Says David Robson
NO
MEN are better than women at housework. Are women happy about that? Absolutely not. Housework isn’t rocket science, it isn’t brain surgery, it’s pretty simple stuff – yes, the inside of the oven can be a bit of a challenge but hardly something to give you sleepless nights. A decent vacuum, a dustpan and brush, a supply of Jif or Cif or whatever it’s called these days, some bleach and Jaycloths, a duster perhaps, rubber gloves (optional) and we’re in business.
Give it maybe an hour – a tad extra for spring cleaning – and Bob’s your uncle. Or he would be but he isn’t because he falls foul of Rule 3 of home life: a man’s housework is never good enough (for a woman). When she has done the housework, does he go round inspecting, looking for, as it were, some speck that may have escaped the feather duster? Of course not.
Does he open the dishwasher to make sure that the plates are arranged precisely as set down in Rule 17 with the forks all pointing in the right direction? Hardly. Or check that she has done behind the fridge and under the sofa? I don’t think so. Man is quietly grateful, sometimes too quietly. “I’ve spent three hours cleaning and tidying up,” she says. “Haven’t you noticed?”
Women suffer over housework because since time immemorial they have been brainwashed into believing housework is crucial to their identity. A few decades of feminism isn’t enough to change that.
For years psychologists have been going on about a man’s identity crisis – if they put on a pinny or a pair of Marigolds they would feel unmanned, their resistance to doing housework is a statement of masculinity and being useless at it was a question of manliness. But that simply isn’t true. Lots of men don’t do housework because they’re lazy. Left to themselves they wouldn’t even mind if there was a dead mouse behind the television.
But most men are pretty good at it, potentially brilliant. But here’s the problem: if you’re Lionel Messi, you resent being treated as if you are Lionel Messy.
And that’s what happens. If more women were emancipated enough to accept that man cleaning isn’t like mansplaining or man flu – an invitation for ridicule and oppression – men would feel happier about doing the housework. It would cause them neither anxiety or pain. In fact it would be a pleasure as long as it didn’t bring with it a response that’s a cross between the KGB and an Ofsted inspection.
THE headmistress of a leading London girls’ school has suggested women should stop “infantilising” their menfolk by leaving lists of instructions for household chores. That’s all very well as far as it goes but that is not the real problem. It’s the afters that do the damage: when it turns out you haven’t followed the instructions right down to the last comma.
Feminists talks about the “patriarchy”: men ruling the roost. What is at stake here is something at least as troublesome: “matrimony.” I hardly need to tell the headmistress of a girls’ school that matrimony comes from the Latin “mater” meaning mother so the matrimonial (or matrimoanial) home is one where the woman rules and her anxieties hold sway.
People try to argue that shared housework is the secret of harmony – the pair that sweeps together sleeps together, dusts together, lusts together. Not so. Research (admittedly in Norway) found that the divorce rate was 50 per cent higher in couples who share the housework.
It’s man’s work, just trust us to get it right.