Is your cleaner still a feminist issue? Time was, I didn’t approve of people who hired cleaners. I subscribed to the view that it was tantamount to slave culture – the better-off exploiting the less well-off. One set of people declining to have the basic dignity to clean up after themselves; another set cleaning up after them, usually for a pittance. Get me in the right mood, with the right glass of wine in my hand, and I could go on (and on!) about this. Then I had children and I shut up sharpish.
Since then, I like to think my attitude towards housework has become more nuanced – others might say, hypocritical. Now I would say that cleaners are just people doing a job, the same one I did occasionally when I was younger. Pay them properly, like any other professional… and chill.
The feminist angle worked too. If cleaners didn’t exist, busy women would be lumbered. Most men were shameless skivers – they felt that housework was demeaning, “women’s work”. They were still pining for a lost world where women bustled around in pinnies, while men did naff all, like useless giant children, still pretending to be too incompetent to vacuum. Oh, whatever, male sex! Get me in the right mood, with the right glass of wine in my hand, and I could go on (and on!) about this too.
However, now there’s a new study, by a researcher from the University of Warwick, which questions accepted wisdom on housework gender wars. The research noted that different male approaches to household chores might have something to do with class and earning levels. While women still do the most housework, and men still use the “incompetence” ruse, men also do say they believe in gender equality. However, while those on lower incomes increasingly mucked in with housework, men on higher incomes not so much.
This is fascinating, if, like me, you’ve always directed your resentment about housework towards the entire male sex. Some might have automatically presumed that working-class men would be the most bullishly traditional, while middle-class men would be the most enlightened and egalitarian, but it would seem not. Then there’s the issue of how these attitudes could have an impact on women with higher-earning partners – holding them back at work. Meanwhile, lower-earning male partners appear to be adapting to the more supportive roles that changing times demand.
How interesting that housework could be morphing into a class-based issue, rather than about general male entitlement.
As well as opting for “visible” forms of housework such as shopping and cooking, to maximise the perception that they were doing their fair share, middle -class men were also more likely to monetise the issue by hiring a cleaner to “justify their laziness”. Um, some might say, that’s the same thing that middle-class women do. But it isn’t, is it?
Cleaners aren’t full-time housekeepers. Generally, cleaners come in for a few hours a week and that’s not going to sort out all the cleaning, never mind all the non-cleaning things that need doing in a home. Simply paying for a cleaner doesn’t begin to cover “housework” and perhaps those middle-class men need to stop pretending they think it does. While they’re at it, they also need to stop jawing on about believing in gender equality, while helping out less with the boring drudgery than the average working-class man. Here they are making an effort to live and breathe gender-equality, rather than merely talk about it.
So yes, cleaners are still a feminist issue – and so are the men most keen to pay for them.
Here’s another Shade of absurdity
How delightful that the Barbican arts centre is planning a parent and baby screening of 50 Shades of Grey. I don’t know about you, but I like my erotica to come with a fragrant waft of “filled nappy”, “soaked nipple guard” or “rusk breath”. Oh no, hang on, I don’t. In fact, isn’t this a terrible idea?
First, it’s an insult to the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, implying that she’s done such a bad job that even babies are allowed into the cinema. Obviously, the babies would be unaware of what was happening on screen.
Still, you can’t imagine the Marquis de Sade opening the door to an orgy to find a couple with a baby standing there saying: “We just couldn’t settle him – is it OK if we just pop him at the side with a Postman Pat DVD?”
This confirms what I’ve long suspected about 50 Shades of Grey – that it’s lame lady porn, now so unpardonably so that you can take the kids along to watch too. I, for one, didn’t care for the book, propagating as it did the idiotic fallacy that something wildly dangerous and exciting was happening, just because a guy in a suit was acting a bit moody.
One would hope that female sexual fantasies are much more lurid and reprehensible than that – did Shere Hite do all that research for nothing?
This parent-baby screening of 50 Shades represents the ultimate dissing, undermining and neutralising of female sexuality.
I object to the idea that women are into sex, or even just watching sex, that’s so pathetic and tame small children can watch it with them. Whatever your views on porn, what does it say that men get Debbie Does Dallas while women get Watch With Mother?
Good news if you can’t sleep – Wolf Hall is on next
This is a warning to beware of watching the BBC production of Wolf Hall without medically trained staff present. It’s been reported that it’s spreading narcolepsy throughout the land; symptoms include eyes glazing over, uncontrollable drooling and terrible cravings to switch over to Celebrity Big Brother.
Watching the first episode, I drifted into a deep, uneasy slumber. When I awoke, I was wearing rags and had a 3ft white beard. I then attempted to view the second episode and, so far as I can make out, I haven’t actually woken up again yet.
Enough of the snark – what happened? Wolf Hall is haemorrhaging viewers because it’s so slow, dull and darkly shot.
As for the mumbling – it makes Marlon Brando in The Godfather come across like an over-stimulated Brian Blessed.
How could Hilary Mantel’s twice Booker-winning vision end up on screen looking like this? Presumably the aim was to stay true to the period, keep characters naturalistic, in short, do things “properly”. However, is there such a thing as doing things too properly? More populism and less “properly” wouldn’t have gone amiss.