OK, A Whiffle Bat?

I'm not disputing the fact that men in our society "care less", on average, than women about whether the house is clean. But let's think about why this might be? Messy male commenters, what did the house you grew up in look like? Were the common areas messy? The bathrooms gross? Dishes festering in the sink? Did you turn your underwear inside out for a second wear? If the answer really is yes, then you probably came by your slobbishness honestly. I would actually be willing to bet, though, that people brought up in a house like that had some family problems besides chores division, and are likely as not going to rebel by making things in their own homes perfect.

If the answer is no, why wasn't it messy at your house? Again, the answer could be: I was raised by my single dad and we all chipped in, and while it wasn't white-glove clean it was fine. Again, though, if that's the answer I bet you are not one of the truly slobbish.

I think the most likely answer is: my mom picked up after everyone, although my dad and I had chores of a typically masculine kind such as mowing the lawn or raking leaves or making dad's special waffles on sunday or whatever. I was nominally responsible for cleaning my own room, and I had to be harassed to do so, and my mom actually dealt with the laundry side of things. Or, everyone had chores of an load-the-dishwasher type and for the heavy stuff we had a cleaning lady.

[I should note, here, that it is possible for men to be unfairly overworked if the "guy" chores happen to be very demanding, as when you have to use a snowblower all the time, or split wood, and there's no reason why women can't rake leaves.]

Now, as to the fact that men living alone are often slobs, we have to ask when and where this is. College apartments? Everyone is a slob in college. How do men who have lived alone all their lives generally do in the cleaning stakes? Any of you know any 50-ish, never married men? All the ones I've ever known had really, really neat houses. What about widowers? Unless their wife just died and they are suffering from depression or something, again, neat. Guys in the military are not known for their cavalier attitude towards matters of neatness, are they?

[UPDATE: This post wasn't actually done; I meant to save it to drafts...]

My point is just this: guys do not have magic blinders on that make them unable to see dirt. How can we tell? Because when household or employment structures demand it, they can see dirt just like a regular person. My step-dad was raised by a very strict father who was a colonel in the Army. He actually used to make white-glove inspections where he ran his gloved fingers along the edges of the upper shelves of the bookcase. Penalties for failing were, um, strict. Oddly enough, my step-dad was able to see even small amounts of dust, even on lampshades. (The effects were not life-long, perhaps...)

It is easy to see basic game theory at work in the putative all-guy household; it is rational to maximise your tolerance of mess because whoever is the least tolerant will do much more of the work. I think all my "guy's are just messy" commenters will aknowledge this. Why, then, not think that in the two person, mixed-gender household the same dynamic is at work? It is rational to dip slightly below your set level of caring about dirt, because then you will do less work, and the house will likely be as clean as you wanted. This doesn't mean men are all manipulative bastards or something, except insofar as everyone is a manipulative bastard. It just means that if they go with the flow, conform to the percieved stereotype of not seeing dirt, and generally follow a path sanctioned by society, they will reap some real rewards. The fact that internal pressures will make their wives or girfriends feel that the messy house is in some way "their problem" doesn't get these guys off the hook. I just don't believe that people magically do not notice when the bathroom smells bad. I think when they say, "I just don't think it's dirty" they are saying, "I don't feel like doing anything about it right now and if I put it off just a little more, I may not have to do it at all." And don't pretend that guys never purposefully do a really half-assed job so that they won't have to do it again. The flip side of "she's never satisfied with how I do the dishes" is "he doesn't wash the bottoms of the plates!"

Comments

[Amanda Marcotte]

Booooring retort. Young men care less about learning to clean because they expect that having to live in filth is a temporary situation that will be rectified upon marriage. Most guys I know who hit a certain age and are still bachelors wake up and start cleaning. They care if it's clean, it's just the potential rewards for waiting it out were encouraging slovenly behavior.

[Amanda Marcotte]

That said, not all guys are slobs in college. My college boyfriend wasn't neat, but he was very clean, which isn't surprising when you find out he didn't have a mother.

[John Emerson]

Well, I've been mostly single and living alone since about age 30, and I'm still a slob.

I actually have a hatred of houses, whereas I love apartments.

My stereotype of women is that they'll do anything for you if you buy them a nice house. I knew several (3) women who stayed single when they realized that they could buy a house without getting married.

[John Emerson]

"Unmarried men over 50" are often gay. They have the housekeeping gene.

Viable widowers learn to keep house, but the others often to pot and end up in houses full of rats and fast-food leftovers.

[SomeCallMeTim]

Jeebus, you're going to hate me, but...

1. I cannot remember my mom ever having to pick up either my clothes or my sister's clothes. There was a hamper. My sister and I did most of the vaccuming, sweeping, bathroom cleaning, as part of our chores. As we got older, we split laundry. It wasn't a big deal, as my mom is not a big freak about this stuff. My dad, OTOH, is, and now that his life has slowed down, he does most of the household cleaning.

2. I think we are ignoring the neat/disinfected distinction, as a certain 6'8" philosopher/TE might say. The first time I lived with a woman, we fought about cleaning the bathroom. Of course. She nit-picked everything, I thought. It took me two months until I realized that he wanted me to disinfect stuff, and not just rearrange the shampoo bottles and wash the stray hair out of the sink. It still does not occur to me to clean the bathroom until mold is sufficiently sized that it is hard to avoid it in the shower. I don't mean I'm unwilling to clean it. I mean I really don't notice it, or not long enough to remember to clean it. [More shame-based deletions]. I am really going to clean the bathroom tonight.

3. I think you are, perhaps, underestimating the grossness of many young and young-ish men. I've had male friends call me to the toilet to see how big a dropping they'd left. One was so proud he made another friend take a picture. [Other examples deleted, because I'm feeling shame.] At the time it was gross. But we still managed to live pretty happily.

It's possible that women live the same ways behind closed doors. I don't have the access to know, obviously. And I just haven't heard those reports.

4. The 50 year old single man next door has a house filled with stacks and stack of newspapers. Everywhere. We are not close.

[DaveL]

I don't remember much about housework until I was 11 or so, which presumably means my mom did it. Then we moved from the country into town, she went back to working full time, and my siblings and I started doing a large chunk of the cooking and what cleaning got done. And things were pretty messy for a while.

When I lived on my own, I was neither a neat freak nor a terrible slob. My wife's father is a big-time neat freak, and she brought that to the marriage. Over time, we've reached something close to parity on housework, but it took some doing, and a lot of that is my fault. There are still a couple of chores that she does because I don't do them to her standards, but there are other chores that I do mostly or always, and a lot that we both do. And vacuuming is an intermittent thing, and sometimes we're both busy and the last load or two of laundry sits on the end of the couch waiting to be folded for a couple of days, or we eat out four days in a row because nobody wants to deal with the kitchen, but we survive. She still gets frustrated sometimes when I don't do a particular chore right when she wants it done, but mostly it's child-related and social stuff where she's still carrying too much of the load, not housework.

[baa]

Young men care less about learning to clean because they expect that having to live in filth is a temporary situation that will be rectified upon marriage.

Sorry, no. Look, there's just data staring us in the face here. We can take examples of gay men. We can take examples of marine drill sergeants. Indeed, we will find these groups to be awful neat. But if we take anything like matched sets, or a broad sample we are just going to find that men clean less and are less tidy than women.

Maybe this is all cultural. Hey, maybe other obviously sex-correlated traits - like being a football fan, or playing lots of videogames, or buying pornography - are 'cultural' too. I am never exactly sure what force this is supposed to have. If a person has been acculturated not to care about something, they don't care about it. 'Cultural' and 'tractable' aren't synonyms. Maybe if we think cultural implies tractable, the implication is that people should take it on the chin to model behavior for the younger generation. Maybe they should, if it's important enough, but that won't make it any more natural-feeling or enjoyable.

Leaving aside the role-modeling, should men who are not housework-inclined do more to makes their wives or girlfriends happy? Yes. Compromise, as SCMT said on the last thread, is the name of the game. But it probably is important for everyone to understand that when men say they "don't notice" the grime in the tub, 9 out of 10 times, it's true. It isn't some plot to get women to do it, it's the simple truth.

[DaveL]

There's one thing missing from the update: avoiding a job until your partner does it tends to make for a resentful, pissed-off partner, or at least an unhappy, overworked partner, so it's not a pure freebee. Whether that's enough to change behavior will vary from couple to couple depending on degrees of sexism, cluelessness, and just basic assholiness, but your game theory approach is a little too pat.

On average, I believe that men need to do more housework and women need to worry less about how clean their houses are, but under those averages there's a whole lot of individual variation and probably a fair bit of regional and socioeconomic variation. That's part of the reason it's so hard to talk about without getting lost in anecdotes.

[jrochest]

avoiding a job until your partner does it tends to make for a resentful, pissed-off partner, or at least an unhappy, overworked partner, so it's not a pure freebee.

Well, it is a pure freebee if you don't care what your partner thinks: if you hate her, look down on her or assume that she's supposed to do all the chores and just needs to stop sulking, or if you just don't care, then her resentment doesn't matter.

And if you do refuse to clean that's probably your attitude, which of course makes the resentment worse. It's very hard to believe someone respects you when they make you clean up after them all the time, every f*cking day.

[bryan]

"Unmarried men over 50" are often gay. " I think people often think I'm gay, but a visit to my house dissuades them of that right quick.

[Jacob T. Levy]

Hmm.

1) To some indeterminate but large and possibly total degree, men's greater and women's lesser tolerance for mess is culturally-ingrained by the sea of sexist assumptions in which we all swim: yes.

2) Continuing to reenact that difference as adults disadvantages women professionally and emotionally, and teaches children to live it in their turn: yes.

3) Men use exaggerate the difference strategically: probably some sometimes, though I doubt many do so consciously. (One kind of test case can come in office space away from home. For those people who are free to keep their offices clean or messy, e.g. profesors, chaos there, as a post-college-age adult, is presumably not there on some strategic expectation that one's spouse will come in from home to clean it up. Conversely, men who are impeccable at work and chaotic at home may be behaving strategically. Very many more of the really chaotic offices I know-- not all but most-- are occupied by men.)

4) The only non-sexist equilibrium is for both partners to converge on the preferences that got inculcated in women by societies that had one partner be a full-time housekeeper, sometimes with additional paid help: no.

1-3 are simply indeterminate on where we should be converging; and it's very likely that we *shouldn't* converge on the standards of the 2-3 generations of women who were told that their only productive activities and the standards by which their worth would be assessed were child-raising and housekeeping. We haven't culturally purged out the attitudes created by that bizarre interlude, but we shouldn't let it set our standards forevermore.

Indeed my guess is that we haven't. My grandmother would be dismayed by most of the homes of two-career couples I know, were she around to pass judgment. She was damn sure horrified by the house I had growing up, with my single mom and two sons. So?

Homes should be clean not dirty, sanitary not gross. (Therefore, SomeCallMeTim: ew.) To what degree they should be tidy rather than messy is a separate question. Dishes and bathrooms need to be cleaned (properly), but papers don't always need to be picked up. Dust needs to be kept under some control, but if your house can pass a daily white-glove test and there's no allergic people living there, you may be living by my grandmother's silly rules.

Sexism has left both genders with problematic attitudes that aren't sustainable if we're to have more equitable gender roles, not just men. I admired my mother-- still do-- for her ability to decide that my grandmother's housekeeping norms were to be ignored no matter how vigorously my grandmother tried to make her feel awful about it...

[Cala]

I don't know whether there's a neat-freak gene. As much as it thrills the non-neat-freak me to imagine neat-freaks being eaten by tigers because they were too busy arranging jungle fronds, I suspect that the situation is largely as Belle described: moms take care of most of the house work, and their kids observe like crazy and come to think of that as normal. Add a little of 'the neat freak is teh ghey' and all the pink and purple organizers little girls get, and it's not too surprising.

And men will clean. Once they're past college, into a career, and still single, having a place where a woman will be naked becomes important.

Like baa, I don't really think it matters whether it's nature or nurture, except that there seem to be plenty of men, as MY's thread shows, who use 'women are wired to clean' to justify sitting on their asses.

And that's really what this comes down. If you and your partner both work, and she's spending her free time cleaning while you relax, you're a dick. And the two of you really need to sit down and work it out, whether this takes the form of the both of you doing less cleaning, or you pulling the weight, or realizing that she's not nagging.

None of this 'but I don't want it to be that clean, so I wanna read my paper while she dusts' bullshit. I'm sure your wife does things that aren't always at the top of her fun list.

(I think the passive-aggressive strategy is right out. What's next, batting our eyes and pretending to faint whenever the cleaning solution comes nearby?)

[Carlos]

Belle, the nice thing about a wooden bat is that you can drill holes and pour molten lead in them, for extra emphasis. With a whiffle bat, this burns the plastic: not good.

Anyway. Of course men are genetically adapted towards superior cleaning skills! All that upper body strength comes in really handy for scrubbing floors and pots and pans, and our greater height allows us greater range for those hard-to-reach places where dust accumulates. What, some waify supermodel is gonna get the oil stains off the garage floor? I DON'T THINK SO. And who's gonna mow the lawn?

Just as men are better in the kitchen -- quick, name a woman three-star chef -- men are superior in the cleaning department as well. Look at the great hygeinists of the past: Lister, Pasteur, Spangler. There's a reason it's called "Mr. Clean", you know.

And look at all those slovenly single women's apartments. Sweaty workout clothes, yoga leotards, unfresh lingerie, cosmetics piled up around the sink and on the toilet. And for the love of Mike, tampons! Granted, no dirty dishes, but that's because there's _no food_ in the refrigerator. Which may or may not have been cleaned since they moved in.

[belle waring]

yeah, I was thinking of making up a back on the veldt just so story about how, since men had to find and maximally exploit flint deposits which may have been some distance away from their group's home range, they have a special capability for sorting small objects and making sure nothing gets lost. it was of the utmost importance that their tools be arranged properly so that the right one for the hunting job of the day was available. these factors, plus all the tedious time spent hand-tying poisoned blow-darts, help explain why men are such neatniks today. women in the proto-human group, by contrast, lived a more hap-hazard life in which gathering, tending fires, and child care occupied variable amounts of time, hence our unstructured ways nowadays...

[SomeCallMeTim]

Cleaned my bathroom. Well, everything but the sink area. Next up - laundry!

[Gary Farber]

"Cleaned my bathroom. Well, everything but the sink area. Next up - laundry!"

Could you come by my place, please?

[Scott Lemieux]

Yeah, as much as I'm not looking forward to getting a cricket bat in the head I think that Jacob is 100% right. There's no question that there's a gorssly unfair division of domestic duties, and that there's obviously nothing "natural" about women being unfairly burdened with the work. But it seems to me that there's an awful lot of slippage between "living in squalor" and "dusting the bookshelves and the baseboards every two days to that someone running white gloves over them won't get a speck of dust" going on in these argument. When it comes to basic sanitiation, there's no question that partners should be equally responsible, But if the expected standard is well beyond that (and I can't tell from either post exactly what Belle is arguing in this respect, so I mean this in general), I think that's subject to negitatiation. Indeed, it seems to me that feminism should be interrogating the amount of irrational busywork that people have been expected to do in what otherwise could be leisure time as opposed to elevating it to an a priori standard that men should try to achieve as well. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with wanting to sacrifice time to have an immaculately neat home, but if the claim is that this level is a mutual *obligation* as opposed to an aesthetic preference, that's where I get off the bus.)

[SomeCallMeTim]

Scott Lemieux clearly hates women. And America.

[paul]

heh, the "bottom of the plates" bit made me laugh. My parents told me about a house they had visited where, when they got up to help clear the table, ran afoul of the mistress of the house when they stacked the plates: "Don't do that! I'll have to wash the bottoms of the plates!"

They were pretty sure it wasn't a joke. They didn't comment on the rest of the housekeeping.

Related factoids: I helped a neighbor move out of their house and we discovered that the prior residents had painted their kitchen w/o moving the appliances. A kind of geometric motif was the result. And in another house I lived in, we tored down some poorly hung panelling to discover a row of green and brown greasestains from where the prior residents had leaned their heads against the wall. Makes my gorge rise even now, 25+ years on . . .

I realize this isn't a repository for sloppy housekeeping anecdotes but really, some people will go to great lengths to avoid simple tasks.

[jerry]

Dear Belle,

Do you actually have any data to support any of your theories or are you just whacking off again?

If Yglesias didn't have his head up your ass, he would be asking where in your screeds you actually establish a norm so that the rest of us can measure good amounts of dirt vs. bad amounts of dirt and good amounts of entropy vs. bad amounts of entropy.

Do you believe Amanda's bizzaro claim that "Young men care less about learning to clean because they expect that having to live in filth is a temporary situation that will be rectified upon marriage." What does it mean to her argument that she says "men" and not "boys"?

Again, your point comes down to your statement (in not so few words) that it's not nature, it's all nurture. And you think that measurement of dirt and chaos is a universal invariant that all of us can and do measure in exactly the same ways. Okay, so you've proved you are clueless, now what?

[Cala]

Jerry, I am amazed that you can type with your head firmly wedged in that position.

Needless to say, none of Belle's argument depends on there being a Universal Dirt Standard. Or at least it's no more dependent on the existence of the UDS than the arguments that women just learned to love to clean back in the veldt while the men hunted tigers.

[jerry]

Or at least it's no more dependent on the existence of the UDS than the arguments that women just learned to love to clean back in the veldt while the men hunted tigers.

I am not an evolutionary biologist, or a geneticist. But I have read a few books. Here is my response, from yesterday, when Belle again wanted to hit people.

It seems to me likely that in fact there are evolutionary reasons, expressed in our genes that as you word it, women just learned to love to clean back in the veldt while the men hunted tigers.

And just like today we get fat and suffer diseases because our food quantities today are so much different from what evolution planned for us, I wonder how much of "women's crazy expressions of cleanliness" at home are due not to what is required for a successful procreation (evolution's end goal), but are a hyper response since today we have so much technology that lets us express our genetic inheritance in ways that nature could not plan for.

Is it nature XOR nurture? No. It is nature and nurture.

Belle's argument would be stronger and fall on more receptive ears if she could accept that. It doesn't mean that Belle needs to do 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% or even 10% of the work. It doesn't mean that.

It means that Belle may be better able to look at the question itself, and rephrase it both to her and to her husband's benefit.

[jerry]

I am amazed that you can type with your head firmly wedged in that position.

A long time ago, I had a lens implanted in my belly button and a fiber optic cable leading to my lower intestine. And I practice my typing everyday.

Hope that explains the situation.

[Andromeda]

The rational housework avoidance is hardly sex-linked. I looked around growing up, noted that my mom did lots of housework and was always stressed and unhappy, my dad did very little and was generally relaxed and happy, and quite consciously decided that housework was a bad idea.

I also dispute your idea that people just magically don't notice when, eg, the bathroom smells bad. I have pretty much no sense of smell and have failed to smell all manner of strong things (eg recently I didn't notice the scent of the cranberry bubble bath I was in which had my husband coming from across the house to comment on how powerful it was).

I sort of idly think it would be nice to have a cleaner house, but I am also lazy and don't like housework and am too tired at the end of a workday to actually do any of it and need time on weekends to decompress and hey, my husband feels similarly. Perhaps I shall take advantage of money to turn it into housework that other people do...

[LJRphoto]

As I came across Scott Lemieux's post and his points on setting reasonable standards I was already thinking about something sorely lacking in anyone's argument so far. It did used to be that women took care of all domestic duties. It was their job... period. However, it used to be that being a good housekeeper and mother meant that you kept the floors swept and bathed your kids once a week. Laundry included your good dress, your house dress and a couple of frocks for each ragamuffin you housed plus whatever work clothes your husband might need. Modern standards for cleanliness are much different and much more labor intensive regardless of (more likely because of) whatever technological advances we have experienced since then. The discovery of bacteria and what it could do to your children meant women had to become biologists who could sanitize everything in the house. Child development discoveries meant that you could no longer swaddle your kid and hang them on a hook while you got your daily chores done before the hubby came home. Unfortunately the women's movement put more burden on women rather than simply giving them more options (and really not that many more options for most women). If you want sources cited, I'm sorry, I'm not going to dig through my college text books, but you can find documentation for most of the facts that Belle points to (such as the 70/30 breakdown of housework) in just about any book on the social psychology of families/relationships/marriage, whatever. She's not just pulling this stuff out of her ass.