Hypothetical
Let's say, hypothetically, that two people live in a house that is much too big for them. Both people work but one of the two works much longer hours (let's call this person: B). That person, person B, hypothetically, doesn't have (or doesn't make) time for housework, so for the first (oh, let's say) year that they live in this too big house, person A does all of the housework.
Pretty soon person A gets sick of it. So person A arranges for outside workers to do the work. But person B is more conservative financially than person A and wants to save that extra $200/month. So, person A says, "well, you start doing your half, and we'll cancel the service." Person B is happy happy. But person B doesn't begin doing the work. The next time the service comes, person B becomes angry stating, "I thought we were going to cancel the service."
Person B sulks and is mean for two days. Person A is now not only tired of housework but is also tired of person B's attitude. But person A is too OCD to live in a dirty house.
Is person A, hypothetically, out of her mind?
Pretty soon person A gets sick of it. So person A arranges for outside workers to do the work. But person B is more conservative financially than person A and wants to save that extra $200/month. So, person A says, "well, you start doing your half, and we'll cancel the service." Person B is happy happy. But person B doesn't begin doing the work. The next time the service comes, person B becomes angry stating, "I thought we were going to cancel the service."
Person B sulks and is mean for two days. Person A is now not only tired of housework but is also tired of person B's attitude. But person A is too OCD to live in a dirty house.
Is person A, hypothetically, out of her mind?
Update: Person A, as the previous line reveals, is female. Person B is male. For person A, there are upsetting underlying (and historical) gender inequalities in expectations about housework. This complicates matters further, and in some ways, puts person B in a no-win situation. In some ways, however, person B is upholding stereotypes.
How then, when males are still willing to participate in long work hours and to leave "home" off of their lists of things that are important and when females are still unable to forsake "home" for money or success, are we ever to escape these categories of male breadwinners and female homemakers? Especially when outside assistance (which, theoretically, would level the playing field) angers person B.
Okay, I'm done.
I think.
posted by perrykat at
12:09 PM
5 Comments:
I've been through that shit too. Just hire the housecleaner and be done with it. You don't need permission and he will just have to get over it. Your Aunt Charlotte
interesting, I think I shall go off and think about that for a bit.
(I mean it's that, or clean the apartment.)
Hypothetically, both Person A and Person B seemed to be quite firmly in their minds. The gender issue, while legitimate, seems misplaced here as the exact same situation could (and I'm sure does) occur when A and B are Arnold and Betty, Arnold and Bob, or Alice and Betty.
What is missing from this hypothetical is Arnold and Bob (let's keep this neutral)'s motivations. For the sake of simplicity, let's leave unquestioned the appropriateness of both Arnold and Bob wanting to work in a paid job 40 hours a week. After those 40 hours, Arnold comes home and cleans the home while Bob works extra hours in his paid job.
Do both Arnold and Bob agree that the (let's say) 15 extra hours of housecleaning and overtime are needed? To the extent that these two chunks of work (in the house and out) are accepted as necessary, I would think that the only question would be how to divide the work. If Arnold did the housecleaning and both Arnold and Bob agreed that over time paid work was necessary, Arnold would be justified in suggesting to Bob that he should "pull his weight" by doing the overtime work, and vice versa.
Of course, maybe they would both rather spend time at home even if it meant cleaning, or maybe they would both rather improve their career prospects even if it meant being away from the house. But that is just negotiating and compromise, not a question of sanity.
Where it gets more complicated and, I think, more emotionally loaded is where Arnold values more highly a neat and clean home, while Bob values more highly financial security. To the extent that they do not both agree what worked there is to be divided, it is hard to see how an equitable and satisfactory division can be reached. And if Bob spends less time in the home (due to his overtime), he will have less incentive to spend time cleaning it then Arnold will, as Arnold spends more time in this space. Bob will also get less benefit from the work Arnold does to maintain it.
This leads to an important point. Even if Bob is logically entitled to feeling it unfair that he should be expected to do both the overtime paid work as well as a (equal?) share of the housework, there is always a danger that comes from one person doing 100% of any task/chore. The danger is that this work can become (or the person doing it can think it has become) invisible and thus taken for granted. And to the extent that the person doing the work identifies with the work (often the reason that they are doing it rather than the other person), the danger is that the inequality of the work -- no matter how logically fair in the scheme of things -- becomes a proxy for the person themselves feeling taken for granted.
So: three separate and overlapping questions:
1) what is a fair and equitable distribution of the work -- paid or otherwise -- that both Bob and Arnold agree (through discussion and compromise) should be done? This should take into account both the importance of sharing tasks to some degree wherever possible, and a recognition that some work will have significantly more value to one person than the other.
2) what is the best way to ensure that each person holds up their end of the bargain implied in number one above? I don't have a lot of suggestions here, but what Annette is good at is asking me to join her when she is working on something that she would like me to do more of. This gives me an opportunity to see how to do it, and robs me the opportunity to say I'll do it later as clearly there will be none to do later since she is doing it now. The challenge with this approach is fighting the well-intentioned tendency to want to tell someone how to do it better (the idea being that if it is easier the person will be more inclined to do it), but rather presenting it as an opportunity to do something together and a challenge to figure out how to do it best (by taking clues surreptitiously from the person leading or figuring out a brand new method on your own).
3) how do you deal with the gender implications and stereotypes that arise from questions of housework? Now, if our stereotypical gay interior decorator Bob is driven crazy by Arnold's leaving plates on the coffee table, we have a similar situation with most of the gender implications set aside. So if we take those gender implications independently from deciding who does what, I think we're left with the following. The gender role and resulting stereotype for women is one that focuses on relationships more than achievement. Thus clothes matter, hair and makeup matter, shoes matter, cleanliness and neatness of the home matter. Some of this is self reinforcing; the gender stereotype underpins the social expectations that women are aware of these things, and thus can more fairly be judged on them. Stereotypically, men are natured/nurtured to be more conscious of hierarchy and status (hence the of voided an embarrassment of having to ask directions), and thus their job matters, (the size and location of) their house matters, their toys matter.
It would be terribly naïve to say that this all means that women are trying to be friendly while men are trying to get ahead. But a woman making more money than another woman doesn't bring the same social advantages that a man making more than another man does. And similarly, some men dress better than other men (yes even guys notice), but there is very little social credit that comes with this. Meanwhile, I don't know many women who won't admit that they dress more for other women than for men.
Knowledge of (or at least belief in) all of that helps me to at least partially defuse the emotional baggage of gender when judging why people do what they do. That is to say, I direct my energy into things that bring pleasure and social capital and security to me. If Person C spends time and energy on something different, it may be a different means to the same end. So in answer to your question about how we escape the existing stereotypes, I think it is a circular process... if society expects different things from men than women, men and women making rational choices will behave differently thereby reinforcing stereotypes of difference. I think therefore that any significant changes are likely to be driven by other forces (technological, economic, etc.) and that the stereotypes will lag behind.
Just spoke to Annette... she's with anonymous on this one.
my two cents (I wrote a bunch more but the computer crashed) is that, especially with a child coming eventually, it's worthwhile having an agreed standard of what is "too dirty/messy", and an agreed way to call in help when it is needed so that neither person has to be the bad guy or has to nag or feel nagged.
Thanks particularly to Charlotte, Annette, and Ang who tell me to go ahead and hire the service. Thanks to Jeff for thinking this through to the Nth degree and making overthink it. :)
Note: I've only just discovered (because Ang called me to tell me so) that unless I refresh the screen, even when I click on a particular post from outside, I don't see the comments. Now I have to go back through all of my posts to see if you all have been commenting without my knowing it.
So, as for what person A will do: well, we'll see, but I predict: cleaning service.
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