I am somewhat floored by the responses to my post suggesting that marriage is the primary unit of patriarchal currency. O me of little faith, I’d sort of expected a slew of matrimonial apologists to attack me with no small vim, but from a field of over 250 starters, only a few argue that marriage is anything but a hotbed of bogosity, and I think only one or two dudes tell the feminists to get a sense of humor.
Speaking of dudes: here’s a little test you can give yourself to see if you are qualified to interrupt the ladies with your unique male perspective:
1. Fill in the blank:
Remarks such as ““Keep shaking things up. I don’t want to live in a world of sheep and I like being challenged when it comes to ideas and philosophy” are considered by radical feminist bloggers to be ____________.
2. True or false:
a. Feminists are likely to be unacquainted with the male point of view.
b. Feminists benefit from the balance offered by the male point of view.
But I digress.
A few glittering baubles of consensus caught my attention when reading the comments. For instance, most of the married blamers who responded — even those who described themselves as tolerably happily married to ‘good guys’ — said that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d known then what they know now. This was a self-selected sample, of course, but at least it doesn’t disprove my hypothesis, which is that marriage is a culture virus engineered specifically to indenture women in the service of male culture.
Also, blamers really don’t like doing housework. Amen to that, sister. Unsurprisingly, housework is only an issue when cohabitation is the domestic arrangement; people who live alone either do it or they don’t, but we are unlikely to consider it a feminist issue unless a more privileged entity stands to reap the benefits. Some women seem to consider that they have made a tolerable marriage because their Nigels do some or all of the housework. But, as blamer legallyblondeez counters, “doing the housework doesn’t magically erase his male privilege.” Housework, in other words, is a bit of a pink herring in the battle of the sexes, in that the fundamental power differential between oppressor and oppressed remains firmly in place regardless of who mops the floor.
Some women suggest that a marriage may be made tolerable with the introduction of a third party to muck out the filth. This bit of feudal reasoning, with its profoundly antifeminist essence, is problematic.
The implications of hiring a menial — always a woman — to perform low-status women’s drudgery suggest an unsophisticated grasp of feminist theory. Blamer Mearl agrees; I reproduce her eloquent remarks here to save me the trouble of having to paraphrase her exact argument.
[H]ere is where I quibble: “Our house cleaner, who is a woman, has a flexible schedule, gets paid well and seems to enjoy the ability to work unsupervised, while listening to music and watching TV.â€
For fuck’s sake, does no one realise that there is zero integrity, no matter how you rationalise it, for paying someone else to clean up your garbage and dirty gitch? If every overprivileged feminist in the G8 countries did this in order to balance out our leisure time and work time and have happy feminist marriages, do you realise that you’re contributing to the increase of an already-existing and growing caste system with Untouchables at the bottom, and those Untouchables are doing the shit work of society, paid or not? Garbage men make 22$/hour where I live, benefits and pension and health care included (Canada here). Cleaning women get $7, and nothing else. They clean your bigger, better house to make money for kids they barely ever see. Many are poor or immigrants. Do you really want to contribute to a growing near-slave society in the interests of the patriarchal capitalism, on the pretense that you are leveling the playing field of marriage with your hubby?
Here is a snippet from Jan Wong’s “Maid for a Month†series from the Glob:
[Note: I selected this snippet, since Mearl provided only a link. –Twisty]
“On Feb. 1, Ontario’s minimum hourly wage rose to $7.75 from $7.45. For reasons that now escape me, I thought the best way to tell the story of that 30-cent raise was to work — and live — at the bottom of the food chain. I would find a low-paying job, a low-rent apartment and, single-mom-like, take my boys with me for the month and see how we survived.
“Cool, what are we going to eat? KD?” said Sam, 12, who prizes Kraft Dinner because he’s sick of triple crème French brie. His brother, Ben, 15, was the embodiment of teen irony. “So I’ll have a urine-soaked mattress?” he said. “Is the floor going to be, like, concrete?”
Before I set out on this assignment, I assumed $7.75 an hour, at 40 hours a week, was a living wage. I began crunching numbers. My monthly pre-tax income would be $1,240, or $14,880 a year. To my horror, I realized I wouldn’t even reach halfway to the so-called “low-income cut-off line” of $31,126 set by Statistics Canada for an urban family of three.”
(Unfortunately, Wong learned nothing from her privilege except that she should “treat her own Jamaican housekeeper better and appreciate her more,†not that she should give up her dominant-class privilege, downsize, take the blow, and share the housework among herself, her husband, and her lousy little kids. I don’t know how to link the whole series, but it’s on the net somewhere. Please check it out.)
Make of this what you will, but I really don’t see why everyone can’t clean up their own fucking mess. That means men and women alike. There is no reason, aside from physical ableness, that everyone, male or female, can’t do whatever work is required to run a household or community. You transform “women’s work†into “shit work†and it just goes to a different level, to the women of poorer communities. That ain’t feminism. And don’t try to tell me that you’re giving someone a job. B.S., I say!
And so we see that marriage may be made palatable to women who view housework, rather than male privilege, as the primary agitator against equality in their relationships. To maintain the illusion that she can be married without simultaneously capitulating to the megatheocorporatocratic machine, the feminist wife cannot engage in stereotypical wifey-work behavior. Instead, she hires a surrogate drudge. Unfortunately, this merely demands that she oppress, in turn, women of a lower caste than herself, while doing nothing to address the power differential in her own relationship.
Just another pernicious little method — like the nuclear family’s dependence on cheap-crap-from-China — by which marriage perpetuates male dominant culture’s primacy.
As always, my answer to the question, “so, Twisty, what’s the solution?” is: revolution.
Twisty, thanks again for your wonderful posts. if you were floored by the marriage post, imagine what it would be like if the message boards were still up!
Housework is one thing, childcare altogether another. Do I change my own children’s diapers, or leave the work to those at a daycare center while I go to work to earn enough to pay for daycare? That’s a fun decision.
May I have some kind of exemption? I’m a single mom, trying to maintain a house and yard and special needs kid - the few times I’ve had help with the housework, I’ve paid $15-20 an hour - this is why I can’t afford it now, I won’t hire someone for $7. But I could sure use the help. It’s not like I’m being lazy and just want someone else to do it whilst I eat bonbons and do my nails. And I promise to never marry again.
Hiring a cleaner is no “get out of jail free” card for a feminist if she or her partner do nothing else to change the power imbalance. But, if she really doesn’t like cleaning, there is nothing stopping her from deciding that she values the person who is doing the cleaning and the work they do, and will pay them an honourable wage regardless of what the patriarchy decreed minimum happens to be. Cleaning as an activity does not make the “underclass of women”; our attitude to women and women’s work makes the underclass.
What impact on the discussion is to be made by the hiring of men for housal duties? We have a man who cleans and maintains the yard. We have another man who fixes broken things in the house, like the plumbing or the HVAC. Another man changes our car’s oil and does whatever other automotive maintenance is needed. These are all tasks that would have been considered stereotypical husbandy-work behavior.
It’s all surrogate drudgery, and it oppresses humans of a lower caste, but I don’t see the same sort of outrage at men (or women) hiring landscapers or “handymen” as an evasion of men’s duties as “man of the house.” To add to the anecdata, we also hire a woman to clean our house, and we pay her well in excess (per hour) of either the handyman or the landscaper (the auto dude is a union employee at a garage, so I have no idea what his per hour pay might be).
It just seems to me that women are especially pilloried for relying on hired help when they outsource the stereotypical work for which they would be judged were it left undone, but men can leave the yard a mess and the faucet dripping without judgment, so long as they let their fingers do the walking and call someone to do the work. Sure, maybe it’s all the world’s wrongest thing for anyone to outsource anything to anyone and we should all do every stitch of work required to fulfill any need we have, growing our own food and knitting sweaters from the wool sheared off sheep grazing in the backyard. But when that doesn’t happen and we rely on the grinding gears of commerce, why are women the only ones guilt-tripped about being feudal exploiters?
I wonder if a group of feminists set up a group of “volunteer” cleaners, it would be possible to change the perspective of housework? If no-one thought of housework as inherently demeaning, or saw benefits and pleasures in the activity that went beyond having a clean house, would more people do it?
My Twisty-topia wouldn’t just have a “fair division of labour”, but a complete absence of labour-as-exchange.
Housework is not inherently demeaning. The inescapable dominance of either economic or sex privilege certainly is. Cleaning up after yourself and those you love seems to be an emotional statement about the importance of other people to you: This is what I do with my time. I clean after you, and myself, instead of doing something I like better, like laying around feeling sorry for myself.
The patriarchy poisons this, and men poison it by refusing to realize that there are known psychological benefits from selfless works for others.
God knows I dislike cleaning up after my wife and daughter. But how can I claim to have any love for them at all if I avoid it? So I do it anyway, and thus realize the benefits that come from doing something from a need to nurture rather than from a compulsion to adhere to cultural norms.
I volunteer to take the dude quiz.
(1) valuable encouragement for their little projects that helps keep them motivated
(2)(a) True. Feminists rarely get to hear what men think because they are so busy hating them.
(2)(b) True. Feminists need to focus on the bigger picture, including how tough it is to be a man.
How’d I do?
I liked the other post, my analysis exactly, but didn’t comment as I had nothing to add or ask. I do have a question about the housecleaning thing.
1. I pay a man $45 every two weeks to cut down my large piece of grass. This is above the going rate. He brings the equipment and it takes him about an hour to an hour and a half to do it. Plus, he does many yards in this neighborhood which means he’s around, would call the police if my house got broken into or anything. Am I exploiting him, should I be doing my own yard? I work a 60 hour week for $15 an hour. I could cut my own yard but I prefer this arrangement. Am I exploiting this guy?
2. I know I should fix my own car but I don’t really know how and I am not that interested. Ditto electricity and so on. I know people - men - who would do these things for me for free but they would expect more from me in exchange than a home cooked meal and a beer. I prefer to hire these jobs out. Am I exploiting these people?
3. I would love to have the house cleaned professionally. Between my job, dealing with parents over 80, a lot of yardwork beyond cutting the grass, the mending, the this and the that, I just do not have a lot of time for recreation, and that is why I had house cleaners. However I dropped them last because she and her 2 minions (together) were $65 for 45 minutes of work - and wanted to change sheets and do laundry, not get dust out from behind furniture or clean ceiling fans and floors.
$65 for 45 minutes works out to $82 for an hour, divided by 3 is $27 per person, plus I have to buy the fancy cleaning products they want (I use simpler ones). That is just about twice, to each person, what I make per hour in my own job, and they choose to do only the lightest of the housework, leaving the heavier work to me.
I would like to know exactly how I was exploiting these people, and whether I am also exploiting the grass cutter, electrician, and auto mechanic, all of whom charge per hour for labor more than I myself am paid, but who *are in fact doing dirty work on my stuff that I do not want to do myself.*
And *please* do not tell me that the auto mechanic has skills I am paying for, whereas the house cleaners do not. There *are* tricks to house cleaning, and I’ve got an instruction manual on how to fix my car, and friends who would lend me all the tools, so do not tell me I can clean the house but not fix the car!
Oh boy, quiz time. I hereby solemn swear an oaf that I haven’t looked at any other answers.
1. Scintillating
2a. False, or they wouldn’t be feminists. They’d be humanists or progressives.
2b. Absolutamnte si!
Prof. Z: All of your examples (apart from housecleaner and “minions” [er, sic]) are of jobs done by men who are considered “professionals” in patriarchal society. Yes, they DO have skills, for which many of them (mechanics, electricians, even plumbers) go to school and earn degrees.
Alternately, housekeeping is considered a talent that gals learn to heart from birth — the vagina is all the cred you need! (Oh, and maybe a few of those “tricks.”) Despite the recent movement toward saying “housecleaners,” let’s be dead honest: We all know that people say the “maid” is coming on Tuesday. Not to be condescending and suggest that women can’t choose this career if they want to, but the reality is that unlike the yard guy, the electrician, etc., women generally don’t work as house cleaners because they loooove other people’s toilets. Not any of the ones I know, at least.
PS: Twisty, I was late to the marriage debate, but this is just to say I’m hopelessly in love with your writing on this and plan to make is required reading for the beau who is pushing to be hubby #2.
I wholeheartedly agree with the folks who argue that, if one is going to hire a third party to clean one’s house, you MUST make sure they are getting a fair, livable wage.
I have a cousin who cleaned houses for years, and she worked for herself–and she explained that that was the key, to not have to give a portion of her earnings to some larger agency. She always said how happy she was to make such good money and have such independence, and I hope it’s fair to take her comments to that effect at face value.
With all this in mind, I recently hired an independent woman who does NOT work for a cleaning company, and her rate is $20/hour. I know it’s much better than the $7/hour she’d get working for a cleaning agency, and I’m happy to pay her this wage. I also like the idea of contributing to a woman’s ability to work FOR HERSELF.
I feel the same way about child care. I don’t have kids myself, but if I did, I’d want to be paying a babysitter/nanny/caretaker $20/hour, too. I babysat my way through junior high and high school, and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever take advantage of me the way I was taken advantage of back then. (One relative in particular would leave me with her three kids for an entire WEEKEND, then get back and pay me $5. No shit.)
The point is that, like so many things, hiring someone to clean (or babysit, or do other “women’s” work) is not inherently anti-feminist. Deliberate feminist intent is the key ingredient.
The answer to this evidently burning question — “Am I exploiting the hired help?” is: fuck yeah. You think that guy is cutting your grass for his health? Because he just loves landscaping your honky lawn? Are you surprised that your maids didn’t want to stick their hands in your toilet?
Everyone seems to love the idea of paying menials more than the going rate, as though this somehow absolves their capitalist ass from the gruesome truth of their complicity in the oppression. I hear this same argument from dudes who use strippers. What have they got to complain about? They make hudnreds of dollars a night, don’t they?
Yeah, I know, the system’s set up so that white folks have no choice but to exploit brown folks, right? Our hands are tied! We don’t have the time or skills to maintain the infrastructure of our whitey lifestyles! What else can we do but hire servants from the underclass created by capitalist society precisely for that purpose?
Yay! quiz time.
1. Annoying and pointless.
2a. False. There is no way for anyone who has spent any time in the world to not be familiar with the (white, straight) male POV.
2b False. The male view radically exceeds the radical feminist blogger POV in terms of the amount of exposure any given individual has to either.
I would like to know exactly how I was exploiting these people, and whether I am also exploiting the grass cutter, electrician, and auto mechanic, all of whom charge per hour for labor more than I myself am paid, but who *are in fact doing dirty work on my stuff that I do not want to do myself.*
It is not that you are exploiting them per se, it is that you are contributing to a broader system of exploitation, of which both parties are a part of and contribute to. This is true even if you are being exploited more than them.
But then again, I’m an anarchist so I have all kinds of crazy ideas about what counts as exploitation.
p.s. Twisty, I think 2b a trick question. I can just hear the guys saying, “No fair!” But here’s why I think it’s a trick question. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)
Society is so dominated by the male viewpoint that the feminist perspective doesn’t benefit from it; we’re reacting to it, not trying to engage with it! Rather than offering “balance,” the insertion of a male point of view into feminist conversations merely reinscribes our culture’s dominant male perspective.
That’s why we need a revolution.
Twisty quoted me! *does a happy dance*
At such magical time as my Nigel is gainfully employed outside the home, he and I will have to redistribute the chores. But really, the chores are a symptom of the larger problems, and hiring someone else to do them won’t change that.
This is chicken fried bullshit on all counts. First of all, we have never referred to the woman who cleans our house as our “maid,” or even our “housecleaner.” We refer to her by name, like we do anyone else we hire to do anything in or around our home. Sunday nights are generally when we say, “Shit! Eva is coming on Monday! We’ve got to clean up this place!” (because, well, we’re messy enough that we have to clean for the woman who cleans our house). She’s not our maid — she’s the full-on human who makes our lives possible, and that’s never forgotten for a second.
And you really think the yard guy digs up my yard because he looooves it? A plumber works with toilets too — think he looooves rooting through toilets clogged with shit? If you want to act like the only think a woman who cleans houses needs is a vagina (an assertion with which I would strenuously disagree, BTW), most of what I’ve seen in terms of people hired to do the “male” house work, like landscaping and home repair, requires a strong upper body and that’s about it. The home repair foreman will be (relatively) skilled, but the guys who do the bulk of the labor are not. The use of a roto rooter attachment to a power drill (to clear a drain pipe) is no more complicated than a vacuum cleaner.
I did not ask whether or not people are exploiting the hired help generally. The question I asked before is why women exploiting the hired female help to do stereotypically female tasks is somehow worthy of more vitriol then men exploiting the hired male help to do stereotypically male tasks. Haven’t seen much in the way of a satisfactory answer for that, and it disappoints me.
After all, it seems painfully obvious that a patriarch is given license to abandon any task he so chooses, and it’s just another gear turning towards capitalistic progress. Both feminists and sexists see this as a form of okay, because the former write off the man as an exploiter of privilege anyway and the latter see no problem with exploitation. Neither holds men accountable. And if men won’t be held accountable for even their stereotypically male work, they sure as fuck won’t branch out into stereotypically female work, as there are cultural incentives for them to eschew doing laundry if they can instead go mow the lawn or wash the car and feel like they’re contributing to the upkeep of the household.
On the other hand, women are held to a higher standard, both by feminists and sexists, because the former demand that we women be pure and not commit any crimes of the patriarchy, and the latter demand that women be as subservient as possible. But they both hold women accountable in ways that men are not accountable, and I think that sucks. It should be at least as bad — if not worse — when men do it, and yet I hear feminists decrying women moreso than men. WTF?
Last person who complained about the way I kept my apartment got handed a mop. just sayin’.
Oh course Twisty say it before I do and far, far better than could I.
I think there’s a difference between work one is unable to do and one is unwilling to do.
And yes, unwilling might not be the best word choice there, but at the end of the day, given a choice between sitting down in front of a “Law & Order” marathon with a bottle of cheap red wine or cleaning my toilets, guess which one wins? I don’t use a cleaning service of any sort, but neither do I have the cleanest bathrooms in the world. (Please call before you visit so I can remedy this.)
But I think bringing in the question of hiring electricians, mechanics, and plumbers to fix problems that most of us do not have the knowledge or tools to address on our own muddies the waters a bit, doesn’t it?
Although I agree that housekeeping work can be exploitative, I have one family friend who lives a fairly nice “whitey lifestyle” on the money she makes from her cleaning business. She cleans homes and commercial properties and even has a contract with a private aircraft hangar to clean planes.
Her business gives her the flexibility to homeschool her daughter (a really cool and creative kid who is managing to escape so much crap thanks to her mom). Her husband also works for himself (hotshot oilfield trucker), so they can arrange their lives to be better parents and set their own rules for work. They live in a very nice area of town (just a few blocks from my dad, upper-middle-class executive type) and have a pretty nice life. She definitely makes more money than I do as an editor at a small publishing house, anyways!
I know some women are exploited in cleaning work, but that’s not always the rule. For some people, it really is the chance to be an independent, self-employed person with more freedom than most. No, she doesn’t love toilets, but from what I can see, she does generally like her job. There should be no shame in doing that kind of work; the problem is that we don’t give it real value.
the problem is that we don’t give it real value.
I don’t have to tell y’all why this is so, do I?
IBTP
The electrical work done by most “handymen” is not hard, and the tools required together would be less expensive than a Swiffer WetJet. Changing oil (and air filters and such — the stuff they do at Jiffy Lube) is actually very easy — the only really complicated thing about it is what to do with the waste oil, as municipalities regulate waste oil disposal heavily (and with good reason). Doesn’t require tools beyond what any independent human should have — and again, not beyond the cost of a decent mop and a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap. Same with most plumbing tasks for which you’d hire a “handyman,” like snaking a drain line or fixing a leaky faucet.
Anyone who buys a rather basic home repair book can learn how to do this stuff, and even a toolkit as wretched as the “Do it Herself” toolkit would have most of what you’d need for the above (okay, you’d need a plumber’s wrench too, and some plumber’s tape). I felt it incumbent upon myself to learn the basics of home ownership upon buying a house, and none of it’s that hard. Thing is, the tasks are time consuming, and I have more money than time…just like housekeeping.
It’s true that running new electrical lines or putting in a new hot water heater would be beyond the average homeowner, but it would also require the services beyond the average “handyman” too. So to answer your question, no — I don’t think it muddies the water at all, because I think the average “handyman” (or oil changer or landscaper) performs tasks no more skilled and requiring tools no more expensive or exclusive than those of a house cleaner. As for the perceived difference in skill level and tool exclusivity that elevates “handyman” work above house cleaning work? I know who I blame…
I am looking forward to this post going meta so that there is a post on the post on the post on the post on the post on the post on the post on the post on the post on the post on marriage.
Sunspots, it sounds to me like you don’t have a lot of respect for work generally. You certainly don’t appreciate housework, and you appear to believe that men stuck being yard cutters have “chosen” this “career.” Most electricians, plumbers, painters etc. I know are *not* in their dream “career” but doing something they can. And are charging no less than the housecleaners. And I’m sorry, they are housecleaners, not maids, I guess your friends are real a**holes if that is how they talk.
Halle-fuckin’-lujah. The hiring/exploiting of other people to take care of YOUR OWN shit is totally beyond me. I see a lot of this here in southern California–”I simply MUST have an asininely overpriced house in the suburbs, but I couldn’t possibly cut the grass or plant the annuals or vacuum the floor or wipe up the dried baby puke myself!” People discuss their “help” as if it’s NORMAL to pay other people shit money to come and maintain your life for you.
What’s even better is when I hear a sentence about “the lady who cleans my house” in proximity to a sentence about “going to the Getty/Huntington/whatever”. If you have time to make use of your season Dodgers tickets, might you not also have time to sweep your own goddamn kitchen?
If you can’t or won’t maintain it, DON’T BUY IT. And don’t use your whitey-white suburban money to pay a “surrogate drudge” to maintain it either, capitalist pig-dog!
Well, if I could go back to 1991, knowing what I know now, I would absolutely still get married. I love the partnership and companionship I have with my husband. I would keep my own name, though.
“Cleaning ladies” (horrible term!) in my neighborhood average $20 to $30 an hour, but no, that doesn’t include health benefits. I have a friend (our kids go to the same school) who cleans houses for a living, part time while her kid’s in school. It pays the rent, but there’s little in the way of extra cash, and I don’t think she’s got any health insurance. Her kid’s on public aid, fortunately, which keeps his asthma from killing him.
Most of the housekeepers ’round these parts are Polish immigrants. The nannies–who make far less per hour–are a more diverse crowd.
My housekeeper comes in once a week for about two hours and leaves with $50, which is not bad money for a 20-year-old with a high-school education and somewhat limited English-language skills. My house would be an abomination without a paid housekeeper, because I just don’t do it. Never have kept to any sort of schedule for cleaning tubs, sinks, and toilets. Can go years in between rounds of mopping or dusting.
Do I have a point with any of this? I suspect not.
I am not being flippant, but I’m not sure why paying other people to clean one’s house is any worse than paying other people to sew one’s clothes, pick one’s fruit and vegetables, slaughter one’s meat or bus the tales or wash the dishes at the restaurants one frequents. All of these jobs qualify as “shit” work, but that doesn’t stop most of us from eating at restaurants, buying cheap T-shirts from Target or Old Navy or buying produce or meat from the supermarket. What makes paying a housecleaner any worse than using your money to subsidize any of these other types of exploitation?
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying this out of any great sense of personal defensiveness. My Nigel and I clean our own house, but I am sitting here typing this in a cheap Old Navy T-shirt.
And, yeah, I do also agree that the focus on whether you or your Nigel do the housework is a bit of (but not a total) red herring when it comes to the larger picture. Equal time scrubbing the toilet bowl doesn’t make a marriage or marriage itself a joining of equals. That would be impossible.
The class part of all this is interesting, isn’t it? I was thinking in the last thread that the women I know of who seem to be fairly content in their marriages have enough money to hire out all the drudgery.
But, you know, I don’t have an asininely overpriced house in the suburbs. Nor do I buy season tickets to anything. I have an old house that is shabby and getting shabbier, which I’m hanging onto mostly because my ex creates such chaos in my son’s life, my son really needs the stability of staying here. It’s common for me to get up at 6:30, get him ready for school, start working at my computer by 7:30, take him to a doctor’s appointment, go back to my computer, take him to another doctor’s appointment, cook dinner, help him with his homework, put him to bed, then work until 10:30. I’d love to be able to afford someone to help clean the house. We’re both allergic to dust but there’s nothing I can do to keep up with it. I know my fucked-up life is this fucked-up because of the patriarchy, and a good revolution would change it. In the meantime, I’m doing what I have to in order to get by. MY job is drudgery - my life is really not thrilling. I’m barely holding things together financially. And I would feel no shame in hiring someone to help me out in any way. Whatever their color. And I do think that the difference between paying someone $7 and paying someone $20 is not insignificant in the whole picture.
I understand the problem with contributing to cycles of oppression. With all due respect to Twisty, who I think walks on water and can probably raise good feminist folk from the dead, I disagree with this argument:
“Everyone seems to love the idea of paying menials more than the going rate, as though this somehow absolves their capitalist ass from the gruesome truth of their complicity in the oppression. I hear this same argument from dudes who use strippers. What have they got to complain about? They make hudnreds of dollars a night, don’t they?”
Coming from a working class family, lots of people I love do (or have done) “menial” work: housekeeping, gas pumping, lawn mowing, bedpan changing in a third-rate nursing home. Yes, this is menial work. However, menial work is WORK–work that needs to be done, that has a value. Stripping is not work that needs to be done, that has a value. It is valued as entertaining by pervy wankers and as profitable by the honky white dudes who run your slimy neighborhood strip joints. The analogy therefore is pretty offensive.
Feeling good about your stripper addiction because strippers make a lot of money = not cool.
On the other hand, it’s reasonable to pay someone a fair wage to do menial work with the intention of screwing the system in which honky white dudes oppress women, selling them as housekeepers for minimum wage while clearing hefty profits. It’s a way of giving respect to the people doing that work, and communicating that one values said work as important.
And hey, until the revolution actually gets here, paying a housekeeper well also potentially offers an out to someone IN that profession whose only other options are shitty McJobs: they can afford to pay for training for other jobs, if they’d like.
efk, I’m a little troubled by your attitude towards anyone who works in a physical labour job. My partner is a mover. He’s paid to be big and strong. Please don’t confuse that with stupid—he went to university. He reads a lot (including feminist books that he *asks* me to give him to read). He’s bright and funny. He also happens to pick up heavy things for a living, and he’s been fairly happy doing it. I also know a roofer who was in the same “gifted and talented” class as me in elementary school, and a woman who had a full scholarship to a prestigious university and chose to be a carpenter instead.
There are many people (women as well as men) who are carpenters, plumbers, and the like because the work pays well, and many of them genuinely enjoy what they do. Being scornful of physical work is pure class snobbery.
How come nobody here is scorning eating in restaurants when we can cook our own food? Or condemning paying teachers when we can show our own kids how to read? We’ve specialized work for centuries and traded skills with each other (contrary to popular belief, even in early societies people traded work/products rather than doing it all themselves).
Perhaps we need to stop telling people that the work they have to offer in trade makes them less valuable as people. We don’t get anywhere by devaluing anyone’s role, regardless of whether it’s “women’s” or “men’s” work.
You know, in my usual hamfisted way, I clotted up my point. Which is merely that our whole world — and by ‘our’ I mean us people privileged enough to have the internet access to read this blog — floats along on the top layers of a pool that gets increasingly fetid the further down you plunge. This is no news flash, of course, but everyone who ‘earns’ more than somebody else might benefit from revisiting this observation. In other words, because this is a capitalist society, everybody ‘earns’ more than somebody, and it’s no good pretending that paying your lawn guy more than the going rate makes you anything but another benevolently paternalistic mug floating in the swamp.
I acknowledge that some who are themselves oppressed by the megatheocorporatocracy in its middle tiers do not have the luxury of living a privilege-free life. The only people who can enjoy that luxury are too oppressed to enjoy it.
This is why patriarchy’s gotta go.
Bird, I’m a little troubled by you putting words in my mouth. I never said anyone who did a physical labor job was stupid, and I have no reason to believe that they are. However, there had been a comment made upthread by Sunspots that went as follows:
My point in reacting to such a comment was that, if all a person needs to clean a house is a vagina, all someone needs to do most physical labor (like that done by a “handyman”) is a strong upper body. In other words, I was being a little flippant. In any event, to the extent my comment had any truth to it, such truth did not go to the quality of the person, but rather it went into the skill basis for the job.
In addition, another poster had asked if the waters were muddied by conflating housekeeping with tasks like electrical, plumbing or mechanic’s work, because average people can do the former but they are not capable of doing the latter. My point in describing how the non-housekeeping tasks are within the grasp of the average person was to indicate why it really doesn’t muddy the water at all to compare the two. That people may be more intimidated by minor household repairs does not mean that they should be, as the tasks required, while not always obvious, require little more than reading fairly simple instructions to complete.
Again, this does not mean anything about the people who are “handymen” — it just means that an average homeowner can probably do the same work with a little reading and a pocket of time adequate to the task. In other words, the job is of average difficulty. I have no opinion whatsoever about the quality of the person doing the job.
If I must so declare on the subject, as a general rule, when physical labor jobs are being performed by immigrant workers, I assume those workers are overqualified and overeducated for the work they’re doing. Most workers who come to the states have to do shit work that would have been beneath them in their home country, because language barriers and job certifications prevent them from doing the work for which they’re qualified in their new country. While I did not mention this earlier (because I wasn’t even talking about workers so much as work), I think physical laborers are rather smart, and certainly deserving of more stimulation than they probably receive in their jobs as laborers.
“The answer to this evidently burning question — “Am I exploiting the hired help?†is: fuck yeah. You think that guy is cutting your grass for his health? Because he just loves landscaping your honky lawn? Are you surprised that your maids didn’t want to stick their hands in your toilet?”
Twisty, until the anarchist utopia arrives, many of us have to work at jobs we don’t like just to pay the rent. Most of us take the best jobs we can. I am very sure that the women I have hired to clean house, and the men I have hired to do yard work did not feel exploited by me. I may be wrong, but only they - not you - are in a position to say so. It seems antifeminist (not to mention, mean) of you to override others’ reports of their experiences and feelings and substitute your own.
Whether the topic is marriage or hired help, generalizations - even the brilliant ones you are capable of making - will only take you so far.
btw, as a vegan I wonder at your sensitivity to certain forms of exploitation and oppression and not others. Even if you don’t give a damn about the animals - a philosophically indefensible position - both human laborers (in some cases, perhaps, the husbands of the immigrant “maids” you so vociferously claim to defend) and the environment are both pillaged for the carnist fiestas you adore and celebrate in your blog. Slaughterhouse workers are probably the most oppressed labor force in the nation - Human Rights Watch issued a report on it, their only report devoted to a U.S. industry.
No one’s pure. Think about that before you go off blaming people who happen to make different choices than you would. Everyone reading this blog is probably at the top of both the economic *and* nutritional food chains - and most of our choices are thus inevitably going to be heinous for one reason or another. At the same time, most blamers are probably actively striving to live as moral a life as possible, and they should be applauded for that, not blamed for their lapses from your program. While I understand the tactical value of staking out a clear, unambiguous position, I believe in this case you do so at the expense of your blamers and the workers they may not, in fact, be exploiting.
Well, here’s the thing. I have a bad back. I’m still living, and will always live, with the long-term effects of the whole slash, poison and burn of breast cancer treatment. I’m 54 years old. I scrubbed my own toilets and vacuumed my own floors while raising children and working fulltime for 25 years or so. My kids are now grown and gone, so I can’t make them do household chores anymore. They now have their own households to run. My husband of 35 years has been battling thyroid cancer for 7 years and currently he still manages to make all the dough. I am apparently unemployable, despite my advanced academic degrees, so the house is currently my responsibility, to do with as I see fit. That’s the deal.
I see fit to pay a cleaning service to come and clean my house. One of the crew regulars brings her infant daughter with her, which is cool by me. Sometimes I entertain her while the house is being made habitable. They work around my four cats and my elderly incontinent dog. I also see fit to hire lawn service to take care of the yard because neither of us can, or wants to, do it anymore.
I’m a radical feminist, so if this all creates a problem for anyone, you can kiss my fat white privileged ass. As someone else pointed out upthread, if you’re living a life in the US of A (and, as Twisty mentioned, you are among the minority who have the luxury of posting comments about it on an Internet blog), you’re no doubt exploiting someone somewhere just by being in this particular life in this particular time. In the next lifetime we may not be so fortunate. What matters is how we do what we do now.
See here, Dawn O’Day. I don’t blame individuals. I blame the patriarchy. I don’t have a ‘program’. I don’t argue that I or anybody else is ‘pure’. I merely point out inconsistencies in the patriarchy’s argument. One of which seems to be that the working classes are not really exploited because the middle and upper classes just can’t help exploiting them.
But you’re right; I can’t speak for the Mexican landscapers. Possiby they are grateful for the opportunity to toil away on honky lawns in 99 degree heat all summer. A pity they can’t speak for themselves. Their views might be enlightening.
You are very virtuous, though, for being a vegan. Applause!
>You are very virtuous, though, for being a vegan. Applause!
Wasn’t looking for praise, but will take it anyway! Of course the “freegans” think I’m scum: http://www.freegan.info . They point out that even a vegan lifestyle, when lived in the context of capitalism, is deeply exploitative. Can’t win… :-)
I have an unfair advantage in this discussion because my day job is in the field of microenterprise and I work for a nonprofit that helps immigrants. So I actually help Mexican (and Guatemalan, etc.) landscapers, Vietnamese housecleaners, Moroccan auto detailers, etc., every day. And, yes, the landscapers are QUITE grateful to be toiling away on honky lawns in 99 degree heat - most of them have endured great deprivation and danger for that opportunity, and work hard at it when they get it.
Do they wish they had better choices? Of course. I wish they did, too - and I’m not overlooking our society’s (and the patriarchy’s) role in the fact that they don’t. I wish I had better choices, too. But in the absence of the anarchist utopia, I can assure you that your average Mexican landscaper is HIGHLY grateful for the opportunity to earn a decent hourly wage through entrepreneurship as opposed to, say, earning minimum wage in a fast food joint.
I am also not saying that entrepreneurship is the be-all, end-all answer. plenty of people get exploited that way, too. but I presume most of your blamers are typical bleeding-heart liberals who pay the help generously…
All that said, being scolded by the illustrious TF is an honor. I have been lurking for a while and find your blog quite valuable. i have learned a lot and expect to learn much more…
Twisty, I am saddened to learn today that you don’t have a “program.” With summer stretching out ahead of me and no discernible cooking skills or knack for finding decent tacos, I was hoping that someone would give me a Scientology like ideology to devote myself to and a lockstep prescription for how to fill my days. Pity it won’t be you. Maybe I’ll just have to subscribe to that Rachel Ray magazine or something.
I think the fact that we class handyman/plumber/electrician as “skilled” and housecleaner as “unskilled” labor is rather indicative of something, isn’t it?
I mean, yes, an electrician has to learn how to set up and maintain wiring systems (and no, I don’t know anything about being an electrician), but when it comes down to it, it’s just a series of steps one needs to learn how to take.
A housecleaner needs to learn how to wash certain fabrics, for example, or that you can’t use certain cleaners together, that bleach dark carpet = bad. When it comes down to it, it’s just a series of steps one needs to learn how to take.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are things I would only hire an electrician to do (rewiring an entire house), just as there are things I would only hire a professional cleaner to do (clean up a murder scene, say, or get out the mold after a flood).
The difference is that half of the population is forcefully indoctrinated with the skills needed to perform the one task, while the other half of the population has the option of choosing to learn the skills for the other.
IBTP.
Thank you Twisty for bringing this up.
I used to be a “house cleaner”, and (surprise!) it was even more of a soul sucking drear than any other crappy job I have had since, including telemarketing, graveyard shift at Amoco, and teaching English to college freshmen.
I cleaned regularly for this divorced older dude. He was used to being coddled (because, like many men, his coming of age consisted of a smooth transition from exploiting his mother to exploiting his wife), and thus he could not perform the most basic housekeeping tasks, such as putting a dirty ketchup encrusted plate in the dishwasher.
Anyhow, I had to clean his calcified dung off of the base of his toilet with an ice scraper. After I was done, he paid me and remarked that hiring a woman to clean was more economical than being married. I think he meant it as a compliment.
IBTP!
And josie–I feel you. I hate being mired so deeply in the big P that almost everything I do-wear-eat costs someone else their health and dignity.
PS - Twisty - even if you don’t mean to blame individuals, it’s pretty clear from the defensive comments here, including my own I suppose, that many blamers feel personally blamed. I’m not saying you did blame them but the comments indicate that there is perhaps a need for clarification, or further nuance is needed in the discussion…
I thought marriage was the means by which women manage to rope in and bind the male to a lifelong obligation of the pursuit of power, aggression, competition so much so that he loses all sense of indivudual identity and becomss a mechanism for periodically delivering the big O, the moolah and the food in the service of the one who would rather not.
Sigh! I guess its just better to walk dogs and play golf.
WHy do I find it difficult to shake off the sense that intelligence and power are mutually exclusive?
P.S. I do hope you like laughing at yourself in moments of peaceful solitary tranquillity when you scrutinise the text on your previous post. We have now evolved to the state of brainwashing ourselves.
;)
The wonders and mysteries of nature and self-nurture never cease.
Firstly,
1) condescending, patriarchal “liberalism.”
2a) False.
Given that there is no interaction that two people could possibly have in an oppressive society of any kind that is not molded by or in reaction to that oppression, it is a gross understatement to say that any oppressed group is unacquainted with the point of view of their oppressors.
2b) False.
I think this is false for two reasons.
1) Feminists (and everyone else) are so well “acquainted” with the male point of view, that it’s misleading to say that there is a “balance” between feminists’ own feminist ideas and the patriarchal perspective that they’re constantly bombarded with. It’s like saying that you can balance the noise input to your ears standing in front of a PA system at rock concert by humming a tune.
2) No one “benefits” from what passes for the male point of view in our society. I put “benefits” in quotations because I’m using the term in a particular way that needs clarification. I’m not saying that men don’t profit from patriarchal oppression, because we do a lot. Rather, I’m saying that a world with less oppression is better for everybody than a world with more oppression. I think that it’s ultimately in everyone’s best interest to eradicate patriarchy because it will improve mens’ lives too. Male privilege isn’t worth the disastrous impact it has on our interpersonal relations, especially male-female relations, and it isn’t worth it to have such grievous trauma continue to perpetuate through the generations.
I think your point is especially interesting considering how distasteful of childrearing many people seem to be. Also, your related point about specialization is valuable I think because it’s the specialization of the workforce that is the foundation of urban civilization. Of course our particular global chain of urban civilizations have been all exclusively oppressive and violent (with perhaps a very few isolated exceptions), but in principal, neither of those properties are necessary parts of them.
Whoops! Sorry about the shitty formatting.
I love coming over here for a good read.
Is the answer to question #1: “patronizing”?
Is there anyone out there who actually cleans houses (or does other “women’s work” such as tending other people’s children) for a living? That’s a POV I’d like to hear on this thread.
Revolution? I can just see how it’ll go off in so far as we’ve got priorities like perfectly groomed lawns and shiny toilets and pay them immigrants to keep it that way. As one brought into this world by immigrants I have many a humiliating memory to draw on in terms my parents doing shit work. I am sure they did not mind since it allowed the fat assed upper classes to contemplate bigger, more important things like overhauling degrading social structures.
Let’s cut the crap! We’re all into “the revolution” so long as it does not inconvenience us.
I had a housecleaning service for a year; it met my needs perfectly. I would bid by the job, not the hour, then kick absolute butt on the house, cleaning in two hours what would have taken most people to do in three or four. I worked up a delicious sweat. I was going through several painful transitions in my life at the time and wanted a physical outlet. I loved that I could double up on getting a workout AND a paycheck.
But I wouldn’t have wanted it to last indefinitely.
As to child care, my daughter was once hired by a couple with a new baby to come all night while they were asleep and be the one to wake up when the baby woke up and give him a bottle. Not the first wet nurse in history, but I just thought it beat all.
CafeSiren: My daughter has devoted 10 years of her life to child care. She at one time owned her own day-care business. She now heads up the local university’s child-care center. I cannot speak for her, but I can say that it is her passion and her gift, and I can’t imagine she’d ever be as invested in anything else, career-wise.
I’ve done more crap work than I bet any of you could shake a stick at. One of the crappiest was stint at a carwash at age 16 - being ogled all day by rich old buffoons while sweating my ass off washing and vacuuming their stupid Cadillacs. Humiliating.
Another shit job I got trapped into was roofing with a bunch of redneck assholes who thought it would be funny to have me carry 50 lb bundles of shingles up the ladder all day long in 90 degree weather every day to put me in my place. (and then tried to short my pay, which was a big mistake for them. I snicker fondly at the memory…)
My feeling has always been that nothing will stand in the way of my providing food & shelter for the kid. Pride will not fill your stomach.
At any rate, working for myself cleaning houses was actually kind of nice. The people I cleaned for were generally older, or couldn’t do it for themselves for whatever reason. They were always grateful and wanted to chat and even help out as much as they could. They never made me feel beneath them.
I have also worked as a handywoman, and a welder… In both situations I was on the bottom layer and atethe bossman’s shit always (except for when I worked with other women contractors) Anyway - no I have no qualms about hiring someone and paying them a decent wage. They won’t have to put up with crap from me such as I’ve dealt with. I feel like maybe I can set an example that interdependence and equal treatment should be the norm… not hierarchy… And it’ll pay their bills til something more rewarding happens for them.
Yes, I think I’d rather live in a collective where work, child-rearing and everything is shared… but it hasn’t happened yet…
… and also, I’m surprised that no one’s mentioned that working towards a goal, whether it’s working shit jobs while getting and education for yourself, or even just to have a job that tests your endurance (physical or psychological) builds character. Sure, I just complained about those shit jobs in my above post. Those were interactions with the patriarchy which taght me a whole lot about how I would and would not treat another human being. And they taught me that if I don’t stand up for myself and demand a decent wage, decent conditions, and fair treatment, no one will do it for me… lessons which have proven invaluable…
There’s a huge difference between hiring an electrician, contractor, or plumber and hiring someone to clean your house. If you fuck up doing your own plumbing/structural repairs/electric you’re not only potentially violating county codes, but putting your life in danger. If you fuck up your laundry by throwing a blue sock in with the whites you wear blue socks and undies. One fuckup equals injury and legal troubles, the other gets you on What Not To Wear. I’m a lousy housekeeper and can honestly tell you that it’s very difficult to utterly ruin something by cleaning it “wrong”. Yes, I’ve heard of Nigels who ruined a designer dress/priceless antique/expensive carpet by their inept attempts at housecleaning. I’ve also heard Nigels exchanging tips on how to “accidentally” ruin things by cleaning so I’m inclined to dismiss those cases as deliberate acts of sabotage.
Patti and MzNicky, I would much rather my tax money went to getting you the help you need than being pissed away on crap like missile defense systems we don’t need that don’t work. IBTP for that.
1. Patronizing and pointless.
2a. False
2b. False
As to the rest, the critical point which appears to have been missed early on, is that it doesn’t matter how much you’re paying someone to do whatever job it is that you find for them to do. As long as you are participating in the economy, you are contributing to the oppression of the capitalist patriarchy. It doesn’t matter how you feel, how the workers feel, or how Twisty feels. It is something which happens.
Society today is built upon a system whereby certain people do certain classes of jobs, in order to make things run more efficiently. The way that we determine who does what job is based on interest, aptitude, and a whole lot of inherent privilege. People are paid, for those jobs, whatever they can get, and whatever those paying will give them. The reason that sports players are paid as they are is that millions of people are paying their paycheck, 20-100 bucks at a time. The reason that men are paid more than women is that that’s how it has been done, and there hasn’t been that much of a stink raised about it. No profits are threatened by the actions taken against it.
Twisty proposes revolution. What revolutionary acts have you taken? Not what incremental acts, not what acts to better yourself personally, what revolutionary acts. Personally, I have taken very few. I have not been, up to this point, a good revolutionary. This is not to say that I have not struggled against the status quo, that I have not felt the oppression which can come from rejecting your place in society, and acted against it. I rather suspect that is true for all of us. Revolution is hard. Going along with society is easy. Even the act of reading this blog and posting on it can be subverted, if we fall into the trap of thinking that this is action, if we start to feel safe knowing that others agree with us, and think of posting and reading as action. The man is out there, and he is laughing as we gather together and gripe to one another. It has been said that you need to allow the people outlets to let off some steam from time to time, that you can control them the rest.
Everything is done in context, everything is seen in context. You all know the context. Let’s do something about it. Not something quiet, or something safe, let’s do something dramatic and dangerous.
Let’s do something revolutionary.
I’m a white honky with white honky parents who have degrees and professional jobs, and they were never so swamped with their jet-set lives that they couldn’t take the fucking garbage out of their house to the edge of the lane. Maybe it’s because we didn’t live in a giant house with a giant lawn with an edge that required a Mecca-like pilgrimmage to reach. My diet was mostly home cooked, sometimes by me, since I come from a family with farm and immigrant roots. My grandparents used to kill their chickens themselves, and my parents have - under duress - resorted to buying free-range from local small farms to pacify me at family dinners. These things are possible, you know. If everyone quit defending themselves and just THOUGHT about it for a sec…
Further quibbles: I suppose the elephant in the room would be the whole “It’s too much of a fight to try and make my stubborn Nigel share the housework, so I hire a Kenyan housecleaner (but I graciously pay her 15 dollars an hour, and everyone’s happy!)” argument. In response to this I am making the “W” sign with my fingers.
Next, how often do you rewire your house as opposed to washing its floors? Wait, don’t answer.
Furthermore, the value system is fucked. If I actually WERE Emperor, I would pay teachers, nurses, farmers, apple-pickers, tailors, weavers, people who cleaned sewers, mothers of infants and small children, as well as those women to whom the responsibility for the emotional stability of the nation falls (anyone who has sat for more than one minute listening and sympathising while anyone else complains), TEN TIMES as much as I would pay the jackass astronomer who spends all year glued to a UV ray gun, charting the movement of neutrinos. The astronomer’s job is only possible because his house is cleaned and meals are made and his gitches are washed by other people. It doesn’t work the other way, though.
“Let’s cut the crap! We’re all into “the revolution†so long as it does not inconvenience us.”
Thanks, po-mo sucks. And thanks, Twisty, for the compliment of being featured in a post!
titter, the quiz is cute.
i’m jumping in having read half the comments, so perhaps this has been said: consumerism sucks. it makes slaves of everyone. i’ve hired cleaners, been one, and there are aspects that suck to both sides. but should we also be speaking of why it is we “need” all this “cleaning?”
i’m turning into a radical environmentalist as i age, and cleaning/killing nature is starting to become a sore spot with me. i live in a house with two other people, and there are days i’m ashamed of all the space we “have” to clean. i try so hard not to overconsume, and just being in the US makes that really hard. cleaning is one part of that. you *must* buy some cleaning products, regularly, or there will be consequences. very few people talk about the damage some of these chemicals do, over time and in large amount, to the environment. let me make it more direct: you’ve heard of all these drug-resistant diseases, like flesh eating bacteria? apply the same idea, to the things you’re killing as you’re cleaning them.
anyway, i’m all for civilized standards of living, but we go about it all wrong in modern consumerist society. a thousand years ago, the japanese had an amazingly clean society without environmentally destructive petroleum derived products, and at least they were honest about it: the slave class knew it had no rights and the system was set up to exploit them. today, we kid ourselves into thinking that there is some kind of science or logic behind our definitions and application of “clean,” which just happen to enslave us, destroy our environment, and keep us divided and less likely to have the revolution.
“I suppose the elephant in the room would be the whole “It’s too much of a fight to try and make my stubborn Nigel share the housework, so I hire a Kenyan housecleaner (but I graciously pay her 15 dollars an hour, and everyone’s happy!)†argument. In response to this I am making the “W†sign with my fingers.”
Yup. I always thought that part of the feminist revolution would be that men would do their fair share of the housework. It would be interesting to know how many people here have male partners who do their share of the cleaning and how many employ someone to do it.
And cleaning up after your own crap doesn’t require the skill level of being able to plumb or rewire houses, however anybody tries to spin it.
Ahhhhhhh. Somewhere in the murky bowels of my blog there is an essay or two on my struggles with these issues.
While I was married I lived HIS suburban wet dream: Huge house, enormous yard in one of the most chi-chi neighborhoods in this high-rent town. White floors and carpets, people! Before we bought that house we had a privileged white college student come in twice a month to help swamp out our apartment. I never felt guilty because she seemed so happy about the money and the flexibility.
When I extracted myself from that situation I made very deliberate choices in order to minimize my work, not to mention my ecological “footprint” on the world: A small townhome within walking distance to a grocery store/pharmacy, a teeny lawn I take care of myself (that I’m landscaping away in favor of a hardy, acid-loving Xeriscape) and a galley kitchen that was probably put in just for show because DAMN it’s small. I have two small cabinets for food.
I ripped out the carpets and my boyfriend (at the time) put down (cheap!)floors that clean up with a Swiffer and a little bit of water. This place has no garage, no basement, no attic, and limited closet space. Enormous discipline is required not to amass too much sh*t, so I make frequent trips to my sister’s house and the local Goodwill to get rid of it all.
Today I have the place fixed so that I could probably just hose the place down once a month and call it a day. Now I actually LIKE cleaning house. There is absolutely NO need to hire someone else to do my shitwork since there is so little of it to do.
Random Lurker wrote:
There’s a huge difference between hiring an electrician, contractor, or plumber and hiring someone to clean your house. If you fuck up doing your own plumbing/structural repairs/electric you’re not only potentially violating county codes, but putting your life in danger. If you fuck up your laundry by throwing a blue sock in with the whites you wear blue socks and undies. (end quote)
If you mix bleach with limescale remover, you can gas yourself. If you let gunge build up then spread it around with a wet cloth that’s been kept damp and fermenting for a week, you can spread e coli. If you use the wrong substance to clean a floor, you can create a slip hazard. If you put broken glasses away or dump things on top of glass in the washing up bowl or sink, you create a hazard. If you stand on stools to dust hard to reach places, you can endanger yourself. People slip, trip, fall, burn themselves and die in houses every day.
I’ve worked in care work and my particular job was a mixture of housework, cooking and cleaning shitty bottoms. All of which had to be done correctly because you were trying to keep the ‘clients’ alive and healthy, and yourself too.
Housework is skilled. Childcare too. It’s not the work that’s the problem, it’s the lack of value attached to it.
“PS - Twisty - even if you don’t mean to blame individuals, it’s pretty clear from the defensive comments here, including my own I suppose, that many blamers feel personally blamed. I’m not saying you did blame them but the comments indicate that there is perhaps a need for clarification, or further nuance is needed in the discussion…†–Dawn O’Day
Naturally, blamers are always encouraged to feel something when they read my posts. What they feel is more or less out of my hands. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I had become fatigued sugarcoating my prose against the possibility that readers might be offended by it, and that consequently I was taking back my blog. Henceforth my essays will reflect my personal prejudices, and the comments will reflect the blamers’. The way I see it, it’s a win-win.
In the case under discussion, I am advancing (in an apparently clumsy and incomprehensible way) the view that marriage (and its concomitant nuclear family) is instrumental in sustaining a racist caste system and an exploitative global economy. Although my point is largely a theoretical one, so far the arguments against this view have pretty much consisted of “I can’t help it†and one or two “my menials aren’t really oppressed.†Nobody has succeeded in making a case showing how the performance of traditional Western middle-class patriarchy-approved behaviors (like marriage and nuclear familyism) actually liberates any oppressed groups, so as yet there is no real disagreement here. Just some discomfort. Which, frankly, I am relieved to see.
How come I’m not interested in trying to make everyone feel better about their participation in capitalist oppression? Why should I? Is capitalist oppression good or something?
But Dawn O’Day. I would be very interested to hear the punctuational argument for ending your remark with an ellipsis rather than a period.
Twisty, much of what you say about marriage is true. The system, in our society, is going to skew towards putting women in various oppressive roles. But I wonder if it’s occurred to you that when you note that “from a field of over 250 starters, only a few argue that marriage is anything but a hotbed of bogosity,” this pool may be a bit self-selected. Anyone who feels marriage can work under certain conditions will be criticized and accused of Nigeling.
I completely agree with what Spit and other have said about how, with all good intentions, marriage can turn to shit for women. No question about that.
But I think it’s somewhat unfair to Rainbow Girl and others who are looking at their futures to paint a universally gloomy picture.
I think the way marriage can work is for women to wait until they are comfortable that they’re financially self-sufficient, and until they can trust their partners to come up with an equitable method of child care and dividing housework. eg, day care with enough shared parent time during the week so that the parents feel comfortable about their level of involvement. Or if family members are nearby and can combine with day care. If a woman is not sure that her prospective partner is committed to equally sharing housework and child care, then yes, don’t do it, because yeah, there’s a trap ahead.
The examples I’ve seen (and the one I experience) where marriage works are ones in which the woman waited until her 30s (not that there’s a magic number) and was equal or above her husband in earning power. This isn’t a class-based argument; some of these women were working class, but their husbands were too. Granted, in these situations, child care can be tougher. But then, poverty makes everything tougher, and marriage isn’t necessarily the bogeyman that makes it all worse, if the economic parity and trust components are there.
Delphyne: “I always thought that part of the feminist revolution would be that men would do their fair share of the housework. It would be interesting to know how many people here have male partners who do their share of the cleaning and how many employ someone to do it.”
My husband does probably 60% of the housework and I do about 60% of the childcare when my daughter isn’t at school, or with daycare or a relative. Yes, we do employ a cleaner — it’s actually a husband and wife team. They come twice a month and alternate, so each one is coming once a month, and they each get $100 a stint. I think it sucks that because of unequal economic opportunity, some of us are paying others to clean our houses. And yet a lot of that is a poverty issue rather than a gender issue. The bottom line is, paying someone fairly, given the underlying economic problems, isn’t the problem; poverty is.
If you will permit another flight of theoretical fancy, I might suggest that the actual problem is this so-called ‘civilized’ habit of trading resources for labor. This is a system which works only when the resources traded are valued at less than the labor, because the end goal is always profit. What do you suppose causes poverty in the first place? Why do you suppose that the gulf separating the rich and the poor reaches new depths of abyssitude all the time? The average corporate CEO makes 8 million a year, corporate profits are skyrocketing, and guess what? There’s nothing trickling down! Laborers aren’t getting corresponding raises. If they did, minimum wage would be over $20 an hour.
My other bit of prejudiced advice, to anyone who likes clean floors but is disinclined to sweep’em herself, is this: get a Roomba! It’s the first step toward Shulie’s sci-fi utopia of chick-leisure! Who doesn’t love a robot?
“In the case under discussion, I am advancing (in an apparently clumsy and incomprehensible way) the view that marriage (and its concomitant nuclear family) is instrumental in sustaining a racist caste system and an exploitative global economy.”
To the contrary, I think you have advanced your view quite clearly and effectively.
Here’s a radical idea that will tide us over until the revolution is completed:
Don’t have more stuff than you can take care of.
No, seriously.
House too big to clean?
Live in a small one. Try an apartment.
But what about the lawn?
Have a teeny one. Or replace it with self-sustaining native plants.
Or just don’t live in a place that requires you to have one.
Maybe we won’t achieve the revolution right away.
But we can all start to deconstruct capitalism/consumerism right now.
Have less. Exploit less.
For the record, I live with my kids in a 2 bedroom apartment.
The neighbors and I all take turns shoveling snow, planting flowers, and cleaning the hallways.
I clean my own damn toilet.
It’s not perfection, but it works okay.
Well, certainly there’s a lot of truth to that. Yes, this system is corrupt, and I agree that trickle-down is mostly BS.
The issue, though, is that your proposal seems indeed to be somewhat of a flight of fancy. How, actually, would you propose that we get rid of the trading of resources for labor (yeah, revolution, but how would that happen exactly)? It’s a worthwhile proposal, but what would it look like, how would one implement it? Would we lose any entrepreneurial creativity by doing so? I don’t know if we necessarily would, actually, but how we’d get there in the first place seems insurmountable. Looking at how things would work if we could get rid of various structures, as an exercise to see what we could be doing differently, is valuable, but does it really change the realities?
I fear that incremental steps to change the current system are probably going to be the best solution we have. If there were a way of reconfiguring and setting caps on CEO and executive comp, so as to enact a higher minimum wage, I’d be all for it. And there are probably other such steps that could get lessen the “abyssitude.” These are far from ideal, but I’m not sure the ideal is achievable.
Twisty: “This is a system which works only when the resources traded are valued at less than the labor, because the end goal is always profit. What do you suppose causes poverty in the first place?”
Totally. Profit is theft. Capitalism is institutionalized theft.
I am one of the ones who feels she has made an equitable marriage, and it’s not because he does most of the housework (although he does, and thank God, because otherwise we’d live in squalor (as my ex-husband and I did)). When Sweetie and I first got together, I could not believe how utterly gentle he was with me. He’s not a big guy–we’re about the same height, and he’s thinner than I am–but we all know that they don’t have to be big to be scary. When he touched me, he did so lightly and tentatively, as though he recognized and respected my person. What a thought, right? While I’m sure he would fight like a madman to defend me if that were called for, he is not and has never been what anyone would call a “protector.” And it occurred to me all at once one day early in our relationship that all the “protector” bullshit is nothing more than an implied threat of violence against the “protected.” Of course, we have to start with the idea that there’s something to be protected against, but that’s the premise of, oh, everything I can think of, from mainstream entertainments to politics to economics to dogs to religion. So we have a premise. Let’s have a syllogism, from the protector’s point of view:
Major premise: He can hurt you.
Minor premise: I can hurt him.
Conclusion: You are safe.
But that’s not really the conclusion, is it? The real conclusion is “We can hurt you.” That fawning “I just feel so safe with him” crap that some women spew about their Nigels is nothing more than an authentic fear response perverted to serve the patriarchy.
Back to Sweetie. I feel safe with him because, to him, I am not an object on which physical force is to be exerted. At all. Ever. Not by him or anyone, for any reason. If he waves his hand and accidentally hits me, he flinches and apologizes and asks if I’m okay. I feel safe with him precisely because he is not a protector. We can never really know what’s in anyone’s mind, but from the evidence I’ve gathered, I am safe with him. I don’t feel “protected” with him. I’m an adult–my protection is my business. I feel like a person with him. Like a subject, not an object. He does not treat me as an entitlement, and does not seem to feel any particular privilege over my body or mind.
This is great for me and all, but it’s sickening that the best thing a woman can say about a man is that he truly sees her as a person. It’s even more sickening that the best most women can say about their husbands in terms of whether and how he values her time and energy is that he does his share of the housework. Those fuckers want cookies for acting like human adults. Shit on them.
“The issue, though, is that your proposal seems indeed to be somewhat of a flight of fancy.” — Octogalore
But Octogalore, I haven’t exactly made a proposal (unless you count the Roomba). Have I?
In this post it was my purpose to suggest that liberation from oppression — which I see as the goal of radical feminism — isn’t just about middle class Americans cleaning their own toilets. True liberation has ramifications that many white American feminists just don’t see, or are unwilling to see, because they are in many respects the direct beneficiaries of oppression, and stand to lose big (at least they’d see it that way) if justice for all were ever to actually come about.
I’m more a boat-rocker than a go-to guy. I leave it to those without chemo-brain and radiation poisoning to spearhead the revolution. Plenty of people find boat-rocking to be of little value, but, like I always say, you get what you pay for at I Blame the Patriarchy.