The Case for Filth

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/the-case-for-filth.html?pagewanted=3&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all

by msrpotus • 13 years ago

59 33 13 years ago

dnautics2• 13 years ago

ok this is anecdote, and I know it doesn't apply to all women, but my roommate once told me that during PMS she gets the urge to clean. More interestingly: she has a pseudoscientific belief that that, psychologically, her urge to clean comes because her body has failed to get the egg fertilized "the primary function of her body" and so she has to do something to feel useful.

rquantz3• 13 years ago

Does she have any pseudo-basis for this pseudoscientific belief?

dnautics2• 13 years ago

honestly she doensn't even have many girl friends of her own besides her mother, so I would not be terribly surprised if her N on this was really low.

ddebernardy• 13 years ago

Methinks one of the NYT commenters nails it best. In practice, many couples eventually find a sweet spot where one party reluctantly performs more chores than it would naturally do, while the other party either tolerates a lot more filth than it wants to or copes with an uneven share of the household chores -- usually both.

That being said, and as a few female commenters astutely point out, the article's author would gain some additional perspective by having a few children in his household. Cleaning up baby puke and a 4-person household's mountain of laundry isn't in the same ballpark as worrying about vacuuming a two-adult household's rug the next day.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

I don't think people's private lives are the business of anyone else. It's not the government, or academia's job to force or convince men to do more housework (or women do less).

The argument that they would give is that actions of individual in their private lives have effects on others, in particular contributing to a common culture, and so as a society we should try to shape this culture in positive ways.

My argument against this is that our culture should reflect the beliefs and values of the people as a whole, and not the elites. The only legitimate role of the government in shaping culture is to remove the excesses that prevent people from exercising their legal rights. E.g. cultural views that certain kinds of violence are acceptable, need to be curbed because they make punishing the perpetrators of these acts extremely difficult.

rquantz3• 13 years ago

What planet are you on? No one is suggesting the government force anyone to do anything with regard to housework. The antigovernment herds come out whenever anyone suggests that our government should do something. That's par for the course on HN. But I have to say, seeing someone just start ranting against government intrusion in a topic that has nothing to do with it is... unusual.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

What planet are you on?
The antigovernment herds...

Your tone is quite disrespectful. Is this really necessary?

To answer your question, the article makes constant reference to academic work, and while this work is nominally descriptive, it is clear from the nature of the studies that they are part of a program to influence people's actions. I mention government as well because there is no sharp distinction between government policy and academic research, and I wanted to address a broader point in my comment. Both academia and government policy serve a similar high level purpose of furthering certain social goals. If I claim that certain goals are outside of what the government should be interested in, then this applies equally to academic research and government policy.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

Traditionally, housekeeping was taken to reflect on a man's resources but on a woman's character. A man with a dirty house is just broke, which is not that humiliating (if you don't have a family to provide for) in times like 1935 or 2013. Thankfully, that attitude is peeling away and it's only taken to reflect on a woman's resources, and nothing more. It isn't right to have cleanliness (or the lack thereof) interpreted differently for the genders.

What I find screwy and wrong is that cleaning services (which are necessary if two people are going to work career jobs, since career jobs rarely come in under 50 hpw including commute) and childcare come out of after-tax income. That is fucked up and probably a bit misogynistic. There are a lot of women who leave the workforce involuntarily because, after having a couple of kids, they can't afford to work. This is the kind of shit we get from a predominantly conservative political class which (a) isn't fully sold on women working, largely because (b) they, unlike most of us, don't need two people working.

adjwilli• 13 years ago

You'd think conservatives would support a domestic work tax credit then since they would be most likely to afford domestic employees and thus benefit the most.

xradionut• 13 years ago

No, the attitude I hear in the Deep South is: If you are successful, you can afford professional services and your spouse doesn't need to work, if not, you are a loser and not a good enough Christian. Work harder! (And send my kids to St Thomas for spring break while you enjoy your stay-cation.)

Even the executives where I work don't really comprehend the stresses of a "normal" two income family. They have evolved to live in a disconnected reality.

willmacdonald• 13 years ago

Actually in Sweden there is a tax break like that. It covers domestic cleaning and house hold refurbishments.

Originally you used to collect the receipts and at the end of the year you recieved 50% of the cost as a tax break.

Now the cleaners/builders include the 50% off when they quote for the work. This just means they all doubled their rates.

avn2109• 13 years ago

(Owning few possessions) + Roomba + Scooba = tolerably clean bro pad.

In this case technology really is driving a social change. Even 10 years ago my dudely apartment would not have been anywhere near this clean. You can eat off my hardwood right now.

ht_th• 13 years ago

I agree. I often saw these cleaning bots as decadency or superfluous gadgets, but since I've gotten one I have changed my opinion of them. They clean good, consistently, and on schedule. My living room -- the place my bot lives in -- is spotless. The other rooms I clean them once a week by placing the bot in one of the rooms to clean while I tidy and wash another room. It takes less time, it is less boring, and my house is cleaner than ever. And as a bonus, my allergies are less problematic to boot.

greeneggs• 13 years ago

A cleaning service is not necessary for most people. (Admittedly, "most" = me in this case, but do you have a better argument?) And even if it were necessary, I don't see why it should be tax-subsidized. Lots of true necessities, like food, aren't.

To contest your second point, people should work where they are most productive, and the government shouldn't deliberately subsidize inefficiencies. Taking care of kids is work, just like working at a retail store or writing novels, and the government shouldn't subsidize one or the other.

knowitall3• 13 years ago

Yeah it's really annoying that once you have kids, you also have to spend time with them.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

Emotional commitment can't be outsourced. You have to be there for their most important moments (recitals, ball games, etc.) You have to spend at least a couple hours every day with your kids, sure. But, for most people, I'd say that if you can outsource cleaning up messes, you should. That way, when you are with your kids, you're energetic and happy rather than overburdened and worn.

Kids with two successful parents who engage with the world on their terms are going to be better off-- they'll have the confidence to expect the world to meet them on their terms, and because they have this, it will-- than if they get somewhat more with-parents time, but their parents are constantly worried about housework and money.

angersock• 13 years ago

The conclusion drawn at the end of the article "Fuck it, don't clean the house!" isn't really supported by the (interesting!) discourse preceding it.

Having lived for the past ten years in various sorts of multi-person housing situations, there is indeed almost always a mismatch of who wants what cleaned how much.

The solution that sort-of works is to make sure everyone has their own space (bedrooms, usually) and then to agree upon some bare level of cleanliness for the commons area. In turn, the commons area is kept fairly empty: the more stuff you put in a space the harder it is to get everyone to agree on what to do with that stuff, and the harder it is to both keep it clean and notice that it's dirty in the first place.

One of my roommates and I had very compatible outlooks on what "clean" means: he's very detail oriented and was brought up scrubbing floors with toothbrushes towards a standard of cleanliness you only get in the whitest and most suburban of backgrounds, and I'm very very functional in mindset--clean is good, but organized is better. Between the two of us, I kept the large stuff organized and looking neat, and he'd handle a lot of the semi-periodic drudgery of scrubbing floors and whatnot. I would of course pitch in as requested, but that's kind of how it shook out.

Other roommates I've had have not always been so good. A road to disaster is "Whoever made the mess, clean it up", and a surer road does not exist. To wit:

One of my old apartments during school was shared one summer by two other students, one of whom was (and is!) a dear friend of mine. All of us had fairly libertarian fuck-you-got-mine leanings, and so we all agreed that "whoever made the mess, clean it up" was a good policy.

Naturally, this requires that all parties both keep an accurate account of what they've made dirty, and also that they clean things up on request. Both of these things do not happen in the real world.

It came to a head one day when I discovered that I could not use the sink, because both basins had become filled with dishes (no dishwasher was available, so we hand-washed our dishes). You cannot cook in a kitchen without a functioning sink, and so I crossly began processing all of the pots, pans, dishes, cups, and assorted crap that had accumulated.

While elbow deep in this, my roommates come out of their respective bedrooms and begin chatting with me. The conversation was as predictable as it was unproductive: "I have no problem doing my dishes, but if you can't prove that they're mine, it's not fair to ask me to do them."

It wasn't until they saw the fires of hell burning in my eyes as I struggled to resist the urge to beat them both to death with the frying pan I'd been failing to clean that they stopped this absurd line of discussion.

My current living situation is much better, precisely because we're all on the same page: we're all going to be mildly inconvenienced from time to time, but we have better things to do than optimize the arrangement of household problems.

Whoever kills the toilet paper goes and finds more. Whoever finds the dishwasher full and cycled unloads the dishes. Whoever notices the trash is too full empties it.

Certain tasks do have an affinity--I, for example, always vacuum up after my dog's fur. Other roommate always cleans up pans after they've cooked. It all works.

The big trick is to respect the people you live with, to have empathy for them, and most importantly to realize that in the long-term you are going to be a lot better off if you adopt a policy of "I'll fix this as soon as I find an issue". That works especially because it keeps things from building to a point where they get to be an issue.

Stop-the-world garbage collection, in real-life as in systems engineering, is not the best policy for normal work.

Long story short, I think that anyone who wants to really get a gut-level feeling about concurrency and OS design should live in close proximity with other people for a while. It gives you a new appreciation for those issues.

thwarted2• 13 years ago

And if an incompatibility is found/uncovered in this regard, the deal/relationship should be broken off (either the non-respecting/dysfunctional roommate is asked to leave, or the functional one chooses to leave). That's the only solution for Tragedy of the Commons, and roommates are one of the few cases where something can actually be done about Tragedy of the Commons.

While it's often considered "fair" to split everything equally, I've found it useful to, for example, have one person's name on the lease and it's their place and can kick anyone out (if the landlord/lease is agreeable to that, depends on income and the rental market, really). For the same reasons outlined elsetimes on HN about how to split stock and voting rights between founders -- it's useful to have one place where the buck stops so as not to get bogged down in not being able to break a tie. If there's only one person's name on the lease, things are a lot easier (and often faster) to deal with when the relationship goes sour, for whatever reason.

hobs• 13 years ago

I really like that last bit, I honestly dislike the resentment that builds in these types of situations, especially because good friends can come out hating each other.

Having one person who is the tyrannical dictator for life is a good pick imo.

eru• 13 years ago

Or you can just throw money at the problem, and hire a cleaner.

shirro• 13 years ago

Keeping a clean home is about discipline and not gender. Some people take it to OCD levels and others are negligent but there is a reasonable middle ground. Cleaning up after yourself is an attribute of adulthood. If you can't do it you are still a child.

poppysan• 13 years ago

If a person is over 18 in the US they are an adult, and to base this on what actions they choose to take is the wrong metric. For instance, My wife and I work a lot and choose not to handle the major cleaning tasks, such as mopping, dusting, vacuuming, and the like ourselves. We outsource it to a cleaning company who does a weekly pass on these things. The house stays in pretty good shape in between, and the only time I have to clean much is if the kids are being rambunctious.

True, if I couldn't afford it I would have to do more myself or burden my wife to do it, but it doesn't make me less of an adult.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

It doesn't take a particularly generous reading to say that hiring someone is cleaning up after yourself. That is (for the purposes of the gp comment), you make sure your house isn't a mess, the details of how aren't interesting.

pessimism• 13 years ago

As someone with severe dust-mite allergy (that went undiagnosed until I was 18), please consider cleaning your space—regardless of who you are. Clean houses are more than status symbols.

analog31• 13 years ago

And don't have carpets. Also, less stuff means less dust. My mom is a clean freak (also a scientist), and most of her rules have to do with the amount of stuff in the house rather than how it's kept.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Funny I should find this after mopping and scrubbing my kitchen floor (I have a Y chromo, BTW.)

I like a certain amount of cleanliness and order, not Felix Unger levels, so I handle my assigned areas to the level I like and no one seems to object.

Women who'd like men to at least appreciate housework might advocate more men joining the Armed Forces. My three-year stint was pretty much latrine duty.

niels_olson• 13 years ago

Married for 13 years, kids of 11 and 8. I consider Thwarted's comment

The big trick is to respect the people you live with, to have empathy for them, and most importantly to realize that in the long-term you are going to be a lot better off if you adopt a policy of "I'll fix this as soon as I find an issue"

Very insightful. I know I don't do as much housework, to the point that I hired out the lawn work. So when I can, I do. I do the dishes fairly regularly and generally recruit the kids to help. We FaceTime with my parents every Sunday at 7 pm. While Grammy, PePa, and the kids read Harry Potter round-robin, my wife and I are in the background folding laundry.

My wife has total freedom to have a made service come in. I will never argue with that.

Does money buy happiness? I don't know, but it definitely buys time to pursue happiness more efficiently.

sonier• 13 years ago

Does money buy happiness? I don't know, but it definitely buys time to pursue happiness more efficiently.

Money buys time. The more you are willing to spend to quickly solve some of life's problems, the more time you will have to do what matters to you, whether that be seeking happiness, money or knowledge.

Money also takes away distractions. I started using a wash and hold service in NYC. About once a week, on my way to work, I drop off my clothes, on the way home I pick them up washed and folded. Something so simple only saves me ~1 hour a week, but not having to think about and planning to allocate time is worth so much more.

mavhc• 13 years ago

There's less housework to be done, with better tools, so it takes less time, no need to iron with modern clothes, no need to file papers with computers, less dirt roads, less need to clean. Dishwashers, washing machines are cheaper and therefore more common.

knowitall3• 13 years ago

"There is a slight correlation between the egalitarianism of a household and a fairer division of domestic labor"

How did they measure "fairness" of the division of domestic labor? I suspect that their evaluation is very biased.

To assume 50% division is fair is just wrong.

Edit: to explain, you have to take context into account. For example one person might care more for some things to be cleaned than another (for example some people like to clean the house to perfection EVERY DAY). One person might do more other work. And so on. Where does the assumption come from that people are forced into disadvantageous relationships? Possibly people know exactly what they sign up for, and whatever division of domestic labor they end up with is exactly what they negotiated for (consciously or subconsciously). And before you mention the children, note that painting the job of caring for children to be so horrible is just pure ideology. Maybe some people actually enjoy spending time with their children - more than spending time with Excel and Power Point.

Also, how is the division of domestic labor even measured? In time? Or awfulness of tasks? Is filling the washing machine equivalent to cleaning the toilet?

The Case for Filth

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