In the age of Trump, it seems as though we’ve slipped backwards in time. It’s once again assumed that if you’re a woman, you must be good at cooking, cleaning, and making men happy. Unfortunately for my hubby, I wasn’t blessed with the motivation to work on these domestic gifts. If it wasn’t for UberEats and the pre-made food section at Whole Foods, I’d probably have died well before I had the chance to get hitched. Luckily for me, my hubby is a feminist so he’s happy to cook, clean, make me smoothies, and still be my big strong, sexy (and breadwinning) man.
Society encourages young girls to turn on their Easy-Bake Ovens and dress up their American Girl dolls, all in preparation for a life of housekeeping and child-rearing. I may’ve gone down that path myself, if not for the time I burnt my hand trying to make a brownie.
Aside from Trump trying his best to drag us all back into the dark ages, as time passed, thoughts have slowly progressed about the roles of women in society. Bursting out of their kitchens, women broke into the business world and turned perspectives upside down. Breaking barriers that once seemed impossible for women to do, you’d think that most men would now have no choice but to see women as equals in the workplace, and soon, the home. But do they?
As women began to be taken more seriously, the myths and stereotypes about women have been consistently called into question. Gone, it seemed, were the archaic ideas that all women want is to get married and have children, as more and more women these days are satisfied with putting their careers first.
I don’t feel any shame about being bad at “women’s work,” and I’m not convinced there’s any reason I should be.
Buttttt, based on the fact that so many white women voted for Trump because their husbands wanted them to, it seems we still have a long way to go. So this seems like an opportune time to clarify a few things, in case Trump or any of his followers are reading this:
Myth: All women are good cooks.
Truth: This one is definitely not true — just ask my husband! In our home, my hubby does the cooking, but across America the task still typically falls to women. A survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that on an average day, 83% of women do some sort of housework, compared to 65% of men. With respect to food preparation and clean-up specifically, only 40% of men, compared to 66% of women, take responsibility for it. So, it’s not so much that women are good cooks as it is they tend to get saddled with that task more, because of our still-sexist society.
Myth: All women are good at cleaning.
Truth: We all know the gender roles when it comes to cleanliness for boys and girls: boys are expected to be filthy while girls are expected to be prim. As for adults — how many times have you seen a man pushing a vacuum around a room or cleaning up after kids in a TV commercial? Exactly.
Wondering why a vacuum cleaner is still in the portrait of a standard housewife? One women’s magazine article said cleaning is a form of meditation. Another article said that women just have higher standards of cleanliness. They both go on to say that if a house is a mess, the woman living there is the one who’ll be judged, not the man. Yikes!
Myth: All women are all feminists.
Truth: I wish (!!), but clearly not — as IMHO a feminist wouldn’t vote for Trump. Not because Trump is a man who ran against a woman, but because Trump is a sexist pig who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to sexually abuse and objectify women.
The definition of feminism comes down to the fact that women are equal to men and deserve every opportunity to prove it, not that feminists think men are scum (they don’t! that’s missing the point!). Feminists aren’t a different breed of person, they just demand the acknowledgement that anything a man can do, a woman can do.
I want a man to hold a door open for me, but I also want women to get promotions for their hard work, and not be judged based on how we look in a skirt. Empowering organizations such as Lean In aren’t trying to make women kick all men to the curb, but instead give them the tools to realize they can and should stand on their own two feet without feeling inferior to men in and outside of the workplace.
Myth: Women don’t enjoy sex as much as guys.
Truth: Just because I’m not running around trying to sleep with everyone that looks good doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy sex. Women are just a bit more reserved about it, or at least they tend to be. Maybe if we weren’t pressured to be a “sexy virgin” by society, we’d act more like men do. Plus, we don’t have sex just to make the other person feel good (unless we’re deep down the rabbit hole of self-objectification); it’s about us, too, and don’t you forget it.
Myth: All women love to shop.
Truth: Personally, I hate shopping. The minute I’m inside a mall or clothing store, I want to get out. That’s why I do all my shopping online.
But the sad truth is that women are pressured by society to shop because they’re held to higher standards than men regarding appearance. The fashion industry aims their advertising mostly at women, in an effort to create insecurities. And –amazingly– in Trump’s America it’s still hard to be taken seriously when you’re a young woman getting started in the business world …especially if you aren’t well dressed. When it comes to appearance, women are expected to be on top of their game at all times, while men are allowed to simply slide by. #SoNotFair
The Bottom Line
I don’t feel any shame about being bad at “women’s work,” and I’m not convinced there’s any reason I should be. Women have a lot more opportunities these days, but that’s not to say you’re any less of a modern woman if you fit this “traditional” mold. Feminism is about choice.
The fact of the matter is, women have other things to do in life besides cooking, cleaning, and giving birth. As times have changed, so has what’s expected of women. These days, women are able to juggle all of that and more while still being happy. Some are stuck in the past, but progressive women all over the world are changing how women are perceived and refuse to be held to old-timey standards.
I read an article from Forbes and it suggests that the myth of a woman’s love for shopping wouldn’t exist if people weren’t so insistent that women be the shoppers, in other words—cyclical logic.
Women today have dwindled into sex objects and hard to be respected
Why do I feel like “more” is expected of me than my mother ?
So basically one half of the population gets to define the appropriate volume of housework, and to impose their conditions on the other half? How liberating.
It’s what cleaning symbolizes; undervalued underpaid work and someone leaving it all for you to do is disrespectful and creates inequality between the genders.
Sex is one of many characteristics that define us as individuals. I would argue it is the single biggest. We, as a society, are bashing our heads against a brick wall trying to understand why, even with countless ‘equality’ laws, campaign groups, and other forms of social pressure, most men and women are still quite happy being different and making different choices in life. We know too much about human psychology and biology to continue to pretend that ‘progressive’ busybodies will somehow overcome the empirical biological differences between the sexes. It isn’t working and it never will.
There’s dirt and then there’s DIRT! I did all the cleaning when my now-ex and I were living together. I’m not a clean freak, but I do have a dust allergy so keeping the place clean was preferable to being covered in hives and constantly having asthma attacks. I spent about an hour a week doing a ‘proper clean’, ie hoovering, dusting, cleaning the bathroom, and about 20 mins a night emptying any bins and washing any dishes. Hardly extreme if you ask me. If left to his own devices, the cat litter would only be changed maximum once every ten days or so, the dishes would only be washed once he’d run out and even then they’d sit where he had left them in his room, his laundry was done so rarely that when we moved house, the pile that had been sat there in the previous house remained in the new one, he would think to change the bedding about twice a year, the floor was where his rubbish went and he’d only clean it up about once a year when about twenty black bags of rubbish would be removed. We ended up needing separate bedrooms because he was so filthy and he got infested with bugs. So, ladies, if your man won’t do a little bit of dusting, that’s nothing in comparison to what I put up with for more years than I care to mention!!!
Women tend to do more housework because men tend to work longer hours at work, and when it all adds up, it tends to be about equal (not always, but that’s the difference between individual circumstances and some sort of culture of an imbalance in work done).
Guide for modern womanhood, plus the household chores that you don’t need to do 100% of the time.
Great article. A little funny because of the reality that we all need to realize.