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.

[James B. Shearer]

Well, I am a 50ish never married man and my condo is a mess. My office is a mess also. Things have gotten worse as I have gotten older and accumulated junk. Belle is probably getting a biased sample because people like me are reluctant to invite guests into our messy homes.

[vidal_olmos]

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

And your evidence for it being nature is? You see, nurture is obviously implicated. But in order to prove that it is nature that dictates that women behave the way they do in a given socio-cultural context, an intelligent argument would have to pin down to precisely what extent culture is not implicated. How do you control for cultural variables?

The point is that while a priori you may be right that nature is indeed a reason why one sees women doing more household chores (or blacks and hispanics attaining less success in the marketplace, much to the masturbatory delight of Steve Sailer and his friends), it is incredibly stupid to argue that it most certainly is the case that nature plays a role, when there is no compelling argument suggesting that culture does not account for the observed discrepancies.

[Patrick]

Belle Waring's reponse completely misses the point.

Who cares who the guy who doesn't care about mess and/or doesn't value cleaning got there. Honestly.

What matters is this.

If, for example, that guy's wife/mother/girlfriend stopped picking up his jacket off the floor, and stopped vacuuming, and so forth, would he 1) not notice and/or not care, or 2) start becoming agitated at the mess, and by connection his female counterpart.

Iglesias COMPLETELY MISSES THE POINT as well, but I can't comment on his blog. He seems to think that the source of the inequality doesn't matter, merely the inequality- but he fails to understand that knowing the source helps fix the problem.

If the source is men who passive aggressively force their wives to shoulder most of the household burden, that's one thing to look into solving.

If the source is women who have been indoctrinated into a 1950s era conception of Proper Housekeeping and who can't give that up even as it becomes impractical due to the demands of their jobs, then that's an entirely different issue to solve.

Odds are, its both, in different degrees in different relationships.

[John Emerson]

At the moment I'm living with my sister in our family home, which she's buying. One afternoon I wanted to invite a couple over, which I rarely am able to do, and she got quite upset because the place wasn't fixed up. I told her that I didn't care and they didn't care. She told me that she cared. She was quite intense about it.

She explained that for a woman, her house is what she is. She would be judged by our housekeeping, and I wouldn't. Even if my friends didn't care personally, they might let slip some details about our messy house and the word would get out.

This is steroetypical mainstream America, but the effects linger among the liberated. I'd say it's more nurture than nature, but it's pretty powerful and it hits M and F differently.

My mother was a pretty good housekeeper, but not perfect, and in her last months of life it would have bothered her if certain friends of hers had stopped by when the house wasn't fixed up.

I think that for guys, houses are to live in, and for women, they're to show. I realize that this is a sexist stereotype but it's there in the real world.

And I really deny that guys pretend not to care because they plan to get women to do all the work. Many guys on their own, even for long periods, budget housekeeping time very stingily. One of the issues in my marriage was housekeeping, and one of my motives for not remarrying was to avoid those arguments.

[jerry]

How do you control for cultural variables?

My recollection from anthropology courses taken a long time ago is that you try to look across cultures. In the anthropological record of observed peoples, past and present, what numbers of them participated in some various practice.

What are the practices of the Inuit, or the Yamamano, the Kung, the Hopi, the Australian Aborigines, the Bushmen, etc.?

If a large number of disconnected people share some practice, than there is some evidence that there may be a biological reason for that.

Another way to attack it is apparently through animal models. I find this very dubious myself but seemingly if you find a gene that codes for some mouse behavior if that mouse behavior is similar to a human behavior and that gene is present in humans you can make the claim that the gene codes for the human behavior as well. This is buttressed if you can find humans that do not have the gene that do not express the behavior.

Don't get me wrong -- I know that culture plays a very big role in housecleaning behavior, but I detest Belle's (and others like her) ability to absolutely positively deny that nature may be behind it as well and then excoriate the individuals who take that view. That's just ranting and raving.

[jerry]

And when looking at different cultures past and present, another good split is to examine what happens (or happened) in matriarchal vs. patriarchal societies.

If this is entirely a Western or patriarchal cultural trait, and not a biological trait, you would expect to find anthropological evidence that in non-western matriarchal societies, the men did the housework, or were more worried about cleanliness and hygiene.

If the majority of non-western, matriarchal cultures also have women being the primary housecleaner, you might begin to suspect it is a sex-linked genetic attribute.

[Cala]

Thing is, jerry, you need a lot more than 'Well, there's probably some biological connection' in order to justify not helping with the housework. There's overwhelming evidence for nurture, and while you're absolutely right that it's possible that some old evolutionary adaptive trait has become pressed into service for something else, to justify sitting on your butt in 2006 is going to require a bit more evidence.

The guys screeching at Yglesias' blog were acting as if it was just as evident as tendencies in height or weight. Whatever biological connection there is is going to be a lot weaker.

[jerry]

Thing is, jerry, you need a lot more than 'Well, there's probably some biological connection' in order to justify not helping with the housework.

No one is saying that Cala, nice straw-woman though on your behalf. Glad it helped you dismiss the argument.

[vidal_olmos]

"My recollection from anthropology courses taken a long time ago is that you try to look across cultures. In the anthropological record of observed peoples, past and present, what numbers of them participated in some various practice."

Looking across cultures does not provide compelling evidence to establish that some cultural traits are fundamentally
genetically-derived. It is true, for example, that most cultures have uniformly assigned to women housekeeping responsibilities, but this does not constitute evidence that natural selection is at work in any particular way. On the other hand, the strength, pervasiveness, longevity, and incidental universality of that tradition (of assigning women housekeeping responsibilities) provides a lot of mileage in making sense of why we still observe statistically suspicious disparities in the distribution of chores between women and men today.

The argument according to which a pervasive reason why things turn out to be the way they are is natural selection of some kind is a bit obtuse, in my mind. The evolutionary paradigm is misused all over the place, but nowhere is its misuse more conspicuous than when it comes to cultural traits. We all know that, so long as particular genetic configurations do not affect our ability to survive until a bit past reproductive age, natural selection does not kick in to correct genetic accidents, let alone historical-cultural accidents. Societies that configure themselves--for whatever reason (e.g., women stay at home and take care of the babies, while men go out and hunt animals, a cultural principle adopted by many primitive societies)--around the self-reinforcing conviction that women are supposed to be housekeepers can easily survive. It isn't necessary for any sort of genetic specialization to have occurred to give an account of why those convictions have been perpetuated in many cultures. There are solid cultural explanations for why cultures went the way they did.

[jerry]

Looking across cultures does not provide compelling evidence to establish that some cultural traits are fundamentally
genetically-derived. It is true, for example, that most cultures have uniformly assigned to women housekeeping responsibilities, but this does not constitute evidence that natural selection is at work in any particular way.

...

It isn't necessary for any sort of genetic specialization to have occurred to give an account of why those convictions have been perpetuated in many cultures. There are solid cultural explanations for why cultures went the way they did.

Okay, we're waiting then, what are the solid cultural, non-biological reasons that most cultures, patriarchal as well as matriarchal would have women being the homekeepers?

Remember, my argument is not that culture doesn't play a predominant role, just that I do not understand how Belle can insist that nature plays no role.

My question is that if there is a biological reason behind women's predominance in housework as seen across cultures, then how do you or Belle knock out the argument that it is possible that evolutionary pressures might then favor women that might prefer greater amounts of cleanliness?

It would certainly be easier to knock out that argument by knocking out the premise by providing those solid cultural explanations why so many disconnected societies, matriarchal and patriarchal have women performing the housework.

(By the way I don't even know if that's true, I am taking that from your stipulation "It is true, for example, that most cultures have uniformly assigned to women housekeeping responsibilities, but this does not constitute evidence that natural selection is at work in any particular way")

So between here and tpmcafe, you've called me a simpleton and incredibly stupid and obliquely implied that I am probably a racist and that I argue in bad faith. Anything else you want to add?

[John Emerson]

Man, I thought I was the crazy man here, but Jerry whipped my ass! Hardest workin man in the biz.

What was the topic, again?

[Dr. Free-Ride]

My question is that if there is a biological reason behind women's predominance in housework as seen across cultures, then how do you or Belle knock out the argument that it is possible that evolutionary pressures might then favor women that might prefer greater amounts of cleanliness?

Just for kicks: What would be the adaptive advantage at this moment in having a 1950s obsession with the sparkling house? 'Cause I'm a chick, I don't have it (nor did Mom), and the environment saw fit to keep me around long enough to have offspring (females, and at least as unconcerned with a mess as their mother so far).

Does this mean I'm from a line of mutants? (Mom's mom is the uber-neat freak; maybe she got exposed to mutagens when pregnant with Mom?) Or possible that whatever the natural contribution to the neat-liking is surmountable? And, if so, could not the natural contribution to neat-loathing also be? Or are males more prisoners of their evolutionary legacy than females are?

[SomeCallMeTim]

I believe you must be xxy, Doctor.

[JE Meyer]

Someone said this (John Emerson, I think): "I think that for guys, houses are to live in, and for women, they're to show. I realize that this is a sexist stereotype but it's there in the real world."

This is right on. But the weird thing is, this is not an expression of patriarchy, as far as I can tell. It's mostly an attempt to impress other women.

To me, that seems like the real thing here that might potentially make some women care more about housework than they "naturally" would prefer: Their wish to impress other women. I don't know how that desire is the fault of men (heresy, I know: everything about this issue is supposed to be the fault of men, who are simultaneously free-riding, and constructing the preferences of all women, and ordering their own significant others to do the work, etc.).

In my experience, it's not men who will judge a house by how immaculate it is. Usually, it's the opposite: the men would prefer to leave the immaculate living room and head down to a basement or family room where they can kick back and relax and drink a beer and not worry about getting anything on the furniture.

[bellatrys]

But the weird thing is, this is not an expression of patriarchy, as far as I can tell.

JE Meyer - nonsense.

It's mostly an attempt to impress other women.

Why on earth would you think this is incompatible with it being an expression of patriarchy?

The status games among servants is as much a product of the classist system as any jockying for status among the masters - whether it be 19th c London butlers, footmen and coachmen taking pride in their spit-and-polish, or housewives anywhere, anywhen.

Beyond that, it's ferociously conditioned into most of us women from early childhood that our self-worth depends on being good homemakers - good at cleaning, good at cooking, good at making your menfolk and their guests feel at ease. So of course it's going to be something that most of us "want" to do - the way that your trained rat "wants" to run mazes.

Watch Bridge on the River Kwai, it'll help you "get" it.

And yes, if women choose to act "like men" and ignore the pressure of other women not to "let the side down" AND the media (and who pays for the media? cui bono, hm?) and defy societal expectations and leave the house a pit - or just slightly shabby - it doesn't take long for the guy to start noticing and complaining that it doesn't match up to the way his mother took care of *her* [hah] house when he lived at home.

If she then says, "You want the doorknobs shiny, *you* do it" he will point out that *he* is the breadwinner, and works hard all day while all she does is stay at home taking it easy watching the kids - which comes naturally to her anyway. (Give it long enough and you will hear how men risk their lives on a regular basis in the army/jungles/steelyards, even if the speaker himself never wields anything heavier than a Cross pen.)

[eudoxis]

The position of "nature" or "nurture" require empirical support if they want to be approached in any sort of scientific way. The 100% nurture position is a theoretical one and can't be supported by anecdotes or intuition, no matter how obvious. The default position would have to be something neutral, which is a combination of both.

That said, my husband and father, and all my brothers are the fastidiously clean ones in my family but most of the housework is still done by the women. I'll try that whiffle bat.

[JE Meyer]

Why on earth would you think this is incompatible with it being an expression of patriarchy?

Umm, because all you have to offer is wild speculation to the contrary?

In my experience (your mileage may vary), the socialization that you're talking about is done by women, on women, and is conducted with little to no reference to what men care about. That is, it often is the case that the man of the house isn't all that uptight about having a clean house for guests; nor are the male guests all the uptight about it either; they just don't care. At the same time, the woman of the house frantically goes around cleaning and teaching her daughter to do so, for the purpose of impressing the female guests. How is the woman's attitude the fault of "patriarchy" in any meaningful sense? Or, why are women supposed to be so helpless and powerless in the face of a hypothetical "patriarchy," even though all the real men in their lives show no sign of demanding this behavior?

if women choose to act "like men" and ignore the pressure of other women not to "let the side down" . . . it doesn't take long for the guy to start noticing and complaining that it doesn't match up to the way his mother took care of *her* [hah] house when he lived at home.

Your experience of men must be very different from mine. In my experience, we men would all breathe a huge sigh of relief if our wives started taking a breather where housework is concerned, because then they wouldn't always be expecting us to do tasks that we just don't care about. That's sincere, by the way. I don't know where you get this picture of men as so insincere on this issue, i.e., pretending not to care if the house is messy just so as to trick the woman into doing all the work, but secretly expecting her to do it all the time.

Here's an example: Men care much more about baseball statistics and football games than women do. There are exceptions, of course, as well as men who couldn't care less about sports. But as a generality, that's true. What if men started claiming that memorizing baseball statistics and watching football was a household chore that benefited the home (because, after all, the men would be better able to socialize with other men who visited). And imagine that men started insisting that 1) women were somehow failing in their household duties by not showing enough interest in sports, and that, 2) women are really just lying when they say that they aren't as interested in sports; they're just trying to trick their husbands into monitoring sports for the household, and even that, 3) all of this sports-watching is a huge ploy by the "matriarchy" (defined without reference to any actual women)?

That's the way that you come across. Sure, the analogy isn't perfect, because the household really does benefit from some cleaning around the house. But frankly, for a lot of men, asking us to scrub the shower or whatnot seems as pointless and stupid as if we demanded that our wives start memorizing baseball statistics. We genuinely and truly don't care if that task is "accomplished," and we certainly aren't sitting around expecting our wives to do it, any more than our wives are the ones who demand that we watch sports.

[vidal_olmos]

"Okay, we're waiting then, what are the solid cultural, non-biological reasons that most cultures, patriarchal as well as matriarchal would have women being the homekeepers?"

The biological fact that women bear children and nurture them for a considerable amount of time after birth certainly has a bearing in the relevant aspects of primitive social organization, and once cultures broadly adopt gender roles on the issue of housekeeping the way they do historically, it isn't difficult to see why perpetuation takes place, in the absence of the sort of cultural awakening that the feminist movement brought about. Now, there is indeed something "biological" to why women have been 'assigned' the position of housekeepers since ancient societies, but the assignment is cultural, and there is no reason to believe that housekeeping is codified in our genes.

"... how do you or Belle knock out the argument that it is *possible* that evolutionary pressures might then favor women that might prefer greater amounts of cleanliness?"

I don't. I simply knock out the argument that it is decidedly the case that evolutionary pressures favor women to prefer greater amounts of cleanliness; I point out how unsupported and speculative such a hypothesis is; and I reject the position that it is necessary to ascribe to natural, essential biological differences, what amounts to observed *cultural* differences between groups.

I have indeed said that it is possible that Steve Sailer is right, and that us hispanics and blacks are really much stupider than whites like him, on average, as he would love to believe. I suppose it is also a priori possible that the reverse is true. Just like it is possible that hairy people are smarter than people with short hair, or what have you. But the celerity with which those unsupported speculations pop up in discussions about behavioral or cultural discrepancies between human groups is truly amazing, given what History has to teach us about unsupported biologically essentialist speculations.

"So between here and tpmcafe, you've called me a simpleton and incredibly stupid and obliquely implied that I am probably a racist and that I argue in bad faith. Anything else you want to add?"

I did not call *you* incredibly stupid (I think very sane and intelligent people are capable of saying or thinking incredibly stupid things, by the way), but I did call you a simpleton. For that I apologize, just like you should apologize for calling Belle a racist pig. As for whether you personally argue in bad faith, I am perfectly happy to entertain the notion that you don't. As for racism, I did not ascribe you any racist ideas. I simply fail to see how to distinguish between the impulse to draw biological conclusions from observed cultural differences between the genders and the racist so-called "arguments" that scientifically illiterate people like Steve Sailer advance. This is not to assert the falsheood of the speculations in question, but to draw attention to how thoroughly unsupported--and hence unworthy of being entertained--they are.

[Gary Farber]

"Watch Bridge on the River Kwai, it'll help you 'get' it."

I best like the part where the super-clean house gets blown up at the end by the slightly-mad housekeeper falling on the detonator after being shot.

William Holden character: definite slob. Japanese culture: just possibly, maybe, conceivably, patriarchal.

[jerry]

I didn't call Belle a racist pig.

In a sarcastic comment, I called her a sexist pig. That is what is known as irony.

It's too late to bother with the rest of your stuff, but basically you are arguing in circles. "of course women do housekeeping in primitive cultures, it is because they bear children, and then it is entire culturally dependent, it is ludicrous to think a sex linked behavior could actually be sex linked genetically, it is because they bear the children!"

[vidal_olmos]

Racist, sexist, it's all the same.

It is actually quite easy to understand, Jerry: Women bear children, which makes primitive cultures organize themselves in a manner that assigns housekeeping responsibilities to women. This distribution of chores gets perpetuated by distinctly non-genetic mechanisms, and here we are, with masters of sarcasm calling women sexist for refusing to grant them the right to assert as fact that 'attitudes towards housekeeping' are fucking encoded in the genome.

[bryan]

"(Give it long enough and you will hear how men risk their lives on a regular basis in the army/jungles/steelyards, even if the speaker himself never wields anything heavier than a Cross pen.)"

Okay.

So what if he's a coal miner?

[jerry]

Racist, sexist, it's all the same. Sure, sure, sure it is.

Women bear children, which makes primitive cultures organize themselves in a manner that assigns housekeeping responsibilities to women.

You are being ethnocentric here.

calling women sexist for refusing to grant them the right to assert as fact that 'attitudes towards housekeeping' are fucking encoded in the genome.

Now you are getting hostile. And it seems as though you are not paying attention. Throughout, I and others have not said we want this right to assert as fact, we have said we want this right to assert as possibility. Belle in fact, by excoriating anyone who proposed this mechanism, and you as well, are in reality the ones making all of the demands.

If you two feel so strongly that there is no basis at all for this, in light of the fact that is does seem to be a sex linked behavior, and that there do seem to be social genes, than it is your argument that needs to be buttressed with specific proof that there is no possible mechanism for women doing the housekeeping having a genetic preference expressed in the genes.

Anyway vidal, you're boring me baby. Have a nice day.

[belle waring]

jerry: how can it possibly be the case that I am in the argumentative position that iff there is no possible mechanism for women being more inclined (via "nurture" expectations)to do the housekeeping I am refuted? I do not deny that there is a possible case to be made along these lines. I simply think that a) given that household maintenance guidebooks of 80-100 years ago stress very strongly that men like to have a clean orderly house and b) only recently has anyone suggested that they might themselves contribute to this ideal and c) since that time the line has transmuted to "guys don't care about mess" there is a reasonable case to be made that ex post facto excuses are being made for male privelidge rather than a neutral "let's a priori consider life back in caveman days" case. For whatever "caveman days" case you make about women being intrinsically concerned with disinfecting counters using lysol, I can come up with some counter-example in which women are willing to let things go higgeldy-piggeldy as long as x number of roots are gathered, while men must keep meticulous track of what flints have been expended, what rock flints are available to be transformed into various arrow- and spear-heads, etc. in short...aw, hell this is a family blog.

[Cala]

Thing is, jerry, you need a lot more than 'Well, there's probably some biological connection' in order to justify not helping with the housework.

No one is saying that Cala, nice straw-woman though on your behalf. Glad it helped you dismiss the argument.

Yeah, actually, they were, all over Yglesias' comments. Which Belle cited in her previous post on this. No need to make up the straw-men when others are busy weaving them.

[greensmile]

My dad was much more likely to complain about a messy place. My mom always says "dirt keeps".

[teep]

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.

There is no earthly reason why women can't split wood. Splitting stovewood (up to 24" long and a similar diameter, at least in hardwoods such as red and white oak, maple, hickory, and wild cherry) is not at all beyond the realm of chickly abilities. This I know because I am a chick and I heat my house with firewood. Every year, I cut a winter's worth of firewood (by chainsaw) and split it (via wedges and a maul) and stack it in tidy racks using my very own girly hands.

I'm just mentioning this because it sounded like you didn't think women could/should/would split their own wood.

The thing that most people do not know about splitting wood is this: It is not all about the muscle. There is some muscle required, but the name of the game is NOT "swing the axe or maul AS HARD AS YOU CAN and hope that the wood splits there." That approach is actually very tiring and ineffective because, while you can use power to compensate for deficiencies in technique, it takes a LOT of power to make up for even minimally crappy technique.

Splitting wood is more efficient and more rewarding when you apply decent splitting techniques and rather less power. Your best bet is to look for where the wood *wants* to split and then to aim for that spot, using only as much power and speed as you can without losing control. Under this approach, there is muscle involved, but your control and target selection skills are more important than your power.

Full disclosure: I have a hydraulic wood splitter but I prefer to split my stovewood by hand because it's good exercise and because I enjoy doing it.

[Mandos]

I have an amazing idea and it involves teapots and lambs. First you balance the teapots on top of the lambs heads. Then you make tea. Then when the lambs move, they spray hot tea over their enemies. Their enemies are made of sugar.

My point is that I'm getting lost in all these hypotheticals.

[Doctor Slack]

Then when the lambs move, they spray hot tea over their enemies. Their enemies are made of sugar.

Now, now, there's no need to go bringing Pentagon research projects into it.

[HourseMan]

If you are in the market for Household Chores, here's the guide that you've been looking for.

[lingre]

Where can I buy lingerie with a custom design? I want to buy something for my wife as an inside joke. I want to get lingerie that I can order with custom images printed on the lingerie. Very unorthodox, I know. But has anyone heard of anyplace that can do such a thing?

[intimate apparel]

What is the life expectancy of lingerie? I may just be unlucky, but it seems that my Victoria’s Secret stuff only lasts about 3 months. The lingerie I get at Target lasts a year …How long do you think lingerie should last for?

[Smiling]

He actually used to make white-glove inspections where he ran his gloved fingers along the edges of the upper shelves of the bookcase