Sandra Tsing Loh's latest article in the Atlantic was a head scratcher. It took me a couple of reads to try to figure out what she was rambling about. Post-divorce Loh has a lot of man-issues, and her articles are painful to read.
After a couple of attempts at reading this article (why did I bother?), I think I finally found some interesting points at the end. She wonders whether women need men at all, if they are making all the money. She describes a conversation between some of her majorly bitchy friends who complain that their husbands and former husbands were spending too much time cooking and not cleaning the house in the right way. If my husband complained about the way that I regularly fail to clean the bathroom, he would find a toilet brush shoved up his ass.
Loh wants to know, if we don't need men for money and they aren't so great at changing light bulbs either, why do we need them at all?
The answer certainly isn’t surfacing in Japan, where single women younger than 30 make more on average than Japanese men their age do. Working wives still spend 30 hours a week on housework, compared with the three hours a week their husbands put in. Maybe that’s why one Japanese word for husband translates loosely into “big bag of trash.”
A recent study found that couples that do equal amounts of housework are more likely to get divorced. The researchers conclude that by formally laying out housework plans and schedules, it kills spontaneity and increases conflict. They also found out that men were happier when they did more housework, while the amount of work that men did had little relationship to the wife's happiness levels.
This brings me back to one of the criticisms of Hanna Rosin's book, The End of Men. Critics said that she didn't address the major question of what happens to feminism, when women win. Can't women, just as much as men, become assholes when they have too much power in a relationship? Women have been striving for equality for so long. Now that we finally have success, why aren't we happier with the it?
Apt. 11d 
That Telegraph article struck me as nearly as strange as Loh’s article. For exmaple, it says “Chore sharing took place more among couples from middle class professional backgrounds, where divorce rates are known to be high.” That may be the case in Britian, but here the middle class professionals are where divorce is rare.
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Yeah, I caught that, too. I have no idea.
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This isn’t very PC, but I wonder if some of this weird, erratic behavior isn’t partly due to perimenopause.
“Declining estrogen levels associated with menopause can cause more than those pesky hot flashes. They can also make a woman feel like she is in a constant state of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Unfortunately, these emotional changes are a normal part of menopause.
“Some of the emotional changes experienced by women undergoing perimenopause or menopause can include:
“Irritability
Feelings of sadness
Lack of motivation
Anxiety
Aggressiveness
Difficulty concentrating
Fatigue
Mood changes
Tension”
http://www.webmd.com/menopause/guide/emotional-roller-coaster
I’ve noticed that a lot of marriages seem to implode right around “the change.”
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If you read the comments on the Tsing Loh piece, you find a lot of people basically saying that the lady with the lightbulb issue and the toilet paper issue sounds like an ass, and if it was a man who came home at the end of the day to a clean house with dinner on the table and then proceeded to berate his wife about toilet paper and lightbulbs we would just CALL him an ass. We wouldn’t attempt to find any deep psychological or sociological significance in these issues. Also a lot of stuff about how unrepresentative these marriages are of the population as a whole. At least, I don’t know any women who make 600,000 dollars a year. Do you?
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“At least, I don’t know any women who make 600,000 dollars a year. Do you?”
Nope, and if I did, I would expect her to have a housekeeper on staff who takes care of detail-type stuff.
About the toilet paper–when making a shopping list for your spouse, specify how many of the item to purchase.
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In our marriage, the idea is not that we need each other.
The idea is that we really want each other.
(As a parenting team we frequently basically need each other, but we are each aware that if the other dies, the remaining parent would still need to manage.)
So I can’t relate to that premise in the article at all. No I don’t “need a man” but I really like my husband! It’s nice to have him around.
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We just got a new garage door motor and the fixtures now take two light bulbs, so that will probably save some marriages. Alternatively, the drive is now so quiet that you could open the garage door and not be heard at the far end of a moderately large house. That may end some marriages.
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P.S. I say that as someone who had major chore issue with her spouse, years’ worth and individual therapy-time worthy. For years I did all the chores I thought were necessary while my husband descending into mad workaholism in a sick industry, but I decided I liked him enough to deal with his “chore disability”. (Initially, I thought I might as well since I’d be doing them after the divorce if it happened.) It did impact my career, but it was my choice & gift to him.
The last several years we’ve been equal chores partners.
So I get that there can be problems, just like there are around earning potential etc. etc. It just seems weird to me to phrase it as a needs analysis.
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My understanding of claims for equality is that they are based on ideas about justice or fairness. I don’t recall any particular feminist figures arguing a causal relationship between equity and happiness.
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You know, when I went to read the article, I was prepared to empathize with the woman who found her husband’s housework lacking. I’ve dealt with men who deliberately half-ass housework (as in leave stuff half-clean and half-filthy) in a passive-aggressive attempt to get out of doing it (example: swish the toilet brush around the inside of the toilet, while leaving the piss stains on the seat, toilet and floor around it).
But then I read this: I find Ron in the kitchen, as usual, cooking a red sauce from scratch when Prego is just as good.
WTF? She oughta be shot for saying that. Fuck you and your light bulbs, “Annette.”
Geez louise.
Prego. Really?
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Reading this article, I had the distinct impression that all of the women are actually Sandra Tsing Loh talking, because the gripes all sound like her.
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“Reading this article, I had the distinct impression that all of the women are actually Sandra Tsing Loh talking, because the gripes all sound like her.”
I think you’ve nailed the tone. Alternatively she searches out friends who are *exactly* like her, or she applies the Tsing Loh filter when she translates her friends comments (hey, I wonder if you can get that for a navigation system).
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I have a spouse who is chore challenged, and I understand some of the anger. Tsing Loh, as usual, takes it to ridiculous levels.
I think what she’s *really* saying is that she’s dying for someone to just take care of her in a way that she feels comfortable accepting. She was obviously totally capable of being unhappy before she got divorced, and that hasn’t changed.
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(Indeed—do you know a male therapist? I don’t, and my last therapist charged a murderous $275 an hour.)
Medium Raggirls child psychologist is a male with a $30 co-pay.
It’s a little like watching an observational comedian from another planet. “Have you every noticed how males have three arms, but women have three legs, but their knees are screwed on backwards? What’s up with that?”
No, sorry, I haven’t actually noticed that.
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The problem with Loh’s style of writing (personal anecdote +book review = grand summation of life) is that sometimes your personal anecdotes don’t have anything to do with other people’s experiences. God knows that I use that formula quite a bit, so I shouldn’t criticize too heavily, but at some point, you have step back and question whether or not you are representative of a large group of people. I don’t think that Loh does that enough.
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I don’t know where to start! It just sounds like, “the moon was out” and “they got divorced” therefore “the moon causes more divorces”.
Soooo many factors involved in a marriage breaking up – how can you boil it down so simplistically? Well, outside of needing to sell an article with a pithy headline.
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Loh used to be one of my favorites. These days, as Laura notes, it’s just painful to read her.
Laura, since you both write for the Atlantic, aren’t you a little worried you’ll encounter her in a hallway/at a meeting/on a conference call? Given your critiques of her writing wouldn’t that be weird?
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tres weird. Good thing I work at home.
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La Lubu ftw.
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Honestly, I used to love Tsing Loh. I’ve read all of her books. But I let my subscription lapse to The Atlantic because I couldn’t take her irrational rantings anymore (which I feel started with “The Case Against Marriage”).
But, hey Laura, if you start writing for the print version of The Atlantic, I’ll renew my subscription!
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The Prego wouldn’t bug me, but the light bulb thing absolutely would. It’s just not that unreasonable to expect someone to do the chores he specifically says he will do. My husband and I used to fight all the time about his tendency to tell me he would do things and then not do them, over and over and over. I found it so disrespectful, as if our conversation had not happened at all, and it made me feel like a nagging wife when really all I wanted was an accurate answer to a simple question. Do the chore or don’t, but if you don’t want to do it just say so! And it caused a lot of anxiety because I never knew which of the various minor commitments he would disregard on any given day– I couldn’t count on anything and it really made it hard to plan meals, and to plan my own time and chore-doing. It seems trivial but it really drove me nuts and we had a lot of fights. He doesn’t do it anymore, I guess he saw the light.
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“The Prego wouldn’t bug me, but the light bulb thing absolutely would”
As they say, oral agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. If you actually want things to happen, there should be a written honey-do list, perhaps an emailed list (with high priority items marked), and/or a reminder at a time when the person can actually take care of it right now, rather than when in the middle of some other activity or in some entirely inappropriate location. (For instance, I wouldn’t ask my husband to do stuff mid-week and then be surprised if he didn’t do it on Saturday when he had the time. I would make sure that it went onto the plans for Saturday.)
I currently try to make a point of telling my husband to email me a reminder for whatever it is he’s just thought of for me to do, even (or especially) if we happen to be sitting at dinner at the time. If I didn’t make a memo or enter it into my calendar during the conversation, the conversation never happened.
There’s just way too much information flying around the average home, and it needs to be managed properly.
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Funny, that’s what we ended up with too. A master Google Doc to-do list that we both refer to, with high-priority items marked. Sometimes he says he will refer to it, and then doesn’t, so it’s the same problem at a meta level. But it sort of works.
Still, in the article, after promising to change the light bulb three nights in a row and the fourth night a rather memorable exchange of words, I understand how that would put her over the edge. If a person needs requests in writing he or she should have enough responsibility and self-awareness to communicate that. I hate the feeling that I have to coach him like a toddler into managing basic commitments and responsibilities. Like he can only be expected to uphold his minor commitments if I take on the burden of devising a system to make it as easy as possible. If he acted like that at work he’d get fired.
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He obviously didn’t change the light bulb because he was being pushed, whether it was a conscious decision or not. There’s only so far you can push those things before it gets worse. Fortunately for my wife, I take out those emotions at work.
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It sounds like each and every time, “Annette” was asking him while he was cooking dinner. Not cool.
On the other hand, this is a whole lot worse as an offense:
“He may be an A-plus househusband, but he’s a B-minus housewife. He knows the toilet’s clogged, so why doesn’t he call the plumber and—more important—arrange a time to let the plumber in so he can fix the problem? At midnight last Wednesday, I’m bailing out the flooded balcony with a four-cup Pyrex.”
I’m not clear exactly how balconies flood (wouldn’t it be more like a Niagara Falls effect?), but no jury would convict her. Anyway, how hard is it to clear a toilet yourself (unless the kids installed some sort of foreign object, of course)? I hate to say this and bring on bad plumbing juju, but it’s got to be at least a decade since we’ve had to have professional help with a clogged toilet. (Sinks are a different story.)
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I liked this from one of the Atlantic commentors (excuse the language):
“The ditzy broad intentionally picks out a dude who is a dreamer’s dreamer, a hippy, feckless as hell but probably fun and a good guy and she thinks his dreamy fecklessness makes him a prize. She lists a bunch of Ron’s pre-marriage behaviors which would cause any fool but a femfool to understand that Ron ain’t going to be your steady, dependable, his – word – is – his – bond kind of guy. He’ll forget, he’ll dream, he’ll get started on a new project before the last one is done. We men all know a Ron and we like him but we don’t depend on him.”
Yep.
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We fought over housework more than money. We finally hired a housekeeper because we agreed we would both be saner if we weren’t bickering over whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. My least favorite phrase that came out of Mr. Geeky’s mouth was, “We need to (insert chore here)”. It made me crazy. I took it as a criticism of my housework. And I thought, and often said out loud,”Then you do it!”. We let our housekeeper go when I quit my job, and somehow the housework gets done fairly evenly. In part, I think it’s because the kids are older and less messy, and do their own chores, and I think I just don’t care as much. I would go back to having a housekeeper in a heartbeat if it got too bad. Right now I need that money for college.
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“I think what she’s *really* saying is that she’s dying for someone to just take care of her in a way that she feels comfortable accepting. She was obviously totally capable of being unhappy before she got divorced, and that hasn’t changed.”
This is a very compassionate reading of what her unhappiness seems to be about. Or perhaps, charitable.
Speaking less charitably, Tsing-Loh mostly just sounds deeply self-involved to me. Not someone I’d ever want to hang out with. Her expectations are unrealistic because she seems to have no empathy, and perhaps even worse, no sympathy for possibly anyone around her. Most definitely not the men around her.
And also, sometimes marriages end, for entirely solid reasons, between perfectly nice people. That doesn’t mean that no one should ever get married. Maybe she’s still hurting It can take more than a few years to recover from a divorce…
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Another aspect about this that really depresses me is how sex is treated as a bargaining chip that as successful women they don’t need to use anymore. Maybe I’m an outlier in being sexually attracted to my partner, but why is giving him a back massage or having sex such a terrible thing to do if you presumably love the person? It also is representative of how selfish and mercenary the whole relationship is. I know relationships change over time, but there was no indication that marriages would ever be based on love, attraction, and companionship. My ex-husband was very self-absorbed and one of the most ungenerous people I know, and I think, ultimately, this is at the basis of a lot of seemingly disparate toxic stuff that happened in the relationship. When everything is tit-for-tat ‘I did this for you, now what are you doing for me?’ the relationship devolves into scoring points, power plays, and worry about being taken advantage of. Now that I’m in a better relationship, I can look back and see not only how stressful that was but also how within the context of the relationship it made me a worse person.
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“Maybe I’m an outlier in being sexually attracted to my partner, but why is giving him a back massage or having sex such a terrible thing to do if you presumably love the person?”
Around menopause, the libidinal pilot light seems to go out for a lot of women.
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z said, “Do the chore or don’t, but if you don’t want to do it just say so!”
This only works if it’s actually ok to say you don’t want to do it. That’s often not the case.
Amy P said, “…a reminder at a time when the person can actually take care of it right now, rather than when in the middle of some other activity or in some entirely inappropriate location.”
Yes indeedy. A steady diet of “Stop what you’re doing right now and come do this thing that I want you to do” is a royal pain in the neck. Not that anyone here would do that of course.
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“Stop what you’re doing right now and come do this thing that I want you to do”
Yeah, but what about the third time you’ve asked/reminded/nagged? Keeping track of what needs to be done is a chore too.
(In general though this issue arises with the kids since one does not have the power to order other adults in the house around. I think that’s what’s tough for people to get when they join lives. Ultimately, you don’t get to decide what the other adult human does. So, absent slavery — and marriage used to be that for women — conflicts will arise. People have to work them out. )
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This only works if it’s actually ok to say you don’t want to do it. That’s often not the case.
It is my experience that men often learn the reactions they get to different answers, and act accordingly. “Will you change the lightbulb?” “Ok.” In that situation, “Ok,” means “The thing I can say that will end the conversation.” Any other answer means “The thing I will say that will make the conversation go on longer, and probably end in a fight.”
I believe the technical term is not “lying,” but rather “bullshitting.” The man is not speaking with the intent of not changing the lightbulb — he is simply speaking to get the result he wants.
It’s like in that classic of Western Philosophy, Meatloaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboards Lights.” A woman is asking a question (“Do you love me?”) because she wants an answer, but the man is listening functionally (“There is an answer that will let me have sex, and an answer that will prevent me from having sex. I don’t know whether I love her or not, but it doesn’t really matter because I know what answer will get me what I want.”)
On the one hand, it sucks that men answer questions this way. On the other hand, if I have been married to a man for 20 years, and still ask him questions knowing that he will answer functionally and then take the answers at face value, then I have a problem too.
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“The thing I can say that will end the conversation.”
If you have a list of ones that work, please forward.
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“So, absent slavery — and marriage used to be that for women — conflicts will arise.”
Not in Christian Europe. One of the essential differences between a wife and a slave is that you could get rid of a slave very easily.
As a matter of fact, you can even see a very definite distinction between wives and slaves going right back to Genesis, which reflects the Mid-Eastern cultural norms of thousands of years ago. An Old Testament patriarch would have had both wives and female slaves (concubines), but there’s always a very clear line between the two (one probable contributing factor is that a wife would not infrequently be a fairly close relative). Abraham, for instance, sends away his concubine Hagar at his wife’s insistence, but did not send his wife away, despite her decades of barrenness. In later biblical texts like Proverbs, you see further development in the understanding of the marital relationship. Male monogamy and fidelity is more and more encouraged (see Proverbs 5:15-20), at the same time that the prudence and work ethic of the older wife is praised (see Proverbs 31:10-31).
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“It is my experience that men often learn the reactions they get to different answers, and act accordingly. “Will you change the lightbulb?” “Ok.” In that situation, “Ok,” means “The thing I can say that will end the conversation.””
There’s a strategic error here in not agreeing on a specific time for the task to be accomplished by. Just a bare “OK” could mean anything between now and the parousia.
I find that the time issue has come up a lot with both me and my husband (with both parties playing the slacker role at certain points), because there’s often a lack of clarity about how important the task is and when it needs to be done.
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I am squarely with Z on this one. My husband frequently indulges in not following up on minor commitments. He also has mastered the logic which states that, by dint of my asking him about something more than once, I’ve somehow tipped over into badgering him, and whatever task it is will now FOR SURE never get done.
This makes my husband, in my mind, a TODDLER. It is not my job to make him be organized, to write sh*t down for him, to remind him AT ALL. If he is not clear on urgency then he should ask. People at my office live by these rules, he should be able to as well. Imagine my distress when I see my 11 and 9YO daughters indulging in the same behaviors of tiptoeing around their dad when asking him to do something for them. (“Dad, weren’t we going to put up my clock today?”) It’s like I’ve taught them that women are held accountable for their work/commitments/chores and men are not. Pause to vomit.
And vomit again when I realize that on this topic I have way too much in common with a person I otherwise loathe, Sandra Tsing Loh.
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Lightbulb question: I have no permanent answer but as an alternative thing…I had this “ok” problem. And the root of it really was that it wasn’t okay to say no.
So I had to make it okay to say no. So I just started doing all the chores I felt had to get done. (Hint: Not windows.) People argued at the time, even, that this was just training my husband (what. a. phrase.) to not do chores.
In the short term, that was indeed the case. I lost hours of time that could have gone to career-building (this was pre-child). I focused instead on the fact that apart from the chores my husband _really was(is)_ my best friend and that I’d have to do them post-divorce anyway and so on. I was pretty brutally honest about it. “I’d’ve made freelance income if I weren’t sorting out the lawncare.”
A cleaning person would have been a solution too. That was kind of my stuff, that I should clean my own toilet.
A lot – a _lot_ – of people I shared this struggle with tried to talk me into the idea that if he REALLY X (loved me/respected women/was grown up) he would do the chores. I totally see that POV. But it was interesting how sure they were it was More Than Chores.
In our case it really wasn’t. I don’t know how universally true that is, or I’d write a book and get slaughtered. 🙂
It did equalize although it took years and a stray comment from my kid to be the…ugh…lightbulb moment. 🙂
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Again, I’ve been on both sides. I agree that there is what appears to be a gender thing where women appear to be brought up to be more responsible. So, like, I notice that we need more toilet paper BEFORE we run out, while my boyfriend might not. Or, that the drain is draining slowly, and needs to be cleared out BEFORE it clogs, not afterwards when its a mess. Or again, paying bills, making doctor’s appointments, I hate all these things and am not naturally good at remembering, but as an adult, I know I need to keep track. But on the other hand, most adults manage to live fairly functionally, and I’ve found the more I manage things, the less my boyfriend/colleagues etc. pay attention or take an active role. Being on the other side of this in various ways, I’ve realized if someone else is going to do all the worrying, I might as well leave them up to it. This can be practical or a resistant technique to someone who’s overly controlling. This is especially true with chores–if someone is going to redo what you do, criticize you as doing it wrong, or feel the toilet paper needs to be replaced several roles before you do and then complain about how they have to do everything, why bother doing anything or paying attention? In fact, if I did indeed notice we needed more toilet paper, made a note of it, but then was criticized for not noticing and buying toilet paper on someone else’s schedule, I would probably passive aggressively ‘forget’ to buy it even when originally I had been planning on it. Likewise, if I’m in the middle of doing something chore-like and someone demands I change the lightbulb immediately or else, the lightbulb automatically goes on the bottom of the list. This goes triple if the person clearly doesn’t appreciate the work I’m doing for them at the moment (like wishing I’d made Prego instead of homemade sauce.) I bet if she had said something like, “oh wow, that smells great, thanks for making dinner. Oh, I noticed the lightbulb was out and I couldn’t find one, could you change the bulb when you have some time, or at least put out a lightbulb in the garage?” the lightbulb would have gotten changed the next day. If the person is someone with an anger management issue, like my ex-husband had, I would also say what I could to avoid an argument, because I would realize addressing the underlying issue would lead to a huge long fight and maybe days of recrimination, and it would be easier to deal with the daily issue of the lightbulb.
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