Wanted: feminist cleaning service
May. 29th, 2016 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/22tf7kk:
ineptshieldmaid:
deputychairman:
to provide a male cleaner to be the change we want to see and undermine the patriarchal model of housework being a woman’s job. Obviously nobody actually SAYS that any more, and yet I and all the women I know do more housework than our male partners, and my small daughters are now witness to my failure to bring about domestic equality. I’ve tried just not doing any cleaning ever, and all that achieved was living in filth and everyone eating crisps for dinner so I can’t call it an unqualified success. Therefore I now appeal to late stage capitalism: free market forces, step up and offer me Smash the Patriarchy Cleaning Services: Men Clean So Your Children Will Not Interiorise Harmful Gender Stereotypes in the Home!
#housework is a feminist issue#and one that’s still very much live in my house#the children wanted to help me Hoover#which was adorable of them#and I tried indoctrinating them with#‘this is a boy’s job really’#but I don’t think it worked#I need a ROLE MODEL#I’m prepared to pay for one
Tangential, but one of my oddest workplace experiences was working in a store where the Sunday manager was a delightful matriarch of Indian cultural wossname (idek what her citizenship was). She was a very big believer in Men’s Jobs and Women’s Jobs (can also be done by men).
Men’s jobs included: all the vacuuming, emptying bins, carrying large items, anything to do with the warehouse.
Women’s jobs: everything else (shelving, dusting, dealing with customers, etc). Men were also expected to do these jobs, but boss would get into quite a tizzy if she caught me trying to vacuum or empty bins. Despite the fact that the only man-creatures who worked Sundays were tiny effeminite twigs who’d blow over in a light breeze.
Every so often she’d try to convince the people who assigned shifts to send her more manly men on Sundays to do the vacuuming, but this never worked. (Probably because the hiring and shift-assigning was done by a middle-aged guy with a Thing for attractive blonde women. Any men he hired were universally less manly than him, and as he was not very manly…)
Also funny was watching her have a stand-off with any of the staff about what constitutes Men’s Jobs and Women’s Jobs. It was like she’d never heard of a universe in which vacuuming or bin-emptying was considered a women’s job. I’m not sure if this is common to her culture or a quirk of her family, or if she was playing a long game of silly buggers with the white people, but she was very insistent that only men were physiologically equipped to vacuum properly. So you’d find the female staff weekly defending our right as women and our responsibility as equal employees to take on the daunting task of vacuuming.
Semi-relatedly I guess, my sister is absolutely delighted that one of this year’s crop of farm hands is a wonderfully competent young woman who has taken over most of the driving of the farm’s largest tractors, because the toddler had started to believe that Tractors were for Daddy to drive and Mommy cooks. Daddy still doesn’t cook much, but at least she knows women drive tractors a lot. (Now she sometimes gets upset when her father drives the big tractor because “that [employee’s name]’s tractor!”)
I got nothin’ for housecleaning advice though.
ineptshieldmaid:
deputychairman:
to provide a male cleaner to be the change we want to see and undermine the patriarchal model of housework being a woman’s job. Obviously nobody actually SAYS that any more, and yet I and all the women I know do more housework than our male partners, and my small daughters are now witness to my failure to bring about domestic equality. I’ve tried just not doing any cleaning ever, and all that achieved was living in filth and everyone eating crisps for dinner so I can’t call it an unqualified success. Therefore I now appeal to late stage capitalism: free market forces, step up and offer me Smash the Patriarchy Cleaning Services: Men Clean So Your Children Will Not Interiorise Harmful Gender Stereotypes in the Home!
#housework is a feminist issue#and one that’s still very much live in my house#the children wanted to help me Hoover#which was adorable of them#and I tried indoctrinating them with#‘this is a boy’s job really’#but I don’t think it worked#I need a ROLE MODEL#I’m prepared to pay for one
Tangential, but one of my oddest workplace experiences was working in a store where the Sunday manager was a delightful matriarch of Indian cultural wossname (idek what her citizenship was). She was a very big believer in Men’s Jobs and Women’s Jobs (can also be done by men).
Men’s jobs included: all the vacuuming, emptying bins, carrying large items, anything to do with the warehouse.
Women’s jobs: everything else (shelving, dusting, dealing with customers, etc). Men were also expected to do these jobs, but boss would get into quite a tizzy if she caught me trying to vacuum or empty bins. Despite the fact that the only man-creatures who worked Sundays were tiny effeminite twigs who’d blow over in a light breeze.
Every so often she’d try to convince the people who assigned shifts to send her more manly men on Sundays to do the vacuuming, but this never worked. (Probably because the hiring and shift-assigning was done by a middle-aged guy with a Thing for attractive blonde women. Any men he hired were universally less manly than him, and as he was not very manly…)
Also funny was watching her have a stand-off with any of the staff about what constitutes Men’s Jobs and Women’s Jobs. It was like she’d never heard of a universe in which vacuuming or bin-emptying was considered a women’s job. I’m not sure if this is common to her culture or a quirk of her family, or if she was playing a long game of silly buggers with the white people, but she was very insistent that only men were physiologically equipped to vacuum properly. So you’d find the female staff weekly defending our right as women and our responsibility as equal employees to take on the daunting task of vacuuming.
Semi-relatedly I guess, my sister is absolutely delighted that one of this year’s crop of farm hands is a wonderfully competent young woman who has taken over most of the driving of the farm’s largest tractors, because the toddler had started to believe that Tractors were for Daddy to drive and Mommy cooks. Daddy still doesn’t cook much, but at least she knows women drive tractors a lot. (Now she sometimes gets upset when her father drives the big tractor because “that [employee’s name]’s tractor!”)
I got nothin’ for housecleaning advice though.
