[分享]from NYT 男女战争之家务劳动
Posted: 2006-04-12 9:25
挺长的，文章。我的读后感是文化的沟深啊又不深。
You Want It Clean? You Clean It!
By LISA BELKIN
Published: April 9, 2006
KENDRA LEE would not go so far as to call herself a neat freak, though her husband does consider her a nut. Let's just say she can't leave on vacation until her countertops are polished and her carpets are vacuumed. "The thought of coming back to an unkempt house would ruin my entire trip," said Ms. Lee, an event planner from Hill City, S.D. For this she blames her mother, who planted her seeds of neatness early, actually using a white glove to look for dust in little Kendra's bedroom.
Diane Dobry, on the other hand, would not go so far as to use the word slob, but she notes that her marriage broke up in part because she and her spouse had different views of cleanliness, and she does use capital letters when she sends an e-mail message to say "I HATE housework, and do everything to avoid it." Ms. Dobry, currently working toward her Ph.D. at Teachers College at Columbia University, also blames her mother, a woman so meticulous that she once got out of bed while recuperating from surgery to clean the guest bathroom. "If my mother had lower standards, and let me do things myself, I might have learned how," the daughter said. "But I never learned how to do anything because she always did it for me."
Forty years after feminism promised to free women from drudgery, we are still talking about housework, and we are still talking as if it were all about women. Some, like Ms. Dobry, are rebelling against it. Others, like Ms. Lee, are embracing it. Authors, like New Yorker writer Caitlin Flanagan, are writing books about it (hers, out this month, is "To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife").
Academics like those at the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia are studying it. (The first found that women have squeezed working hours out of their day by reducing the amount they sleep and the amount of housework they do, while the second found that working women were happiest in marriages in which husbands earned more, even if wives did more housework.)
In short, the question of cleaning remains unsolved despite four decades of increasing equality, the growth of labor-saving devices, the emergence of the most educated generation of women in history, while more men embrace their feminine side than ever before. That this is still such a hot-button topic for women indicates it is about more than who will scrub the toilet.
What it's about is ambivalence, which is summed up in Ms. Flanagan's book title. "I am as drawn to domesticity as I am drawn to anything," she said in an interview, admitting an addiction to shows like "Martha" as though she were admitting to a taste for pornography. "And yet I am as suspicious of it as I am drawn to it. It seems like a trap. A trap of all my worldly talents."
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.
Neil Chethik polled 300 husbands across the age spectrum for his book "VoiceMale: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework and Commitment" (Simon and Schuster, 2006). "Housework showed up right after money as the top issue of discord," he said. "It was higher on the list than sex, higher than raising the children, ahead of every other issue you can name."
Mr. Chethik once switched lists of chores with his wife, leading both of them to discover that they preferred their original gender-based roles, although he did discover he had a knack for laundry. Ms. Flanagan said she would feel diminished if her husband took over her role and, say, cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Both writers agree that women bring more emotional baggage to this subject. Women do not just see a cluttered living room. They see a failure to live up to their mothers' standards, a rebellion against those standards or judgment from neighbors whose standards might be higher.
"Women are very attuned to the unseen audience," Ms. Flanagan said in an interview. "A man can sit in, watching television with newspapers scattered everywhere and food all over, and they just don't care. They can do it later. We women have the sense that someone's watching us. We need those newspapers picked up because what would people think?"
Mr. Chethik thinks men are simply wired not to notice an audience, seen or unseen. "Of the men I interviewed, it wasn't so much that they didn't want to do the housework as that they didn't notice that the house was dirty," he said. "They didn't see it or smell it. It just doesn't register the same way."
To give credit where it is due, men have changed over the decades. They certainly do more housework than their fathers.
I like a clean house as much as anyone," said David Bowers, author of "Dad's Own Housekeeping Book," to be released by Workman Publishing on Father's Day. Though he knew nothing about domestic arts before his daughter was born three years ago, he learned fast after becoming a stay-at-home father and now brags that he can get his house to a "mother-in-law approved" level of clean.
Much of women's ambivalence comes from the fact that women are changing rather than the idea that men are. Women are not what their mothers were, nor are they ready to abandon what their mothers represented. Ms. Flanagan, for instance, writes, "I am not a housewife, I am an 'at home mother,' and the difference between the two is vast."
A "housewife," she writes, defined herself "primarily through her relationship to her house and her husband," while "an at-home mother feels little obligation to the house itself." Her goal, she writes, actually "is to find a way to combine traditional women's work of child rearing with the kind of shared housework arrangements and domestic liberation that working mothers enjoy."
With due respect to Ms. Flanagan, however, working mothers are not exactly luxuriating in their liberation. At least one study has shown that employed mothers slept 3.6 fewer hours a week than those who were not employed. Whatever the burden of time and guilt felt by a mother who is home is compounded for a woman who is not. That has not changed since 1989, when Arlie Hochshield wrote "The Second Shift," about how women leave the office only to come home to a whole other job, one they either can't or are not permitted to let go.
This by no means implies that things have not changed since the book was published. Across the country, couples are inventing some creative ways to share housework that, at first blush, look nothing like the 1950's or the 1980's.
Neil Gussman, a chemical engineer who lives in Lancaster, Pa., and his wife, Annalisa Crannell, an associate professor of mathematics at Franklin & Marshall College, split their housework according to what can be done when it is dark outside and what can only be done when it is light. This leads to a reversal of traditional gender roles, with Mr. Gussman responsible for the bathrooms, the kitchen (particularly the floor) and some vacuuming.
Like Mr. Chethik, Mr. Gussman has discovered that he enjoys doing the laundry; folding the wash gives him an excuse to watch Nascar racing and cop shows, he said. Ms. Crannell, meanwhile, does all the yard work: raking, mowing, weeding and fence building.
Kirk Thompson and her husband, Matt, divide the chores with a seemingly modern twist. When they were married four years ago and setting up a household in Dallas, the couple quickly learned that they were one of Mr. Chethik's statistics. "Housework was the No. 1 item we consistently fought about," Ms. Thompson said. "Matt is a neat freak. It was the reverse in my house. The woman didn't mind a little clutter, and the man had to have everything picked up immediately."
So they split the chores. Her responsibilities are the kitchen, bedroom, laundry and shopping. His are the living room, bathroom, vacuuming and all the yard work. "Matt can eat and throw his dirty dishes in the sink and leave them, or leave pots and pans out it he cooks," she said. "I clean them up and cannot complain. I've come home from work and the sink is full of dirty dishes and stinky food, and I just bite my tongue and clean them up. Conversely, I can throw my shoes in the middle of the floor, take off clothes and leave them around and let dog hair pile up in the corners of the rooms. Matt cleans it up, no complaints, but on his schedule."
The couple are expecting a baby this summer, and "this whole balance of chores could come crashing down," Ms. Thompson said. "But maybe he hates to empty the Diaper Genie, but I'll hate going to the store"
A common thread through so many of these stories, though, is that of men doing what they want (Mr. Thompson wanting the house clean and simultaneously wanting to leave his dishes in the sink; Mr. Gussman wanting to do chores in the dark because during the day he is a competitive cyclist) and women doing what is left, a thread that still makes this conversation all about women.
What men want to do, they say, is most often a domestic version of something macho. Mr. Chethik enjoys the laundry, he said, not only because he gets to watch television while he folds, but because "it's basically working with heavy machinery: picking up big loads of stuff, moving them from one place to another, setting buzzers and timers and then hitting the on button."
That's why Michael Peck loves to vacuum. For the first few months of their marriage, his wife, Lori, did almost all the cleaning of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ("He cooked while we were dating," Ms. Peck said. "He lured me in.") Back then, though, they had no dog and their vacuum was an ancient Hoover inherited from Ms. Peck's grandmother.
A year and a half ago they adopted a Jack Russell terrier, because they had been told the breed does not shed, and soon their apartment was covered with dog hair. Mr. Peck, a graphic designer, spent $400 on a bright yellow Dyson vacuum, and now a joy of his day is using it to suck their 700-square-foot apartment clean. "I'm not allowed to touch it," said Ms. Peck, who also works in advertising. "If I do, he comes home and looks so disappointed."
And does Mr. Peck vacuum properly? "However he does it, that's fine with me," she said.
That attitude ― and the difficulty many women seem to have with it ― is central to any conversation about housework. Yes, it is true that society still assumes this to be women's work. And yes, it is true that many men do all they can to avoid their share. But it is also true that many women are guilty of what sociologists call "gate keeping": building a fence around a territory, be it vacuuming or child care or grocery shopping, and defending it as theirs. They set the standards in that realm, and they set them high. Sometimes unrealistically so.
"From a man's point of view," Mr. Chethik said, "men feel like they're often being accused of not caring, but then, if they try to do something, they are told they aren't doing it right. They can't win. Their wives say: 'Clean this up. I want this clean.' But then they're scolded because they don't clean it right. There's no right or wrong. Men shouldn't have to meet your specified standards for housework."
In other words, men wish women would change just a little bit more and accept that, though their mothers cleaned and stored the dishes after dinner every night, it is not wrong to let the dishes air dry next to the sink overnight.
At the same time, Mr. Chethik said, men should remember that a little extra effort is in their own best interests. "When wives are happy with the division of housework, almost everything else is better," he said. "There's more sex, better sex, less arguing, less chance of going to therapy, less chance of divorce."
In that way, he said, "all the talk about housework isn't just about women, it's also about men."
他们小时候妈妈没有教育他们换下的衣服放椅子上，脏了的衣服扔洗衣桶里？ 也许这是家里有地毯的结果。 住木板/瓷砖地张到的孩子就不会这样。
当然小爱也过分了一点：头两个月他洗碗都不知道要放detergent。。。我现在在努力把海量放宽，只要做了，就不在乎做成什么样，最多找借口让再做一次好了。
女主人一定是呐闷怎么客人们突然安静下来了，才发现。气得叉了腰冲他吼：“我问你，你是这家的人吗？”男主人困惑的表情很真实，完全不知道自己做错了什么。 
马上有好几个客人比划着给他讲怎么往回开。笑死。
可惜的是我送得多接得少。
