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

------
yetanotherphd
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.

~~~
rquantz
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.

~~~
yetanotherphd
>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.

~~~
rquantz
_Your tone is quite disrespectful. Is this really necessary?_

Maybe not, but what you're saying still doesn't make sense. There are lots of
things trying to influence our actions, and the academe is one of the least of
them. What's more, it is necessary to have robust inquiry into anything and
everything. It can be argued what should and should not be the purview of
government, but you're trying to say that anything government shouldn't be
involved with, also should be left alone by academia? That's ridiculous. Oops,
sorry to be disrespectful there. But what you're saying is some kind of weird
paranoid lunacy.

------
niels_olson
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
> 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.

------
pessimism
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
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
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.

------
dnautics
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.

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

~~~
dnautics
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.

------
mavhc
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.

------
shirro
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
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
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.

------
michaelochurch
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
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
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.

------
angersock
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.

~~~
thwarted
_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._

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
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.

~~~
thwarted
I won't enumerate all the details why having one person have at least 51%
voting power is valuable, because the writeups about stock shares does it
better justice, but I will say that I think it's naive to think "we're best
friends, that will never happen to us".

At least one of the parties needs to be a big enough person to quickly
recognize and change a relationship that is going downhill, because if the
relationship is important, the current bad situation will lead to that
resentment buildup, often times completely destroying any hope for a
reconciliation.

"We can't live together, so we don't" is a more useful state to be in than
"We're friends, we _should_ be able to live together."

------
knowitall
"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?

