Says Angela Epstein
YES
AT FIRST sight it looked like something from a crime scene. A perfect oblong of dust set against a freshly swept, tiled hall. Thankfully there were no dead bodies. Just the overwhelming evidence of a man at work. One who, when given the task of running a sweeping brush over the floor, felt it wasn’t necessary to lift up the doormat.
Did the culprit (no clues but, reader, I married him) think he wouldn’t be found out? I don’t think so. Such actions are hardly the hallmark of an undercover operative. The motivation was far less complex.
You see when it comes to cleaning the male brain operates in an entirely different way. One exquisitely illustrated by his view that it is entirely unnecessary to sweep part of a floor covered with a rug.
Pragmatic, resourceful and unapologetically time-miserly, what’s the point of wasting valuable energy (ie effort) and resources (more effort) cleaning a patch of tiles no one will ever see?
It’s episodes like this which, over the years, have convinced me that men are simply not wired to be decent cleaners.
They regard clearing up from dinner as placing unrinsed dishes at best in the dishwasher – where do they expect those congealed bits of lasagne to go – or at worst just fermenting in the sink.
They regard cleaning the bathroom as putting the cap back on the toothpaste. And view taking out the rubbish as an Olympian feat.
So what’s the reason for the disconnect? In part I think – and could the screaming sisterhood look away now if easily offended – biology doesn’t make us unequal. It simply makes us different. As such, though men may be supremely organised in the world of work (my husband can find a utility bill from decades ago) this is not a crossover skill set.
Men aren’t preternaturally programmed to be homemakers either . Far too busy hunting dinosaur meat to vacuum the cave, they don’t possess that innate feminine need to make a house feel lived in.
As one friend said to me: “When my husband gets home from work earlier than me, he wouldn’t dream of drawing the curtains, switching on a few low lamps and making the place feel cosy. He just puts on lights in the rooms he uses.”
Of course some of it could be childhood nurture: pink cooking sets for girls, big chunky digger toys for boys. Though I don’t believe in gender neutral play kit, I have to admit that when one of my sons was little and asked for a toy vacuum cleaner for his birthday I nearly expired with pleasure.
WE’RE also much more efficient at it than men. A scientific paper in the journal BMC Psychology found men were slower and less organised than women when switching rapidly between tasks in tests. So in the time my husband has, say, thought about emptying the washbasket, a woman has emptied it, loaded the machine and hung up a batch of recently washed clothes. All while helping her kids with their homework.
One friend maintains it’s all pure guile and cunning. Doing a domestic job badly is a sure way of making any woman just do it herself. And better.
For all these reasons it’s why we need to leave lists spelling out exactly – exactly – what we want.
It’s not, as Victoria Bingham, head of South Hampstead High School, claims “infantalising husbands and partners”. It’s just a savvy move to ensure that if you do want something doing, spell out how you want it to be done. It gives men less reason to rise in revolt or affect faux ignorance. And more chance of those doormats being lifted off the floor.