on cleaning

You Want It Clean? You Clean It!

Two things are clear. First, women still do more housework then men. Married women spend twice as much time on housework than their husbands, and single women spend twice as much time on housework as single men. Second, much time that could be spent cleaning is spent fighting about it.

The thing a lot of women miss is that you can’t make men do more than they would do on their own. Clearly, most men don’t need things to be as clean as women prefer them to be; hence they are likely to get resentful if they’re made to work harder than they would if they were living alone. (It’s kind of like when you work on a group project, and you’re generally a slacker, but your group wants to get an “A,” so you are forced to work overtime…It can be extremely frustrating…) However, if roles are reversed, and the woman is working and supporting her husband, that’s when I think it's only fair for the woman to expect the man to more housework...