Why men don’t help out around the house

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about human connection. To support my life’s work, buy a guide, follow me on OnlyFans, follow me on Twitter, support me on Patreon, or just share this post 🙏

~~~~~

Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of a man wiping a counter.”

On Medium, SG Buckley writes about a Cambridge study on why men partnered with women don’t clean up after themselves or anyone else. They call it say “affordance theory.”

The academics define “affordance” as a “possibility for action” and suggest that this perception of affordance depends on gender. In a home with a man and a woman, the woman is more likely to feel an urge to act than a man when seeing domestic work to be done.

Okay, but why is this gendered? In Science Times, Margaret Davis summarizes co-author Dr. Tom McClelland as saying women are expected to be good at and do more cleaning than men. These expectations train women to be irritated until their homes are clean.

Women cook and clean and take care of the kids and inside the house. Men bring home a paycheck and take out the trash and maintain the outside of the house and cars.

This was all fine and good while men could bring home the bacon. But now women have to bring home some bacon too, and then cook it up, clean up after, and be the primary parents.