Nature also hates doing the dishes, or so I hear

by limitedliabilitygirl

Let’s keep this simple: If you are a man, and you eat food and live indoors, and you ever want to identify as a feminist or feminist ally or reasonably claim that you support gender equality by any name, you need to know what goes into what used to be called “keeping house.” And not just the charismatic mega-fauna equivalents of housekeeping, like “Grilling foods outdoors” and “Sometimes helping wash the dishes for extra credit,” but the actual dirty, boring minutiae of caring for and cleaning up after human beings.

I’m not going to lie to you, there are strategies to make cleaning house easier and to break it up into small tasks so it doesn’t look insurmountable, but it is repetitive and time-consuming and not very exciting…and utterly necessary if we don’t want to live in squalor. (And just when I think squalor might not be so bad, a mouse runs out of my toaster and I have to throw the toaster away and sterilize the counter.) But for men, whose traditional mindless entitlement has been made possible by generations of feminized domestic labor, backing gender equality takes more than a neutral stance; it requires positive actions that make restitution.

It’s easy to agree in theory that it’s not a woman’s gender-specified job to put food in your face-hole for you, but if you are a man or male-presenting person and you don’t proactively take responsibility for planning and/or making your own meals until you’re forced to by near-starvation or until someone else volunteers to help you, then you are enforcing partriarchy with your passivity. Even if you don’t order your domestic partner or that woman you just passed in the hallway to make you a sandwich, by simply doing nothing, you’re saying that the work is not yours to do. And when you get into the habit of leaving that work undone, a woman or female-presenting person is more likely to feel pressured to step into that role because it’s modeled absolutely everywhere for all of us.

Likewise, if you don’t sweep up the cat hair, clean the bathroom, do the dishes & laundry, and just generally take responsibility for whatever happens in your home without being asked and without expecting undue praise for doing so, you’re still part of the problem–you’re coasting on privilege to avoid responsibility for the necessary work of physical life. (This is also like that thing where when dads take care of their kids for 3 hours out of the week, they’re “baby-sitting.”) You’re not living your feminism–you’re reinforcing patriarchy while expecting the benefits of identifying as feminist.

And don’t even say you didn’t notice–did you ever notice how only people who benefit from privilege can afford to remain ignorant of it? Everyone on the wrong side of that fence has already been forced to notice whether they were inclined to or not, so don’t go crying to them. Did you think equality was sitting on the couch for equal amounts of time while no one bought groceries or took the trash out? Believe me, son–Nature abhors a vacuum even more than you do, and saying that someone else doesn’t owe you their labor does nothing to change the status quo if you don’t take over that labor for yourself.

The same conditions apply to anyone on the receiving side of privilege in any context, so take heart: you’re not uniquely burdened in this regard, and no one is getting off the hook here. All work–of daily life, of social infrastructure, of culture change, of movement, and of justice–needs to be done. If you don’t want to be part of the problem, start doing it.