken his name. The name thing is what bothers me the most. It’s so scary that people just want to kill me off like that. Even dogs gets to have names. The name thing is sick. Makes me feel like his father wants to marry me or something. This might be my own psychotic paranoia, but I think there’s a lot of that going on too. Like, other males in his family wanting to have some control over me, asking when the baby’s coming (I’m thinking of tieing my tubes out of spite!)(Or maybe getting pregnant with a black friend...), complimenting me on a clean house, ignoring my name.
He knows I hate the name thing, so he goes out of his way to mention my last name when he introduces me and makes reservations in my name, stuff like that, but people will still call me his name. We tal about these things a lot, but again… It’s like instead of marrying a great guy, you’re marrying Marriage.
It’s like instead of marrying a great guy, you’re marrying Marriage.
OK, I know it comes from a painful place, but I LOVE this phrase! 
Yes. Because brain slugs are awesome.
That’s the brainslug talking. Liberate yourself!
I’d like to get married again someday. Unfortunately, my former wife converted to a fundamentalist religion and gave me a choice between divorce and converting to her religion. I had no problem going to her church and being social with her new faith-mates, but there was no way I was going to convert. I gave religion long ago, and I didn’t think I could give up something so central to my personal identity just to preserve a relationship. So the choice she presented me with was no choice at all. We got divorced.
I still like her and respect her and all. She dropped the religious kick, but over is over. I don’t see much of her these days, especially since she spends a good portion of the year at the South Pole (works at McMurdo station).
I think it’s because being clean is objectively better than not being clean, Flip. You can’t say that about babies or marriage. I’m never going to be able to look at filth and think it’s fine. It’s always about whether I’m lazy or not, at the end of the day. The feminine training is not that clean is better than dirty, it’s that if you don’t do it, no one will. Why that’s hard to get around for most women is it’s absolutely true. If they don’t do it, no one will. And it has to be done, because it’s disgusting otherwise.
Your other route, of course, is to nag. Which is about as popular as stubbing your toe.
Sorry about the angry rant. I guess I wanted to get this in before all the other feminists start on how wonderful life is in feminist land, because feminists pick good husbands, and their huband ar not oppressive, and therefore, they’re not oppressed by marriage NOTATALL.
Correction: [I gave religion long ago] should be [ I gave up on religion long ago (athiest, you know)]
What I wouldn’t give for an edit feature.
Well, I could use preview, but I’m lazy.
If you protest marriage for feminist reasons, people are going to think you’re a cad who’s hiding behind feminism to excuse your refusal to commit.
This seems nonsensical to me. In my experience, if a cad is afraid of commitment, the last thing he’ll hide behind is feminism. Nomarriage.com anyone?
DISCLAIMER: DO NOT GO TO THAT WEBSITE. SERIOUSLY.
So yeah, people who assume that, are probably assuming very wrongly.
Heh, having written that I went and cleaned the stove. I could have said, “Fuck it, who cares if it’s got food all over it.” But that would be wrong. And that’s what it comes down to, when men say that women should lower their standards. What should be given up? Is it right to leave food caked on the stove? Of course not; that would bring roaches. It’s got to be done, and women are just socialized more to think that no one else will do it.
Thnks FlipYrWhig, made me smile!
The feminine training is not that clean is better than dirty, it’s that if you don’t do it, no one will.
Yes, I do think that men are trained that if they don’t do something around the house, eventually someone else will. Women are trained that the thankless task is their task.
Is there a difference between household dirt that only those who live there could ever see and household dirt that visitors could see? I’m only hung up on the latter. That’s when I clean.
I think it’s because being clean is objectively better than not being clean, Flip.
Truth. I mean speaking as a pretty bad slob here, you’ll never see me complain if someone else wants to do the cleaning.
Marriage, kids, dressing up are a big pain in the ass to do and then keep on being big pains in the ass once you do them (with benefits which for some people outweigh said ass-pain). But nobody isn’t happy about a clean house.
I think the cleaning thing also stems to the huge fear women are socialized with, of having to work so hard to show yourself as not being crazy, especially since pretty much any kind of mental or emotional behavior pattern or way of relating that is marked ‘female’ is also somewhat pathologized. It’s like the “crazy cat lady” thing; there are male animal hoarders as well, but the idea of becoming one isn’t something that single men taunt themselves with. A bachelor with a filthy apartment is just being a guy, tee-hee (and if he’s really concerned about its state, he’s probably gay), whereas a woman with a filthy apartment probably has deep-seated psychological problems.
I could have said, “Fuck it, who cares if it’s got food all over it.” But that would be wrong.
I’m embarrassed by how long it took me, but eventually I got to the point where I told myself that if I noticed something messy, I might as well be the one who did something about it, rather than waiting to be asked, which in practice would mean, well, not being asked, because of the stigma associated with being The Nagging Wife. Read enough Pandagon and Bitch Ph.D. and eventually even a proud feminist man can become self-aware! Or at least more so.
Link to Hayley’s post please?
I MUST HAVE A KNITTED BRAIN SLUG!!!
Do the black bits tie under the chin????
LOL! tnx 4 teh lulz
Raspberry Jamba,
I am so with you. That is precisely the kind of thing I’ve been encountering since I got married. My husband is not the issue, and strangely, neither is my MIL. It’s my mom, and acquaintances, and random people who happily put me in the “‘50s Wifey” box. I cringe when I’m addressed as Mrs. His Name, cause you know, I apparently no longer exist as an individual.
And now that I decided to take some time off to pursue a different career, I’m suddenly a housewife being supported by my long-suffering hubby. Never mind that I only took this step because I had enough set aside to be able to take a break while still fully contributing to joint expenses.
All that said, I don’t regret getting married. I like being married to my husband.
Though had I never met him, I would still be quite happy, and believe that single women can lead amazing lives without marriage. I did for the first 35 years of my life.
I was reading about married women’s rights in Victorian England recently, and that was a horrifying portrait. Even if you had your own money or property, the minute you married that money was your husband’s to do with as he chose. You had NO SAY in the matter. If you divorced, and that was a big scandal, even if he was beating you or cheating on you, he got the kids and the house. Even if he was beating the kids too.
At least marriage doesn’t have that baggage any more.
A bachelor with a filthy apartment is just being a guy, tee-hee (and if he’s really concerned about its state, he’s probably gay), whereas a woman with a filthy apartment probably has deep-seated psychological problems.
But a super-clean woman risks tipping over into the Ice Queen or “high-maintenance” stereotype, no?
I still rather like raspberryjamba’s idea that the perils of Marriage have a lot to do with how _everyone else_ sees your relationship and how it ought to work and who is supposed to occupy what roles. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. It explains why it’s so annoying to me when my wife’s parents talk to her on the phone in the evening and ask her if she needs to hang up and start working on dinner, when they KNOW that for 15 years we’ve been cooking together, because we enjoy it and it’s much more efficient and I hate feeling like I’m being cared for, and they’ve frikkin’ WATCHED us doing it, and despite all that they still process it as a Wifely Duty.
My father, born in 1922, is amusing if infuriating in his near hysterical insistence that I get remarried. I’ve been divorced since 2000. He started telling me to find a new husband LITERALLY the day I moved out on my then-husband. It makes him utterly froth at the mouth with indignation when I patiently explain for the 10,000th time that I have no desire to get married, can see no useful purpose in it. My children are grown now and I am not having any more, and my credit was so ravaged by my failed marriage and then divorce and then struggling for 8 years to support myself and 2 kids that I honestly cannot fathom wanting to foist that on someone I loved. I would happily co-habitate if the situation was right for me and my man, but marriage is right out. It’s really amazing to hear him talk - I love to push him to distill what he is saying because in essence here are his main points:
-I am a woman, therefore I cannot take care of myself.
-I should withhold sex from my boyfriend until he agrees to marry me. (I need to be careful not to aggravate his heart condition but I have actually informed him several times that I enjoy sex at least as much if not more than my boyfriend, and have no intention of withholding it for any reason, let alone as a tool to bully him into something I don’t even want.)
-I cannot possibly be happy. That I tell him I am completely content with the idea of never again marrying leads him to call me ‘delusional’ ‘out of sync with society’ ‘jaded’. I tell him I AM happy and he says ‘oh no, you’re not. you can’t be’ (because I am unmarried. Unmarried women cannot be happy. end of story)
-The older I get, the harder it’s going to be for me to ‘land’ a man. So I’d better get moving because I’m clearly deep in denial and by the time I come to my senses it will be too late! (cue ominous music) (I’m 42, fwiw)
-A husband will fix all my problems.
Virtually all of my problems are financial. When I ask him why a new husband should pay for MY children’s tuition or MY bills, he says “because that’s how it is.” The fun thing is really pushing him into the corner where he has to admit that in his mind, a man supporting a woman is essentially payment for sex. Which is why he argues that I should withhold sex from my boyfriend. When I ask how it would be any different for me to go sell my services on the street he accuses me of belittling human relationships. teehee. Fun with old white men.
@ JetGirl
Totally. That whole thing about whenever you’re doing something like going to school or buying something like a car, people just assume HE’S paying for it.
so I wanted to let him know that yes, you can be a man disagreeing with a feminist and not be labeled sexist.
Is it possible? Yeah.
But it depends on your feminist.
I totally got torn a new one a dozen or so posts back.
I’m not a misogynist and you guys suck.
Furthermore, the button at the bottom of the page says “Blaspheme”. So don’t go crying to me for taking you up on your offer.
I think some of the most blatant inequalities of monolithic patriarchal culture are slowly (okay, *very* slowly) giving way to a more diverse spectrum of relationships in our society. The result of this is that, on average, women are gaining power in relationships and men are losing many of their former assumed privileges. Obviously individual relationships will differ, and many pernicious habits persist, but at least the trend is in the right direction.
It’s glacially slow, but as long as people make a real effort to define the terms of their own relationships and find partners who share their values, things will improve, especially as equitable relationships become seen as the expected norm.
Call me crazy.
Marriage comes with a huge package of cultural mythologies, exerted from the external and incorporated in the internal, no matter how progressive the partners and the partnership.
Case in point:
I might as well be the one who did something about it, rather than waiting to be asked, which in practice would mean, well, not being asked, because of the stigma associated with being The Nagging Wife.
there are others that make marriage sound like a burden on the male: fictitious tales of women taking everything in a divorce (very rare, unless she came to the marriage with it); men-as-sacrificing-hard-working-breadwinners, men sacrificing their god-granted ability to screw around and needing permission to be with the boys, etc. etc. ad nauseum. These myths are pervasive, and they obscure the real picture of who makes a greater sacrifice on average - and who is really expected to.
I totally got torn a new one a dozen or so posts back.
I’m not a misogynist and you guys suck.
Perhaps you are simply immature.
@Flip: That’s really cool that it annoys you. You’re wife probably appreciates the support.
@Alyssa: Yeah, I participated in a similar argument with an aunt once, and I’ve never gone there again. Once you point out the whole “pensioned live-in maid & prostitute” angle of traditional gender roles, people’s feelings get hurt.
I’m married to a good guy who was raised in a household where his mother did everything for everyone. Even when his stepfather retired his mom continued to bear the burden - and yeah, she saw it as a burden. I never understood when we were dating why his retired dad just let her continue being responsible for all that crap. When does she get to retire? Answer - apparently never.
So it seems like it’s simply engrained in my husbands subconscious that when he does his share its something special even though he regularly does his share (and sometimes more and vice-versa) without comment. This only comes up when we have big fights, about once a year, and he points out in anger all the things he does around the house. In the heat of the argument he doesn’t realize how stupid he sounds...or appreciate the fact that I have to laugh at him. How can I not? We are both adults who work full time outside the home and we have 3 cats - shit has to get done. This subject is part of the reason we don’t have kids yet - maybe we never will. The yearly hey-where’s-my-medal-for-"helping" conversation makes me leary to bring any more living creatures into our house.
@RJ: Oscar Wilde said he wished he could live up to his blue china. I wish that I could live up to my women’s studies credentials.
I’m with raspberry and jet girl in that it is more how the rest of the world puts you into the little ‘wife’ box more so than it is the husband, usually (because every husband, just like every man, has his issues and forgets about the privilege at least some of the time).
The thing that really, really bothers me is the assumption that he’s some kind of clueless child and that I’m not only the mom of our kids, but the mom of him as well, and that I must take care of every little detail of the cooking, cleaning, and secretarial work that goes on in this house because that’s my job. Never mind that during every other part of the year except summer, I work two jobs and roughly twice as many hours as he does (for approximately half as much money--also infuriating, but I do like what I do).
For instance, a couple of years ago my mom came here for Thanksgiving. I cooked the whole big dinner, because I do love to cook, but after dinner I retired to the couch with the infant and my mom. So while I’m sitting on my ass on the couch playing with the baby and talking to my mom, Mr. S clears the table, puts the leftovers away, loads the dishwasher, and sweeps the floor. Without my having to say a word. My mom was completely floored and repeatedly offered to hold the baby while I cleaned up, so that Mr. S could sit down and watch the football game if he wanted. When I said that no, I cooked the food, he ate the food, and the least he could do was clean up (and he chimed in with exactly the same sentiment), she just about lost it. It was like she just couldn’t imagine any domestic arrangement that would work that way.
So while he’s generally pretty great about most things, everyone else sucks. And it gets worse once you reproduce, because then you’re not only the wife, but you’re the mom too. Which is a whole other set of expectations that I really don’t feel like meeting.
Any time I read a post about marriage I am so incredibly thankful about my in-laws. For the most part, they don’t treat me like the stereotypical wife (currently the husband man is working 12 hour days 6 or 7 days a week, so I’m in charge of absolutely everything, including ‘social’ calendar. This will change VERY SOON), are mostly feminist, and all really cool people that I get along great with.
That said, raspberryjamba, some women have a very good reason to take their husband’s name. For instance, my maiden name (I hate that term) was long, impronounceable, and when you googled me you found either me or my uncle the ax-murderer (no joke). I have other family baggage issues, and by taking my husband’s one syllable noun in English name, I was able to distance myself from the negativeness around my name and will never ever again have to worry about random q’s, t’s, or strange vowel combinations in my name.*
My kids are going to have hell of a time when it comes to the “mother’s maiden name” question.
*This is how I learned that even a close approximation of your last name counts for legal purposes. So, if my name was say, Godelowski (it wasn’t), I got checks with things like Gudlawczki, Godalsky, Godauskas, etc. Interestingly, both me and my father (of Eastern European descent) had a few Japanese-like variants. All of those checks cashed.
Coming from a position of privilege...well all I can say is that I am male, I am married. My wife asked me to marry her, I hadn’t really considered it all that important. I try to follow her lead on the issues of who does what and how she feels about the relationship. We don’t share names or bank accounts. She pays a percentage of the expenses based on her income (about half of mine, this is the same it was before we were married) and we try and be fair as much as possible.
We look at our relationship as a partnership and I think that its generally been pretty great so far. Sometimes she calls me out on things I do that are basically taking advantage of my privilege, or making assumptions about it. I’m sure its still somewhat unbalanced, if not by us by the rest of society and how it looks at us. But we make an effort and I think we’ve done ok. I think we have about as equitable a relationship as possible, given our situation. But there is no question its a battle and I’m sure I don’t see half of it. But I would encourage people who live together and don’t get married to do the legwork to make sure you protect yourself legally. Its easier to get married, but you can still get living will, durable power of attorney, contracts around shared property, etc. A lot of companies will also extend benefits if you are registered domestic partners. Anyway, good luck. Being single can be great, but being in an LTR can be pretty rewarding as well.
I continue to be surprised that almost no men have terrible, um, maiden names that they have to get rid of when they marry. Only women. What’s up with that? You’d think that women with horrible birth names have male relatives who share those names and would be equally eager to drop it upon marriage, but that doesn’t seem to happen. Do families give girls bad names and boys good ones, so that only the girls have a reason to lose the bad name? Odd, really.
@Ashley: some people, men and women, might see fit to change their name. That’s OK. However, lots of people assume that you have no name, or no right to a name, if you’re a woman. I’ve done lots of things with my name, including being born, going to the Dr. plenty of times, and garnering a really awful credit history, and I really like my life, and if my name was Whufsdgk-hjkdus I’d still keep it. It’s my identity. It’s the first thing I learned how to write (I think). When people ask what my name is, this is what I’ve always said. I didn’t grow up saying “Sorry, I have no name. No name for me until I’m married.”
Did your brother see his getting married as an opportunity to change his name? No. And I bet his wife might change hers, and say that “oh, my name is so simple, his name is just more exotic, with all those q’s and t’s...”
I mean, if my name was HITLER, then yeah, I’ll change it. But then, why wait to get married to do it?
The most important point I hear everyone making over and over again is that men can exploit and benefit from marriage and that women can be exploited and be taken advantage of within a marriage. Whether you do so or not is just dithering. The point is that women should rightfully fear and avoid marriage as much as possible.
You can be dating and living with the nicest guy in the world, but how do you know that he won’t revert - to some extent - to the stereotype after he’s got you trapped in a marriage, especially one with children?
As for the fruitless debate about asking for marriage - good grief! My wife and I discussed what marriage meant to us, whether we liked the idea, what kind of roles we wanted to avoid and many financial aspects of marriage long before we talked about whether we would get married. I officially asked her with a ring long after we decided that we loved each other and that we could have a great marriage of equal friendship and kinship. If you are uncomfortable exploring the idea of marriage in a theoretical way with your current partner then you shouldn’t even consider marrying them anyway.
I personally think it best to get married in your mid thirties at the earliest, anyway, but that’s another thread.
I dunno Amanda, the idea that clean is better than dirty seems a bit too self-serving. I’m a dude, single, and lived with another dude roommate for the past 5 years, and we were great friends, and he was more of a slob than me. And so, while it bothered me initially, I made a decision that a bit of dirt and mess was fine with me, because I didn’t make myself any happier by doing all the cleaning. The end result, cleanness, was not worth the time and effort. I suppose I “settled,” but the end result was a house that was a bit less tidy, and I just let it go. I really did, a bit more messy, but no resentment on my part, because things were less tidy than ideal, but at the same time, it was what it was.
He is gone now to grad school, and my house is much cleaner, but it is only me who I am cleaning for, so it is self-satisfactory. I think FlipYrWhig’s point is cogent. If marriage, kids, etc. can be rejected (rightfully) as impositions of an order you don’t want to be a part of, so can cleanliness, or expectations thereof by your boyfriend/hubby/sig other. I think that the cleanliness thing comes not so much from your relationship as it does for external and internal wants. Which is fine, do what you want. I just think it is a bit unfair to cling to cleanliness as an expectation that can’t be resisted while you do such a good job of rejecting other expectations (again, whether they come from your sig other or the world at large). If you are a neat-o, good for you, but that is you, not someone else. If you can’t relax your standards, I think you should take responsibility for that. It’s important to you (cleanliness), that’s cool. But that is your deal, not someone else’s.
Just sayin’. Of course, I don’t have roaches in my part of the woods, so the ramifications of being slobby might not be as extreme. But I am serious. Being clean as opposed to less clean is no more objectively good than any of the other myths you destroy on a daily basis with wit and reason. We play the game if we choose, and choosing to is perfectly fine. But I think it is important to note that we get to choose whether to play or not. We should all identify our particular wants/needs and understand that they exist within us. If you boyfriend bitches about an unclean house while not doing anything about it, that is one thing. But if he doesn’t complain, and you still feel the need to clean, that is totally different.
I hope that makes sense. Relatedly, there are many things I do at home and at work for no other reason than to make things as I think they should be. That said, I realize that I am doing it for me (that is, for whatever reasons that have become a part of my personality, good, bad, or otherwise), and not for the benefit of someone else. I embrace my weird ideas of what is right when I can, and when they become too much of a pain in the ass to accomplish, I change my mind about what is important. Main point being, keeping a sense of personal agency is pretty important, and constantly expanding your set of what is allowed to go by the wayside, such as being clean, is too.
Funk, all that, however, does not address the fact that one party makes a mess that the other then cleans up.
On the subject of names, I knew one guy, married to a friend of mine, who changed his surname to her family name upon marriage and wasn’t planning to change it back when they were contemplating a breakup (before I lost touch with them awhile back.) I knew another guy who changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name upon learning that the name he’d grown up with was not that of his father but of his mother’s second? ex-husband, with whom he had a difficult relationship. Anecdote != singular of data, but I do think it’s a lot more common now than it was a generation ago, and that the trend is not unlikely to continue.
Tidiness: He is worlds more tidy than I am and does about 70% of the housework, mostly because he notices it first and just does it and says it’s not a big deal, whereas I have a blind eye for cruft and clutter and cat hair in quantities insufficient to summon the board of health. I still feel tremendously guilty about not doing my share of the housework, but not enough to actually, you know, go do it. It’s just not that important - I’d say it’s not important at all, but it’s important to HIM, and I want him to be happy, I just balk at the notion that it’s more important for me to clean house (thus making him happy) than do the things that keep ME sane (like surf on the internetz)
I can extrapolate that it’s very possible that many (though not all) guys who neglect housework are a lot like me in this respect: they’d /like/ her to be happy, they’d just rather she relax and be happy with crumbs on the counter and a thin delicate layer of fur all over everything than waste all that time trying to make the house perfect when there are more interesting things to do.
(I admit, he’s relaxed a lot since I moved in with him. And I clean a lot more than I used to. I’m not sure either of us are entirely satisfied with the status quo, but it’s something that we can live with for the most part.)
@abject funk: I am MESSY. Messy, messy messy. And yet, I know that clean is better than dirty. Being dirty gets you diseases. I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but you can get things like athlete’s foot, and colds, and stomach flus and pimples and infections for not scrubbing the bathtub, not doing the laundry, not changing the sheets or leaving food out and then eating it. Having a roomate is not like having a spouse. You don’t do their laundry or sleep in their room.
But that’s not the point of the post. The point is to point out how marriage pushes women and men towards more traditional gender roles, even if they come in with great intentions, and the problem with what you’re saying is that it’s often used to excuse men from doing more housework and call women obsessive nags. Not that you’re doing that.
Amanda, if you shared a name with an ax-murderer, and looked like him, and you were the 2 people of that last name who had the largest internet presence, you might want to change it too.
And I had honestly considered changing my name prior to getting married to ‘Baker’ to go with the occupation/vocation theme. Had I waited longer to get married I probably would have.
I honestly saw changing my name as a form of disowning my incredibly dysfunctional family, and bonus points getting one that’s easier and more anonymous. Doing it when married was a far easier and cheaper way to do it than going through the court system, and it was still a pain in the ass.
Ok, let me actual present a real life problem to go with that statement.
I am neat. Not so much in that I clean everything all the time, I just don’t make messes in the first place—I am tidy about cooking, I take me shoes off when coming in the house, I put away clothes soon after washing them, et cetera. So, I don’t actually do to much cleaning (and most of the cleaning is clean-as-I-go), cause I don’t create so much mess. And I bet I’m not the only tidy person who does that.
My partner (we do not yet live together) is not so neat. He is very messy when he cooks and eats, so that after he’s been over, there are crumbs all over my table cloth and sauce drips all over my stove. His laundry doesn’t reach the put-away stage very quickly. And so on. Nut, all told, he and I probably spend nearly equal amounts of time cleaning. My living space is cleaner in the end because I make very little mess, whereas he makes a bigger mess, so the equal cleaning time applied to our respective messes produces different results.
Were we to live together, which is a possibility in a year or so, we’d really have to work this out. I neither want to live in a messy space nor spend more time cleaning. He finds it hard to stay organized, and doesn’t need to have things as neat as I do. But he’s making more mess—why should I have to pick up after him, when I know that a lesser effort (such as I currently make) can keep a place tidy?
because I didn’t make myself any happier by doing all the cleaning.
Again, saying that doing the work of cleaning is not preferable, is not the same as saying that having things be clean is preferable.
Raspberryjamba, I think we agree here. My main point is that if you are going to push back against social (patriarchal) norms, cleanliness deserves to be included. Your disease/infection/nastiness points are well taken. My only concern is that we don’t allow certain norms, such as cleanliness, and by cleanliness I mean somewhat enhanced ideas of what is acceptable in terms of lack of dust, dirt, things out of place, etc., to be objectively “better” without recognizing that these judgments are also tainted by gender dynamics. I think we agree on this.
The same impulse to cleanness leads to other things, in my experience. Such as requiring everything matches (clothes, furniture, dishware, etc.), never wearing something twice without washing it, obsessing about any ding or scratch in your car, you get the idea. If such things genuinely bother you, that is fine with me. But being neat or fastidious is not its own good, it’s just a behavior, and one that is, I think, connected to patriarchy in the same ways ideas of marriage, relationships, responsibilities, etc. are. Again, I think we agree on this point. Men want other people (women) to make their stuff look good, stay neat, and be shiny. It’s good not to internalize this desire for neatness as somehow an objective good.
Shorter version of my post is, let’s beware of any idea that is defended as objectively “better” in these types of discussions. Athlete’s foot and disease are obviously bad outcomes. But my level of cleanliness with my roommate didn’t result in such things, instead, the level of clean was just less than I would usually personally prefer. Rowmyboat’s example is also right on. Some people do things as they arise, others let things get to a “dirty’ state and then do a more massive cleaning. Mild energy over time and a generally clean household vs. more infrequent episodes of determined labor to clean up messes. In any event, I’m just advocating the point that neatness is not an objective goodness, provided one doesn’t fall into a genuinely unhealthy state of affairs. Also, it helps to hang out with people who either don’t care what your house looks like, or, in the alternative, you don’t care what they think about your house. Having such friends and family who are either not judgmental, or if they are, accept the fact that you could give a rat’s ass what they think about it, is a rather unique and wonderful thing.
I continue to be surprised that almost no men have terrible, um, maiden names that they have to get rid of when they marry. Only women. What’s up with that?
I’ve seen it done once. In a comic strip. (Something*Positive)
When I was little, we had a maid six days a week. She was out starting Saturday at 4pm until Monday morning. That meant that all of us spoiled brats would eat dinner use the kitchen to eat the late take out take out snacks, plates, fruit, beverages, sometimes we would even bake. It was a mess. At some point on Sundays my mom would get really angry about having to clean the mess, and she would force us all to help clean the house. This was always a misery-fest, and I hated to see my mom angry and my siblings miserable.
So I decided to start cleaning everything on my own before my mom got up. We would get up and watch cartoons like at 6am, and then when we were all up (I have four siblings and there were always kids sleeping over too), like at 8am, I would go downstairs and clean. It took like 2 hours, but I enjoyed that sort of systematic work, and the fact that I could see my progress. For like a month NOBODY NOTICED. But my mom didn’t get angry on Sundays.
Then one day, my mom got up early and came down to the kitchen and caught me washing dishes. First she smiled and said: “So you’re the one who’s been cleaning the kitchen!” Then she started crying and hugged me. I cried too, I’m crying right now. It was not a happy cry, either. We’ve never talked about it. I was like, 10 years old.
Rowmyboat, the idea that one person makes a mess that the other than cleans up is not what I was addressing. That is clearly a problem, and I don’t advocate anyone cleaning up other people’s messes. My post was more along the lines of what is baseline “neat.” You partner makes a mess, you should be able to say “clean it up, it’s yours.” My post was focused more on when people have different ideas about what a tolerable level of clean is. Sink full of dishes, old food, etc. is a mess that the person who made it needs to clean up. Vacuuming, dusting, putting magazines away, arranging cushions, pushing in chairs, and other mundane things was more what I was going after. I certainly didn’t put up with mounds of laundry, dirty dishes, fungus, or other nasty stuff with my roommate. Instead, I decided to put my ideas of what I would prefer (a rather sterile and orderly state of affairs) aside and live with a bit more dirt, grit, dust, and things not where I would otherwise want them.
I guess we are discussing different degrees of a common disconnect about what tips the scales from tolerable to intolerable. If one person is always doing the cleaning, that is bad. But if it is due to an unhealthy idea about how things need to be in order to be tolerable, well, that is what I was trying to get at.
That’s a pretty powerful story, raspberryjamba. Kind of makes me re-think the importance of being clean. It was obviously a big deal for your mom. I can see why. She must have felt like her universe had been completely destroyed every Sunday morning. You can see how this cuts both ways, that is, feeling loss of control vs. just letting it go. Sorry to be so pedantic, but seriously, that is a pretty amazing story.
abject funk:
I guess we are discussing different degrees of a common disconnect about what tips the scales from tolerable to intolerable. If one person is always doing the cleaning, that is bad. But if it is due to an unhealthy idea about how things need to be in order to be tolerable, well, that is what I was trying to get at.
This is a tangent that happens so often when it comes to discussions like this. The issue isn’t tidy vs. untidy, or “one person” feeling a compulsion to clean while another doesn’t. In my mind the issue is: women, whether they’re neurotically tidy, terrible slobs or somewhere in between, take on and are handed the bulk of the housecleaning, child-rearing, phone-calling, appointment-making, appointment-keeping, chores, tasks, errands, and emotional, spiritual and physical responsibility for maintaining a heterosexual relationship.
Hey abjectfunk, I think I agree with you too. In fact, I was just now cleaning up because some friends are coming over, and then my husband came out and did like 15 minutes of cleaning things that I didn’t even notice. You know, vacuum, cushions, putting all the newspapers in one place, all that.
It’s like those people who can’t sleep with noise on.
Well, personally, I like not living in filth and chaos. A relatively organized house is a more peaceful place and increases my productivity; it also means less opportunity for cats to vomit somewhere and it to rot into the carpet, etc. So that’s not a bit of societal conditioning I entirely WANT to reject, unlike things like bullshit about marriage or working outside the home.
However, it bugs me that while my boyfriend is more of a neat freak than I am, he’s also less willing to do things like actually CLEAN. He picks up after himself (mostly), which I’m not so good at, but he doesn’t scrub down the kitchen counters or the stove, or mop, or clean the bathroom without a great deal of whining. I mean, sure, it’s not fun, but it actually doesn’t take that long, and caked-on gunk is kind of gross and bad for our cleaning deposit. Cooking in a clean kitchen is much easier; if we don’t clean the kitchen, we don’t cook and end up eating out too much.
But overall, I think we’re working on it--I’d like us both to be more egalitarian about chores, and I’d like us to live in a tidier, cleaner apartment. I don’t think I need to accept filth and chaos to be feminist. I like being able to find things; I like all my books fitting on the shelves (an unending requirement for more shelves); I like being able to walk through my room without tripping on things (an unfortunately infrequent state of affairs). I fail to see how this is accepting patriarchy. However, my boyfriend and I have separate rooms; he doesn’t clean mine, I don’t clean his, he periodically tells me to remove my crap from his room and I do. His room is about a zillion times tidier than mine. I don’t have a desire for Martha Stewart-level interior decor, but visible floors and things on shelves instead of in piles and boxes? Not unreasonable.
I’d probably be totally neurotic about cleaning if we had cockroaches around here, though.
I don’t know quite how to put this intellectually, but the cleanliness imperative is structured in such a way that saying “fuck off” to cleanliness doesn’t give the same satisfaction as saying “fuck off” to marriage, or to the idea of having a kid, or (probably even) the idea of shaving your pits.
That’s why I think cleanliness is more in the category of politeness: you can say “fuck off” to the idea of writing thank-you notes or bringing a bottle of wine to the party and you’re not really being political, you’re just being an ass. In both cases, cleaning and politeness, all the behaviors are most definitely still gendered, and women are expected to bear the burden even when their male partners stop caring. Polite is better than rude, clean is better than dirty, but there’s of course a continuum from the one to the other, rather than a binary function, and disputes will arise over where to set the standard.
my maiden name (I hate that term) was long, impronounceable, and when you googled me you found either me or my uncle the ax-murderer (no joke). I have other family baggage issues, and by taking my husband’s one syllable noun in English name, I was able to distance myself from the negativeness around my name and will never ever again have to worry about random q’s, t’s, or strange vowel combinations in my name.*
I have to say I’ve never really understood this rationale for Why I Took His Name. I mean, if you really hated your last name, it caused you all kinds of very real grief, and you wanted to distance yourself from your family anyway, couldn’t you have changed it to something short and sweet on your 18th birthday? People change their surnames all the time, and they don’t have to get married to do it.
Not to mention, you know, a lot of people have non-Anglo names and don’t die from that, and even some people with common last names deal with misspellings a lot.
I don’t think I need to accept filth and chaos to be feminist.
Maybe there’s _critical_ filth and chaos, which calls into question the existence of bourgeois patriarchal norms in order to challenge them, and then there’s _orthodox_ filth and chaos, which are just filthy and chaotic. And you can never be sure when you’re dealing with each type. It’s all very postmodern, at least until someone has to clean it up. 
Hey Mir, I get your point, and I think that is my point as well. Being handed the work is bad. Taking it on is the issue. If its because of something you want to do, then do it. If it isn’t, don’t do it. I am not doing this very well, but I’m trying to point out that elevating being clean to a higher level of necessity than other things women are generally expected to do for no apparent reason other than “this is the way things are” is allowing the idea of “clean” to exist in some sort of objective realm when it is not, really, the case.
I don’t live in filth and chaos, but I also don’t strive to have my place be available for a Pottery Barn or IKEA ad at any moment. I assume the same is true for most of us. I’m just saying that baselines for cleanness differ, and I’m trying to divorce personal preferences from outside pressures. If you personally like things very tidy...good! But if you run across someone who you care about who doesn’t feel the same way, it may just be the case that the person doesn’t feel the same way. Again, I’m not talking piles of garbage, weeks of dirty dishes, etc., I’m just talking about people who have the ability (or affliction) of letting things be a little less clean than someone else.
Mel, I completely understand where you are coming from. Some kinds of cleaning (tidying up) are easy and rewarding (mess becomes order). Others, like scrubbing and getting down into the nitty gritty are time consuming, gross, and annoying. If left to linger, such tasks become depressing (I’m not joking, as anyone who has actually tried to really clean a neglected bathroom understands).
In any event, I’m not advocating being a slob and taking that as the lowest common denominator. Instead, I’m just suggesting that the desire to have things super sanitized and in order has a lot to do with perceived societal expectations, not necessarily individual preferences. As such, I question why having a clean and orderly house remains an objective good, while other paternalistic ideas such as virginity, marriage, job status, kids, etc. are rightly dismissed as expectations that are damaging to women. I am not advocating messiness, I’m just wondering why cleanliness is still treated as an untouchable indication of goodness. Absent abject squalor and disease-creating conditions, what is wrong with a household that is a bit untidy, out of sorts, and just generally “being lived in” as opposed to being constantly maintained for no apparent reason to appease some grand crowd in the sky who tell you what it means to have a clean house? I mean really. Doing some cleaning up for guests is one thing. Cleaning up for some nebulous idea of what it means to be a good person is quite another.
I will reiterate that I don’t think that I disagree with anyone here. I’m just saying that ideas of what is clean is directly tied to who is required to do the work to make sure the household is “clean.” I am with Mir, the pressure is on the women, and my point is, focus on who does the work, AND, focus on why the work is demanded. I’m not disputing that women do most of the cleaning and other household tasks, I’m just trying to point out that the tasks themselves, that seem so necessary, should be questioned. Questioned in exactly the same way that other ingrained customs are subjected to scrutiny (such as marriage, child bearing and child rearing, etc.).
I’m just trying to point out that the tasks themselves, that seem so necessary, should be questioned.
Well what happens when one questions the tasks, and then decides that, yes, they are rather necessary after all? Or at least that you’re not willing to fight that battle and ultimately lose out on all the social privileges that come with a clean house.
The main problem with the “well then why don’t you just lower your standards?” argument is that it seems women are always the ones expected to change their living standards so that the man can be happy. Because if a woman is sloppy she doesn’t get a free pass on cleaning, either. It doesn’t matter what your personal taste is, if you’re a woman—you have to keep house to the man’s standards or you’re the unreasonable one.
Opoponax, I completely agree with you.
Cleanliness is a socially defined good that, in general, puts women in a no-win position.
That’s my point. Cleanliness is a socially defined good. So let’s not pretend otherwise. And this being the case, perhaps it can eventually join the other socially defined goods such as marriage and child-bearing.
Abject Funk: Seriously, it is not just a socially defined good. I think you really do underestimate the health consequences of not dusting or vacuuming regularly-y’know the types of things you are defining as picky personal preference. While houses should not be sterile, children exposed to dust (and dust mites) and other normal household light mess are more likely to develop asthma and allergies. My son has eczema that is triggered by environmental allergens, such as dust, cat hair, etc., which means we have to vacuum at least twice each week (we have four cats and live in a desert, so things build up fast) and have to dust & vacuum the corners once a week and change his sheets weekly or he develops horrible skin rashes. Though my husband now does about 40% of the housework (after almost 13 years of getting there), it still hasn’t occurred to him that it is also his job to help with the vacuuming, dusting, or laundry. Sorry, but letting go is not always an option, particularly when children are involved.
I feel like I’m getting an interesting perspective on this whole issue recently. My mother has been laid up with a broken foot she can’t walk on and so just can’t do a lot of the things she normally does. Things that really do need to be done. Things like laundry. And feeding the cat. (These are both in the basement, so she really CAN’T do them.) Now, I like to think of my dad as being generally more enlightened than a lot of guys. He does dishes and cooking and whatnot. But my mom definitely does more. Always has. And it’s been, for want of a better word, fascinating to watch him suddenly be burdened with all of this stuff he never really thinks about.
He has stepped up, and is currently caught up with the laundry and all, but there was a good week or so there (when my mom was pretty much completely bed-bound) where she would go, “Okay. Here are the things that absolutely must be done today: Eating. Feeding the dog and cat. Bringing in the milk when it is delivered.” and he would go, “Do you think I’m made of time? I have things that I need to do today! Important things! Like work!”. And then, when he’d sit down to read a book and she’d remind him that the animals hadn’t been fed, he’d go, “Geez! I’ll get to it! I’ve been working all day! I just want some time to relax!”.
Anyway, like I said, he’s got the hang of it now, but I think a HUGE part of that bad first week was that he just didn’t see that work as work that needed to be done. At least by him. It’s always just been done around him, and when he suddenly had to take responsibility for these basic things that keep the household running, it was totally overwhelming and he sort of took it as a personal injury. I’ll be interested to see if his awareness of what it takes to run the household manifests itself in his continuing to do this higher level of housework once my mom is better, or if he’ll revert back to thinking it’s all her job.
And I wonder how to talk to him about all this without him blowing me off.
History_Mom, I appreciate your position, and agree with your recommendations. That said, I don’t live in your situation, which, like mine, is unique. Again, I’m not advocating for sloth, I’m just saying that the current cultural ideal of “clean” is a little over the top. Special circumstances require special methods. Normal circumstances do not. Obviously, if I had a child like you with particular needs, I would take care of things so that the environment was not threatening. That said, your situation is different from mine, and I applaud your efforts to make your home as safe as possible.
Again, this isn’t about a base level of cleanliness, it’s about who and what dictates how we think about our everyday living spaces. Different needs will lead to different requirements, and that is fine. I stand by my point that cleanliness and neatness is over-valued and treated as an objective goodness far too often. Women are forced to take care of this societal burden. In your case, History_Mom, it isn’t a societal burden, it is a real, family burden. Regardless, the two things are different. My point is, so long as a “clean” living space (and when I say clean, I mean hyper-clean), it is clear who will be doing the work to maintain it...women. My arguement is that we should just re-think the idea of living spaces that are always pristine. In your case, things are different, but the point remains. Let’s just get a grip on what it means to have a clean house (and, of course, if you have people with allergies, you need to do things differently. The point stands.)
Abject Funk: I appreciate your comments, but I still think that you miss my basic point that cleanliness is not just a “socially-defined good” but is objectively necessary. That you see it as simply situational and something for women to get over indicates your privilege. My son’s situation does not require going to extraordinary lengths of cleanliness, but does require a basic level of clean. I am naturally a messy person and my husband is much, much worse. I can tolerate quite a bit of mess and disorganization, but seriously, if you think that the cleaning mentioned is a lot then you are advocating that women should learn to tolerate unhealthful levels of mess in their homes.
Again, the problem is not what level of clean is too much/not enough, it’s WHO is expected to DO the cleaning. Redefining appropriate levels of cleanliness does not address this one whit.
So it seems like it’s simply engrained in my husbands subconscious that when he does his share its something special even though he regularly does his share (and sometimes more and vice-versa) without comment. This only comes up when we have big fights, about once a year, and he points out in anger all the things he does around the house. In the heat of the argument he doesn’t realize how stupid he sounds...or appreciate the fact that I have to laugh at him. How can I not? We are both adults who work full time outside the home and we have 3 cats - shit has to get done.
I’ve had this exact fight. My husband got pissed at me because I was not being appreciative enough of him cleaning (i.e. I wasn’t thanking for every little chore he accomplished) until I asked him when was the last time he thanked me for doing any of the chores. It’s like they expect a damn cookie for acting like adults…
“Again, the problem is not what level of clean is too much/not enough, it’s WHO is expected to DO the cleaning. Redefining appropriate levels of cleanliness does not address this one whit.”
no kidding
(says the slob)
I’m really not getting this whole “but all you have to do is learn to live with the mess!” argument.
It all really goes back to what Amanda said in the post “[its cruel] to tell someone that her peace of mind just isn’t that important.” And its hardly 300 level feminism to realize that women tend to have a lot more external pressure to have a higher standard of cleanliness and to take responsibility for making it so.
Yes, part of what needs to change is that external pressure. (Although part of what needs to change is the lack of internal and external pressure on men.) But since that’s hardly something her feminist fairy godmother can change overnight, it’s only fair and nice to help out a bit more in the meantime. Cuz unless you do you are setting her up for less piece of mind no matter what she chooses to do.
I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for feminist men to cede that authority to women, and I say that having learned from watching men do it and argue articulately for that themselves.
Hell yeah.
To take one more step back, if more people of all genders would approach lots of aspects of a long-term relationship with that sort of attitude—“you are my PARTNER, I am concerned that I have blind spots around this, please take the lead and show/tell me what you need here and I will do my best to hear it and work in PARTNERSHIP with you to make it happen”—there’d be lots more healthy long-term relationships out there.
But our culture does not exactly teach people to develop that kind of objective self-awareness, so that’s probably a pipe dream for the time being.
23 years ago a smart, good looking 21 year old woman told me she was never getting married and never having kids. I told her she was full of it.
We’ve been living together, unmarried and childless, for 22 years. When she moved in we decided that all chores would be done by whomever felt the need first - in other words it was fair game to let the dishes pile up but not fair game to complain about it.
Turns out her tolerance for clutter and disarray is much higher than mine so I’ve done most of the housework for two decades. And guess what - no problem! I imagine our relationship isn’t that much different from most, with the large exception that our roles are reversed. I don’t mind in the least - if I don’t want to clean, I don’t. When the mess bothers me I take care of it.
Maybe your husband doesn’t lift a finger - nothing wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned (note - this is about chores, not child-rearing, which is a different story that should begin at conception). The lazy husband is only a problem if he complains about the mess. If he’s complaining then the problem should bother him enough to get him off his ass and do something about it.
I gotta go - time to hang out the wash… really.
Hmm, but before I go… you might think I’m getting a raw deal, but I do whatever I want and nothing I don’t. Sometimes the house is a mess and sometimes it isn’t, but the housework is never a source of conflict in our happy relationship.
Fred, a lot of couples who do the proposal dance, where she’s waiting and he’s exploiting her double bind, have discussed marriage. I think that makes it worse for a lot of women, because they’ve already made their feelings clear to their boyfriends, and so every day he makes them wait for the official ring proposal is a day when you’re wondering, “Why is he dragging his feet?” And he probably isn’t. I think there’s a delicious power to making someone else wait on you.
I dunno Amanda, the idea that clean is better than dirty seems a bit too self-serving.
It’s true that I’d rather not have skidmarks on my underwear for the reasons of my own peace of mind and vaginal health, but to call that “self-serving” seems a bit harsh. That’s like saying, “I don’t know, Amanda. Your desire to eat on a regular basis seems a bit too self-serving.”
We’re not talking about Pottery Barn, here. I bet no one you’re scolding is a neat freak, but just wants a basically liveable house for grown-ups, not people still stuck in the railing against reasonable conventions phase of their lives. Even if your place is slovenly, for basic health reasons and to function, you have to do housework. I don’t care if shit is scattered around my house until it gets to be a real problem, and I totally leave dishes soaking overnight. But cat hair caked into the rugs so you can’t see what color they are? I’m not even allergic to cats and that makes me sneeze.
Even if you have only 3 tasks (laundry, take out the trash, wash the dishes when they are threatening to hit the ceiling), I’ll bet in most partnered homes, the guy gets one and we all know which one it’ll be.
Mickle, I’d love a feminist fairy godmother. Can I borrow that?
Amanda, if you shared a name with an ax-murderer, and looked like him, and you were the 2 people of that last name who had the largest internet presence, you might want to change it too.
Probably not if I was a man. Then no one would expect it, and I wouldn’t have to look for ways to both fit social expectations and tell myself that I’m striking out on my own for my own reasons. I’d probably keep the name, with the full belief that no matter who else holds it, it’s my name and not theirs. And that keeping my name wouldn’t cause anyone to question my love of my spouse. So, perhaps. But I think that the primary and really only reason I’d feel pressure in that hypothetical situation is because you’re assuming that I’m still a woman in your hypothetical.
I mean, don’t sweat it. I often wear skirts in the summer because it’s hot and it’s easier to get around in them. But that doesn’t mean those are my primary reasons for wearing skirts. My primary reason is my gender. If I were a man, all the heat indexes in the world wouldn’t put me in a skirt.
My only concern is that we don’t allow certain norms, such as cleanliness, and by cleanliness I mean somewhat enhanced ideas of what is acceptable in terms of lack of dust, dirt, things out of place, etc., to be objectively “better” without recognizing that these judgments are also tainted by gender dynamics.
Completely irrelevant. Okay, so let’s say you agree on a baseline of cleanliness that’s below the bougie standards you rail against. So what? I bet 95% of the people you’re scolding for caring too much actually have less neat houses than you’re assuming.
Even if your standards drop to the point where dishes don’t get done right away, and disorder reigns, and the main cleaning is to tackle truly vile amounts of dirt, I bet the woman still does 2/3s of the work. Lowering standards means that both people have less work, but the inequities still exist. So the real problem isn’t solved, and now your house is a mess.
I’ve had this exact fight. My husband got pissed at me because I was not being appreciative enough of him cleaning (i.e. I wasn’t thanking for every little chore he accomplished) until I asked him when was the last time he thanked me for doing any of the chores. It’s like they expect a damn cookie for acting like adults…
I think this must be a pretty common fight. Mr. S actually does a fair bit around the house, not as much as me and not nearly as much of the repetitive stuff (dishes, laundry, etc), but still a fair bit, especially compared to other husbands I know. And he seems to think that he expects to be praised and validated for every single thing that he does, while for me it’s just my job and doesn’t deserve any recognition at all. I have to regularly tell him that he lives in the same house as me and, being and adult listed on the mortgage and living here, it’s just as much his responsibility as mine to keep it livable.
I find that the best way to get around the appreciation issue is to thank your partner for everything he/she does. Even if he/she doesn’t deserve a cookie, because they’re just doing their job. My life is a million times easier because if Marc spies me emptying the cat box, he says thank you, even though I do it every day.
I haven’t read all the comments yet, but the “taking his name” thing always bugged the shit out of me. I didn’t do when I was married, much to the consternation of all my family, friends and male co-workers. In fact, I had one co-worker tell me during my divorce that was the reason why I was in this situation, because I didn’t take my husband’s last name. My response was to say outloud and not meaning too, “oh so his affair with a transgendered bisexual while in Atlanta and his desire to be transgender himself and to let me marry him without disclosing that information when he knew before our marriage that is what wanted to do has nothing to do with my divorce? Silly me, let me call him and tell him i will change my last name to his, so we can stop this silliness right now. Which I did right in front of my co-worker* and to my ex’s credit he laughed on the speaker phone for 15 minutes and said, “well, that is easy, why didn’t w do that in the first place and save ourselves the therapy bills?
I like what Terry Pratchet says in his book The Thief of Time-"They(female witches) are materlineal, it’s easier to change men than to change names”
In any case, I have a lot of issues with marriage and I want to thank you Amanda for articulating what I feel, because I can’t be coherent about my ideas why just yet. It has to do with me for 30 years “knowing that sexism existed and knowing it was wrong, but because I didn’t have the resources, women’s studies courses, knowing what books to read, etc, I can’t actually parse my ideas of why I am feminist just yet. I am learning though and quickly.
*What I wrote about me divorcing my husband because of his transgender issues may make it seem like I am bigoted towards transgendered people. I am not, in fact that whole experience made me more compassionate and understanding towards transgendered people and the way they are discriminated against. I would have loved my ex husband if he had told me during our friendship before marriage that he was transgender, and I might have even still married him knowing this and I still get why he would not want to tell me about his transgender status. I might not have married him if I had known about his transgender issue either, and of course money played a big part in our divorce too. I just don’t know if I would have married him if he did have the most difficult conversation of his life with me and I think I deserved to know the truth about someone I am commiting to spending my life with.
So, Funk, uh, why is the cleanliness (female) the patriarchal construct that needs to be vanished, rather than the messiness (male)?
And really, you can’t have one messy, non-cleaning paerrson and one clean, cleaning person living in the same place without the clean person picking up after the messy person. That is simply not possible, so it can’t be overlooked.
I should let the train of thought pull into the station before discharging the passengers.
the post above should read,
..here’s a pattern for my coknitters, and those who don’t knit but know knitters. The offer is if you are desperate for a brain slug(and who isn’t) and don’t know any knitters, leave your contact information and I will knit it for you.
Lowering standards means that both people have less work, but the inequities still exist.
But that inequity can be fixed, or at least it could or should be fixable. (In actuality, it’s probably hard to accomplish equity, but in theory, it can be done.) And I’m not sure why it’s not experienced as a gain, only a loss, for the partner who likes things cleaner to clean less and hence spend less time worrying about that. It’s true that women will be judged for it, but, like I said originally, women get judged for a lot of things, and face the possibility of disapproval with confidence.
So it really does seem like being deemed insufficiently clean is a kind of judgment that hurts more than others—or there are just some people who like to have things clean because they like things to be clean, rather than because they feel a need to live up to a societally-imposed standard. If it’s the latter, that’s not denying that there is a standard—there clearly is, and it’s strongly gendered—but that the bourgeois and patriarchal underpinnings to that standard don’t vitiate the idea that Clean Is Good, which can be an opinion held without feeling like caving to the patriarchy.
The “objectively better” and health-related arguments for keeping things clean are also used as arguments for weight loss. Eventually there did evolve a “fuck off” response to those who would push and judge about weight, rejecting the artificial standards of beauty imposed upon women to say “This is who I am, get used to it.” (It’s certainly not easy to do, but people have been doing it.) Is the non-fuck-off-ability of the _cleanliness_ standard trickier than the fuck-off-ability of the _thinness_ standard because the cleanliness standard is applied to couples rather than to individuals? That is, does the woman in a less-clean house worry that she’ll be judged for doing harm (symbolic or real) to her partner as well as to herself?
rowmyboat: why is the cleanliness (female) the patriarchal construct that needs to be vanished, rather than the messiness (male)?
Touché! Good point. But I think what that also proves is that calling out “patriarchal constructs”—which, alas, countless things are—isn’t necessarily the end of the discussion but the beginning (or middle). Sometimes bourgeois patriarchy also lines up with Stuff We Like, sometimes because we got conditioned into thinking we liked it, and sometimes by coincidence. That’s why it takes effort to work through and finally to judge whether what we desire comes from us, or from a ventriloquizing force that got into our consciousnesses osmotically, or some kind of indeterminable combination. We’ll really never know if it’s us talking, or the brain slugs.
The rhetorical trick there is in classifying all ‘housework’ as ‘cleaning’. Technically, cooking meals isn’t cleaning, nor is mentally inventorying and keeping track of the toilet-paper supplies, or making sure that everybody has clean laundry. But guess who’s supposed to do those chores?
Among the domestic responsibilities, cooking seems like the easiest one to share—and the planning-ahead and stocking-up kinds of things are probably the hardest, and most likely to fall upon women without being acknowledged as work.
this is one of those things no one every really agrees on.
i was married years ago - we had a variable number of roommates and random gamers, and somehow *I* was expected to clean it. i quit after 4 months. it didn’t get cleaned (except for when i wanted to cook something, and i did my laundry) for over a year. i swore i was never cleaning up after others again.
and i have, mostly, kept to that. i’m not a neat person, and i think the floor of my closet is the place for dirty clothes. but, i hurt my leg over a year ago and had to move back in with my parents, so i try to stay at their level of clean (although i fail, i TRY). we rotate all chores that i can do (or at least when i can do them - i just had another surgery and can’t stand, so its not like i can do the dishes)
when i’m all healed, i am moving in with my boyfriend of 4 years. we have already discussed this - he is in charge of household chores because he is the one who cares more (and that doesn’t mean he has to DO them, he has to ask me to do them or decide to do them or whatever) and i am in charge of the bills and financial maintence and memory. because i have one and he is a gold fish.
but, i do almost all of the emotional maintence. well, i tell him i need something or another emotionally and he does it, but i have to tell him. on the other hand, after 4 years of working on we, we have a system that works. WELL. and really, it makes us both happy. he can do the dishes, i’ll do the emotional introspection, and we both go to bed and. erm. have fun.
Amanda: I’m with you that partners should thank each other for doing chores around the house (heck, the appreciation thing extends far beyond just chores) and often thank my husband for doing them. But I don’t do it EVERY time, but apparently, he only notices when I don’t do it and not when I do. It’s both amusing and damnably frustrating at the same time.
To those of you who are complaining about being classified by your friends and loved ones as a married woman, and decrying how much that oppresses you, have you ever considered that you would also be pigeonholed as an “old maid” by your mother/friends/coworkers/etc/etc/etc if you chose to stay single?
The fear of being an old maid outweighed the fear of being an under-appreciated married maid.
Embrace your choice.
jmay: kindly fuck off. It is completely legitimate to complain about other foisting their expectations on you-- no matter what the situation. Just because women who choose not to get married also face social pressures does not negate my experience or that of any other married woman. To say that it means we haven’t “embraced our choice” is idiotic.
What you are saying is no different than the concern trolls who constantly whine to American feminists “Quit your whining, you could be in Afghanistan.” Go concern troll somewhere else.
“"The lazy husband is only a problem if he complains about the mess.”
So, if your wife dosn’t like the puddle of pee that you leave behind the toilet, it’s only a problem if it bothers you. Otherwise she should just shut up a grab a mop. If she doesn’t like the ants or roaches that invade the kitchen because you don’t wash your dirty dishes - tough shit. You’re not complaining about them. Are you starting to see where your logic breaks down?
My standards deserve to be respected. and my husband should give a shit about things that are important to me because they are important to me and he cares about me.
Also, a lot of fights are, at root, about housework, including two of the most common:
1.) We’re spending too much money/not staying on budget...because the kitchen is in chaos and nobody did the grocery shopping so we go out to eat when we really can’t afford it; because the living room is a sty so we go out to the movies when we ought to stay in and watch a DVD; because we need to buy more clothes, sheets, towels, etc. because we don’t do the laundry often enough and stains that could be washed out wind up setting, or a whole load gets moldy and can’t be saved; and my list could go on, but what it comes down to is a neat house is more economical than a house in chaos. For people who do not have the means to maintain these bourgeoisie social norms, as one person labeld them, this is just another level on which it is expensive to be poor.
2.) You’re never in the mood for sex...because either the bed hasn’t been changed in a month and the whole room smells like your dirty socks and approached in a moldy shower in a bathroom that smells like pee is a turn-off; or because I’m fucking exhaused because you do nothing around the house!
See how that works?
Wait, wait, jmay did I just read that correctly?
I should be worried and concerned that I might be considered an old maid, completely unfuckable and unloveable, and this worry should outweigh my issue that when I marry I all of sudden become part of an institution, and stop being a human being? And if I make the wrong choice, to stay an old maid by choosing the Katherine Hepburn option(separate houses) in my relationship and never get married, I need to put up with people making me less than a human being because I refuse to get married and support a biased instutition?
Is that what I am reading there? Because if I am there is always another choice, smile sweetly and say fuck you to people who consider me an old maid, and work extremely hard by living my life and working towards dimantling state scantioned religious sacrament such as marriage(give the same tax breaks and benefits to single people as is afforded to married)
And of course, the first person I could say go piss on and then fuck yourself is you.
But only if I am reading that correctly which I am sure I am not because you would definitely know better than to come here and be all in our faces about “embracing our choice” in this regard.
Well, whether he can imagine it or not, there are a lot of entirely rational women who seem to fear whether they are capable of this very resistance to the historical sexism of an institution.
This is so true, it is extremely hard to resist the gendered roles. I fight it every day. This past weekend, my husband and I were at my Aunt’s house. We were talking about cooking and my husband bragged…
“Well last night when I came home from work I walked the dog, fixed Nancy’s (my mom’s) computer, made dinner and did the laundry. Then this morning, I cooked breakfast.”
Everyone looked at me and I said, “Yes, that’s right, he did all of that” I felt lazy and worthless that he had been so busy and had to do everything. I felt like I was the bad wife with the angelic, understanding husband that takes care of everything when she is tired or doesn’t feel like it. Everybody laughed but I felt so bad.
It wasn’t until the next day that I thought Hey wait a minute…
He fixed HIS dinner by re-heating the leftovers that I had prepared the night before. I had already eaten my leftovers when he got home from work.
He did HIS laundry only. When I do laundry, I do all of it, but he refuses to pick through the wet clothes and pull out items that will shrink before throwing them in the dryer. Consequently, he is not “allowed” to do my laundry. I still had to wash my clothes and the towels/sheets when we got home.
He made breakfast for himself only. I usually wake up a couple of hours earlier and I already had a bowl of cereal. (Most weekends I fix him an omelet when he gets up even if I have already eaten. But this time I was on my way out the door to help a friend set raccoon traps).
He went back to bed after I left, which caused us to be late to my Aunt’s house.
AAAAGGGGGH! Why is it always later? Why did I agree to the point he was making, which was that he was an enlightened, understanding husband who deserved special brownie points? Why can’t I see it when it is happening?
“The rhetorical trick there is in classifying all ‘housework’ as ‘cleaning’.”
heh.
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Is that a knitted brain slug?