While Spain's women daily perform at least six hours of housework, men clock up only 44 minutes - plus 51 minutes of childcare to their spouses' daily average of six hours.
What?! Do American couples spend 88 minutes a day on nonchildcare housework? Spanish men are supposed to do half with the whole determined by the bizarre six hours that the women spend? I say the women should just cut back to 44 minutes, leave the men alone, and reach equality by a far, far happier method.
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Houses in Spain must be the cleanest in the world.
It's not clear from the article whether the 6 hours includes housework. Probably not, because if it did, women could say they spend 18 hours a day on housework. People counting their own time at work are not really counting the real work but the time that passes with nothing much else going on. People working outside the home are the same. How much time in an 8 hour office day are you really laboring? You don't subtract the time "yapping" with coworkers, daydreaming, surfing the net, etc.
BTW, bloggers with Site Meters know that the traffic is much higher during the work week than on weekends. The work-shirk combination is pervasive -- inside and outside of the home.
Michael: "Marketing" -- that is, shopping. That has a whole social/recreational aspect to it. You can drag it out for hours, wandering the streets, getting some exercise, seeing your friends. It's quite different working for money, with supervisors telling you what to do. Measuring work by time is never quite right.
Upon marrying, my attempt at supervising the housework while lying the couch was very briefly lived.
Would "housework" include working to earn the money to pay the mortgage on the house? Apparently, Spain had a Kelo decision of its own and mi casa really es su casa.
And what if your wife is a clean freak, what then?
Some heavy hitters on this blog. Althouse hit monstrous two home runs when she said the law was "ridiculously intrusive and weirdly unenforceable".
Joe hit a grand slam when he said "they are obviously nuts".
"And what if your wife is a clean freak, what then?"
Maybe we need a law requiring women to stop cleaning when she's done half of what the man thinks is worth doing.
But this goes to the source of much discord about housework. Women tend to think more needs to be done. If you could get an honest answer from men and women about how often -- say -- a bathroom needs a full cleaning, you would be shocked at the disparity.
I should do a blogpoll.
What's the divorce rate in Spain? I'm predicting a sharp increase in the near future...
Didn't Spain just legalize gay marriage? So how are lesbians affected by this law? Do they have to split 50/50... or are they only allowed to each do 25% and let the other half of their houses get dirty because they're not legally allowed to clean it?
I know I run the risk of being painted as either a chauvinist, a spoiled brat, a pig, or some combination thereof.
I am the primary washer of dishes and cleaner of the kitchen, and the primary taker of the garbage and recycling to the curb. Oh, and the primary repairman (to the extent my abilities allow). But I can honestly say that I will never rise up to do half of the housework.
That is not to say that I would not be willing to be responsible for half of it, or even more than half. I would simply subcontract it out :)
So for example, when my wife is not up for cooking for any reason, I'm happy to take responsibility---by picking up some takeout. And she is quite the sport about that, perhaps because she knows it will taste better that way.
So to me, the issues it this. Will a wife be content if her husband relieves her of half of her workload, no matter how he achieves that end? Or will she only be content if the division of labor achieves equal suffering? In my case, thankfully, it is almost always the former.
"But she does think the kitchen floor needs washing more often"
And if you live in Spain, when she says scrub, you, muchacho, had better ask 'how far is halfway?'
IT'S THE LAW!
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