Lies About Housework
July 6, 2011
A FORUM in The New York Times entitled “How Can We Get Men to Do More at Home?” is a classic illustration of the feminist program to remake human nature through state control and brainwashing. Participants in the discussion come right out and say that people must change their thinking. Equality is good even if people do not want it. Government should even “force” men to change.
“Mentalities generally change much more slowly than legal codifications and institutional policies,” Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, says. Communists repeated the same line until the very fall of the Berlin Wall. What can Ute tell us about life in her home? Why would you listen to Ute more than, say, your great grandmother, who never welcomed the emasculation of her husband and would have been horrified to see him make a pie? Who knows more about men?
The demand that men do more housework reeks with dishonesty. Women want their husbands’ to help at home, but only up to a point. Beyond that, they seek an idealized version of this assistance that could never exist in reality. The call for men to do more housework is essentially a call for the subordination of men at home. Given the choice between seeing these things done to their husbands’ specifications and seeing them done to their own, women prefer housework and child care done to their own standards. When a man attempts to do anything more than serve as an adjunct, a woman often wrests control from him. That is because this is her natural sphere and she is better at it. He is naturally more focused and systematic.
Besides, women have not stopped wanting men to make more money than they do. Thus the call for men to do more is also a program for their perpetual exhaustion, a harried state of divided attention and constant guilt.
There is one final problem with this discussion: its demonization of housework and disregard for the young. Like all work, these tasks are the stuff of pride and mastery. How could anyone talk of the care of children as if it were a demeaning burden? When approached with a desire for excellence and adequate time, housework provides deep fulfillment. What is at stake? Home. The garden of life.
