A nice girl's guide to getting ahead: Debate over whether women should act more like men, or vice versa, ignores that we all could use a better balance

http://www.salon.com/life/gender_roles/index.html?story=/mwt/broadsheet/2010/04/26/nice_girls_business

http://jezebel.com/5391981/do-men-just-suck-at-folding-laundry?skyline=true&s=x

Do Men Just Suck At Folding Laundry?

We couldn't help but wonder:

We've been talking a lot lately about the delegation of household tasks. And while the conversation is obviously rooted in history, society, a traditional gap and the burden of context, one question inevitably comes up: if women want things done right, do they have to do them themselves? As the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus puts it today, "I could delegate more to my husband, but then I'd also have to accept that pasta with store-bought pesto equals dinner. If you want someone else to step up to the plate, you have to live with what he puts on it." And she puts it even more strongly: "In fact, to some extent women are reluctant to yield dominion over the home front even as they become the majority of the paid workforce."

Of course, this doesn't really address why she's not satisfied with the same sketchy domesticity. Gail Collins touched on the same issue in her interview with Doree Shafrir yesterday when she said,

Half of the world believes it's because guys genuinely do not have as high a standard about making sure you get invited to dinner every once in awhile, or having matching socks. It's possible that guys, if they don't care, then it's very hard to impose those standards. Others argue that this is all a plot and the guys are just waiting out the women. I would go for 50-50. Clearly guys enjoy the higher standards-they just don't want to be in charge of them.

I'm not the one to ask; my boyfriend and I both come from the 'wait-as-long-as-is-humanly-possible-before-tackling-squalor' school of housekeeping, whose equality, it could be argued, is certainly a harbinger of some kind of progress - or of our generation's general lack of responsibility. Growing up, my father was indifferent - and to my mother's chagrin, would ask friends over with impunity when the house was in a state she found humiliating. Maybe that was more the core issue: she saw the state of the home as some reflection on herself; my dad did not. Of course there are Felix Ungers who are defined by house-pride and a love of domestic routine. But that's why they're a comic stock character: the trait was regarded as effete, effeminate, humorous.

Discussing the report "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, Marcus observes,

Both sexes agree that women continue to bear a disproportionate burden in taking care of children and elderly parents, even when both partners in a relationship have jobs," John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira write in one chapter of the report. Here's the interesting subtext, though: Fifty-five percent of women strongly agreed (and 85 percent overall agreed) that "in households where both partners have jobs, women take on more responsibilities for the home and family than their male partners." Just 28 percent of men strongly agreed, and 67 percent agreed. That's a pretty big perception gap.

Marcus suggests that part of this disconnect is rooted in, not just self-congratulation for doing the minimum, but a sort of martyrdom. As she would have it, women want help, but also control. There is, she says, "something comforting in keeping a connection to mundane household tasks even when you're running a major-league research lab. Perhaps younger women don't feel this tug toward domesticity. But for women of my generation, there remains an impulse to live up to the standards of our stay-at-home mothers even as we race out the door each morning." I'd say younger women do, indeed, feel the tug of domesticity - but largely because it's a choice. Canning, knitting, home decor - these have become reflections of who we are rather than the other way around. And the quotidian rites of household maintenance, more than servitude, imply adulthood - which is a whole 'nother kettle of ambivalence.

The Nobel For Brisket Goes To . . .[Washington Post]

Earlier: Gail Collins: "The Revolution Will Be Achieved When No One Has To Do The Ironing"

Man Pad - Tampax's new ad campaign

Man Pad

Tampax quietly unveiled a viral ad campaign in June that I stumbled on a few weeks ago and my feelings about it remain complicated.Despite the hours spent turning it over in my mind, my conclusion is that the campaign--documented entirely on one site, zack16.com,and chronicling the adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy who wakes up one day with a vagina--is many things in turn: edgy, challenging, steeped in stereotypes, possibly transphobic, and potentially subversive in its exploration of gender. ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Zack Johnson, the central figure of this ad campaign--which, it seems important to note, was created by a major corporation--finds himself suddenly transbodied after living a life unquestioning of gender. The idea is interesting and deeply surprising. Zack's adventures are divided into nine brief episodes, where he is forced to rexamine his relationship to his best friend, his sister, and his body. The "sell" doesn't even come until the last few episodes, when it becomes clear that Zack is going to have to navigate his first period (which, I should note, he handles with far less anxiety and grief than I did mine.)

Stop what you're doing and watch the first four webisodes in this twelve minute mini-filmhttp://zack16.com/the-film/

As you can see, the campaign slides into simplistic and sexist stereotypes regularly, like when Zack immediately bonds with his sister by baking brownies and watching a romantic movie. Girl parts make you emotional! His final assesment of the female biology--"Fifty percent of the population has a vagina, and they seem to be doing pretty well"--is not exactly a "Hear me roar" kind of statement. There are moments thatverge on transphobic, too, like when Zack thinks that his crush won't be interested in him because of his "equipment"--um, I think a hell of a lot of women with similarly-bodied partners would disagree with that assesment.

On the other hand--and this is the part that bowls me over--Zack's experience with the boys he's friends with is, well, very transteen. He is worried about being "discovered" by his teammates, who are portrayed as sexist assholes. We are asked to sympathize with Zack, and not just in a gender-binary pity fest. His body has changed in a way that doesn't reflect his understanding of himself, and he is forced to rexamine what it means to be masculine and feminine from the perspective of one who is both and neither all at once. This aspect of the campaign is an accurate description of my adolescence, and the complexity of Zack's reaction is surprisingly well portrayed.

Ultimately, I wouldn't argue that this is a progressive, gender bending ad campaign. However, perhaps by accident, Tampax has created a documentation of a nonnormative gender experience that is not dismissive, hateful, or single-mindedly exaltant of binary norms. Zack's panic about de-pantsing on the soccor field may be one of the most sensitive portrayals of a trans experience that I have ever seen. Or, perhaps, I am being optimistic. What do you think?