Well, what am I wondering about if even a very popular feminist website publishes posts based on the idea that house work is women’s obligation that men should “help” with:

Cast judgment on men who don’t help out around the house.

Got it? Good men are the ones who “help out around the house.” And who is it they “help”? The person who is responsible for the housework, of course. Namely, the woman.

Dear women, the second you have adopted this vocabulary of men “helping” you around the house, you have lost the game. That’s it, you are done, you will be his maid forever until you get rid of this way of seeing things. Don’t expect your partner to HELP. That positions YOU as the only responsible party and HIM as a volunteer who either will or will not do you the favor of “helping” you.

The only productive attitude here is the following: you are both equal partners who take care of the place where you live together. Nobody “helps” anybody. You divide the responsibilities equally and stick to that division of labor. Believe me, it works perfectly and it makes for a very happy relationship. You don’t need help. You need a partner who will assume his half of the household responsibilities.

Stop begging for help already and start demanding that the adult man in your life take responsibility for his place of abode, his food, his clothes, and his children.

I’m mystified by the women who agree to this kind of an arrangement:

A new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women—even those with full-time jobs—still do the bulk of housework and childcare. On an average day, 48 percent of women and 19 percent of men did housework. Married women with children who work full time spend 51 minutes a day on housework while married men with children spend just 14 minutes a day.

If a woman is a full-time housewife, obviously she should do all the housework. But this report says that even women with full-time jobs chose to be their husband’s unpaid maids. This is such a weird, irrational choice that I don’t get it at all.

I haven’t met a single man in my long and productive personal life who would refuse to take care of 50% of housework. I can’t imagine what such a conversation would even look like. “No, Clarissa, I will not clean the bathroom because. . .” What? What do men referenced in this survey say to explain their refusal to take care of themselves? This is not a rhetorical question. I’m really interested in hearing from anybody who has encountered such men. Do they offer anything in return? Do they have any sort of an explanation for their weird attitude? “Yes, I managed to take care of myself perfectly well while I lived alone, honey, but now that I have you, I have become incapacitated”? Is that what they say?

I’m even more interested in what possesses women to agree to such a strange arrangement. When the household chores are discussed before they agree to move in with their male partners, does it actually get specified in the agreement that they will be responsible for washing their male partners’ underwear and doing the dishes, as if the men in question were severely disabled? I also have to wonder what makes it necessary to keep such a man around? A man who disrespects women and sees them as Mommies will suck horribly in bed. And not in a good way. He also has got to be extremely immature and powerfully homosocial, which means that, as a conversationalist and a life partner, he isn’t anything special either. The quoted report demonstrates that these men are also lousy fathers. Bad sex, crappy conversation, no companionship, barely any fathering, and lots of extra work. So who needs this kind of a guy around at all?

As a person who’d never spend even 2 minutes in the company of somebody who disrespects me and himself to the point of suggesting that I service him as a maid, I read such reports as stories from another planet.

Once again, I have to conclude: people are weird.

The last post made me remember the interview I gave last week to a grad student at my university who is conducting research on the experience of recent immigrants in the US. One of the questions he asked me was about the cultural differences between my country and the United States.

“I find it very impressive how mature the young people here are,” I said.

“Immature, you mean,” the interviewer corrected me.

“No, I mean mature,” I insisted.

“Immature,” he kept correcting me.

So I had to explain that, in my culture, it is completely normal for a person of my age to live with her parents (or, more often than not, mother and grandmother) who help her out financially, take care of all her household needs, and bring up her children. In case the person in question is male, things are even more dire. A man gets mommied right until he is handed over to a wife who starts mommying him from then on. There are crowds of grown men who can’t even choose their own underwear, let alone wash it.

This is why I admire young people in this country so much. They leave home at 18, go to college, most of them work while in school, they all make efforts to figure out life on their own, many are politically active, they start all kinds of student clubs and organizations, they all handle their lives quite well.

Yet another article has come out on the “horribly spoiled” American kids. In my honest opinion, all of this endless drama about how irreparably damaged the young generation is has nothing to do with said generation but everything to do with the older people who resent their own adulthood and don’t want the responsibilities attendant on being parents.

The article is titled “Spoiled Rotten” and shares a bunch of boring myths about those far away places where the grass is greener, the sugar is better and the kids are of better quality. Of course, as usual, these better kids are located in two places that, for an American, signify the heights of exoticism: France and some faraway tribe in an obscure place. The children in those wonderful places hunt, fish, make food and clean the house while they are still in their nappies. In the meanwhile, those horribly spoiled American kids dare to expect to be fed instead of feeding their parents. What jerks.

So how do we transform the spoiled American kids into their better version that, according to parenting gurus, can be found in other countries? The secret to rearing these amazing, ultra responsible, super sophisticated children is to pay no attention to them. Because apparently, if you pick up a crying two-year-old and try to comfort her, you are damaging her for life. She might grow up expecting people to respect her emotions and wouldn’t that be just horrible?

You know who I find immature, though? People who choose to procreate and then look for every excuse they can find to spend as little time and energy as possible on their kids. Books and articles proliferate trying to convince parents that the children in a culture where kids get stuck in front of a TV since the day they are born get too much of their parents’ attention. All I see in these articles and books is an attempt by an overindulged and spoiled generation of parents to shoulder off all responsibility for raising their children. What can be more immature than this endless “just give me a reason not to pick up my own kid when he’s crying”?

The article shares all kinds of scary stories about kids who can’t tie their shoelaces at five and then become losers and underachievers in adulthood. As a person who didn’t know how to tie her shoelaces until the age of nine, I find such anecdotes hilarious. And the following story made me roar with laughter:

In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.

The reason why this anecdote made me laugh is that I had the same experience with my younger sister when she was eleven. I placed a plate of food in front of her and five minutes later noticed that she wasn’t eating.

“Why aren’t you eating?” I asked.

“Fork!” she commanded without lifting her eyes from a book she was reading.

In spite of this “horrifying” occurrence, my sister left her parents’ home at 16, worked all the way through college, and now has a successful business of her own. Neither she nor I were ever taught how to clean an apartment or do the dishes, so we have found male partners who do that for us. And we have both been called spoiled by resentful older women who were raised to be domestic slaves.

The young people today experience a greater freedom from silly social conventions and limiting expectations than their parents. They are more careful about choosing a career, a life partner, a way of being that will make them happy. And this is what makes their parents resent them. How dare they enjoy themselves in bars and clubs until the age of forty instead of saddling themselves with a mortgage and an unwanted child who is resented for having toys and crying from time to time, like their parents did?