Saturday I went looking at cars after coming back from building a house (I actually stood around and watched — the board of directors, and some executives from a local builder did much of the work, but I digrees) and wasn’t just LIED to about the car I was looking at, I was lied to about half a dozen things about the car I was looking at.

Men don’t go through 1/10th the cr@p women do when it comes to buying cars. Men can ask straight questions, and subject only to slimey sales practices, get straight answers. Women have to put up not only with all the slimey sales practices, but some pretty straight forward lies and deceptions. And don’t DARE be interested in performance cars because then the poor sales dude hasn’t a clue how to even talk about performance to a woman.

All done. Feel better now!

I might argue therefore that it’s a male privilege not to be constantly assaulted by messages about how it’s your responsibility to keep your environment clean and tidy. ”

And Steph hits the nail on the head. It’s socialisation, not biology. Postive versus negative reinforcement, classical conditioning and all that jazz. There are just lesser social penalties attached male skankiness than to female skankiness.

Wow, just…wow.
1. Failing to pee after sex is not actually lethal for those of the female persuasion.
2. Changing underwear more often during mentruation? Were you under the impression that we didn’t change it daily already? Barring unfortunate accidents I’m not getting this at all. You’re imagining that menstruating women run around changing their panties every couple of hours? Because that sure would be inconvenient at the office.
3. I personally have rolled over and fallen straight asleep after sex on many occasions without performing some elaborate cleaning ritual involving disinfectants and douching. I’m not dead yet, nor have I ever suffered any kind of infection as a result of doing so, yet I have a vagina. Mysterious…
As to the wearing the same underwear for 30 days…I think that a man who would do so would be rather an outlier, don’t you? Or at least rather unpopular?

I now have a funny mental image of a woman looking at her watch and going “uh oh, 3:15 PM, time to do the genital check! OK, all good, must remember to perform the next act of routine maintenance at 5:30. Better change the panties, too.”
Hey Amp, that would make a great cartoon…

Comment: Women do the chores that they want to do, which means those that are relatively clean, or nurturing. Women wait (and wait, and wait) until the get their men to repair the car, change the tire, replace the toilet, fix the plumbing leak, remove the prickly weeds, and so on. If it’s really hard or nasty to do, women try to get men to do it. So, yes, women do more hours of household work than men, but men do the tasks that women really don’t want to do.

1) people who look like pushovers or who can be easily controlled by the salesmen pay more for their cars;
2) One of the tactics used to control is confrontation, which many people are socialized to avoid;
3) more women than men are assumed to be pushovers, which is to say the salesman “tries something” in (presumed) assurance she will not walk out;
4) in reality, this creates selective perception: There are certainly more men who are pushovers, but they never get “discovered” because the salesmen don’t go all snarky on them. If you try the tactic on women all the time, you’ll find more women who are pushovers!
5) continue as above.

If you think that women really ARE less confrontational you can see it will have even more effect.

It’s really a lot like police work: If you arrest a lot of blacks on a pretext, and only arrest whites with clear probable cause, you’ll arrest more blacks, so you’ll convict more blacks. Which gives you (incorrect) justification for your pretextual arrests, which makes you go do it more, which reinforces your (incorrect) beliefs. And so on.

I really don’t think the weight thing is accurate.

You might rewrite it to say:
“…so that she can get the social effects she wants.”

Or else you’re just faulting men for enjoying the way thin women look.

SOCIETY will not castigate a woman who isn’t like Kate Moss. She may or may not get the girl/boyfriend she wants, but that’s really her call. She will have friends, get into school, get jobs, get cars. Just like me, if she wants to look like a certain way she may need to change her behavior. The “need” to be underweight is really not the same as some of the other needs in the list.

For me, I’d want to first find out her goals without directly asking her- this is an observation and history project. What does she get if her process of cleaning is done? i.e. I’d guess it will be hard to negotiate on process if you haven’t first decided on the goals.- you could just end up talking past each other, or proposing new processes that don’t contribute to goals and thus sounds unthoughtful.

For example, here are my goals for cleaning:
1. No bad surprises
2. No missing items
3. No suddenly and unnessarily difficult projects
4. Being ready for guests
5. Efficient and predictable time management.

These are all about housecleaning, even though cleaning isn’t mentioned in them. What it means to me:

1. No bad surprises– no bad stinks, no zones with too much dust or mildew (I’m mildly allergic. Several friends and relatives who might visit are allergic),
no sticky messes that could get onto my clothes just before work or could attract ants,
no clutter where I could stub my toe when up in the middle of the night.

2. No missing items- I’ll always have enough kitchen supplies to make a meal, dishes to put out a meal, clean towels (remember no stinks) and a mildew-free shower, and some clean clothes for either casual or slightly dressy situations.
No workspaces disappearing. Similarly, “Chairs ready to sit” and “Guest bed ready to use” count.

3. No suddenly difficult projects (things that could have been avoided i.e. bad surprises)–
no needing to frantically clean dishes because the dishwasher wasn’t run, no needing to suddenly run to the store for household basics- food or supplies-
no needing to vacuum because it hadn’t been done for weeks,
no needing to empty a really full and stinky catbox- or scoop the yard– because its been skipped (not to mention an unclean catbox is cruel to cats),
no needing to do all the garbage and rake all the compostibles just before garbage night when all I want to do is read before bedtime.

4. Be ready for guests. While of course theoretically the deepest of friends can come over no matter what the house looks like (and not even then- what if they have dust allergies?), I want to be ready for any visitor to drop by, perhaps stay in the guest room, without cleaning. I don’t want guests arriving to the smells of cleaning supplies.

What if you’re carpooling and a coworker really needs to use your bathroom? Or you or your spouse is sick and the boss wants to drop off a report?

5. Efficient time management. By keeping cleaning projects focused and predictable, then I can slot them in throughout the week. “Things I can do listening to radio.” “thinks I can do when I need to get up and stretch.” “things I want to do by myself / not by myself.”

Using these concepts, consider the “process” of “hang up and put away laundry as soon as the dryer is done.” Years ago I didn’t get why my partner wanted me to do this: I’d rather wait until all the laundry was done before tackling it all. But, then, I considered the goals. 1. No suprises– no finding shirts that are wrinkled, 2. No missing items- no essential clothes that aren’t clean 3. no extra work– jumbled clothes take more time to sort, and wrinkled clothes require ironing. 4. be ready for guests– towels and sheets are always ready for guests, and if we suddenly decide to go out, we have clothes ready. 5. Efficient and predictable– I can listen to music.

And the thing about the toilet? That’s easy. You’re cleaning someone else’s shit, and you’re doing it on your knees.

#XY. I can be assured (unless I carry a much higher than average amount of bodily fat; larger men often lose this privilege) that when selecting or consuming foodstuffs in public, perfect strangers will not feel qualified to critique or otherwise comment on my dietary habits should my selections impress them as too rich/fatty/meaty/large in portions. I am not expected to, when choosing a rich dessert, fatty steak, basket of fries or other food not found in the rabbit-chow section of the local co-op, order less than half of what a man does and/or split it with at least six of my friends.

At one time I would have thought this white-centric, but I have since observed it among Black female undergraduates at my university.

This one particularly grates on me because it’s not just about expecting women to lose weight; it relates also to how the culture sees women and desired resources in general. In times when a man was expected to pay for his wife’s meals, anything she ate used up some of another person’s hard-earned resources, rather than anything she’d worked hard for and earned on her own. A desireable woman was one who could look good and work hard around the house while placing a minimum strain on her man’s financial capacity. That meant eating a lot (especially rich, expensive or “unnecessary” foods), spending money on herself or engaging in “vices” such as smoking or drinking were strictly verboten. When the culture comments on the eating or spending habits of women who consume even an average adult amount, this tradition is continued.

While it’s true that the whole culture could be eating a little healthier and consuming a little less, this expectation shouldn’t be gendered.

Maybe I was a little harsh before and I am sorry for hurting you guys. However, this situation for many women, namely the need to be calculating just to make your partner in life take up less than half of the common workload, is neither nice or fun .

A lack of compliments and appreciation in a relationship seems to me to be a different question alltogether. Even though that, too, might be disproportionate depending on gender.

My ego and sense of empowerment is important to me. I enjoy feeling like a hero. It makes me feel good. When I feel like a villian, I get complacent and lazy. . . it hurts. I want to crawl into a quiet place and wait for the feeling to go away, because if I’m a villain, then everything I touch is going to turn to crap. I’m radioactive. . . I’m a danger to myself and others.

But when I feel like a hero, it only empowers me to act like one so I can keep the feeling as long as I can. I can do anything when I’m a hero. I can save the world if I want to. That’s what heroes do, after all.

Nothing imspires me to feel heroic like a little public praise. How much effort does it really take to throw in a kind word in public now and then? A little gushing about what your husband is doing (in earshot of me, of course) goes a long way. Fifteen seconds once a week?

It’s a really simple matter, but it pays off. I glow for week whenever it happens, and it makes me feel good about “us.” It makes me feel good about the relationship. It even improves the way I feel about everyone who was at the party. It makes me want to do more for all of them, like some kind of self-fullfilling prophecy.

I say, you’re not training a dog. I say you’re inspring the hero inside of the man.

Isn’t that enough of a reason to do it?

- Chris

P.S. How that for cornball?

The boasting is mostly a direct counterpoint to the women kvetching about what assholes *their* husbands are (if in a group consisting solely of women) and Pavlovian behavior reinforcement (if in a group consisting of men and women or mostly men). It’s one way for us to prompt the clue fairy to pay follow-up visits to these people, because he gets to boast about it, too. Even in our Blue State environs, we are unusual in our division of labor.

And we use it to point out that things really ought to be more equal by now. Ya know, we go to a potluck, everybody starts complimenting me on the brioche tete or the salad, and I say, “well, actually, Husband made it.” Or we have people over for dinner, they admire our living room, and I say, “well, actually, I only picked out the couch and the loveseat, Husband has much better color sense than I do.” Or a neighbor asks which lawn service does our edging, and Husband gets to say, “well, actually, Wife does it.”

Also, he catches so much flack at work for taking time off to do stuff with and for the kids that I think it’s kinda important that he gets positive reinforcement and appreciation at home. He remains the only man in his office who has taken paternity leave after lo, these many years since FMLA.

Possibly an explantion for all single women with cats..