Boys Will Be Boys Read online

  No, I’m advocating the dissolution of a marriage and a family because this woman’s husband is clearly a selfish cockjangle who views his wife’s job as secondary to her larger role as an unpaid domestic labourer, and whom he’s charged with the primary responsibility of facilitating his life, ambitions and home comforts because he secretly wanted to marry his mommy. I bet he expects her to do his laundry too. (Just FYI: the revolution won’t be won if we continue to wash men’s clothes, ladies. Tell him to buy a hamper and start cleaning his own dirty jocks. While we’re at it, stop marrying men and taking their names as a matter of course. It isn’t ‘choice’ when it’s mostly going one way. Before you argue that ‘it’s just your father’s name anyway’, stop for a moment. It’s your name. You were born with it, just as men were born with theirs. The difference is that our patriarchal society still treats women as if our names are on loan from one man until we find another to claim us and gift us with our new and true identity, while men get to own their names from the start and claim their destinies for themselves. I’m not saying you’re wrong for doing it, I’m just saying think a bit more deeply about the fact that women are expected to do it at all. And if you say it’s because you wanted to have the same last name as your children, just ask yourself why women for the most part do all the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.)

  To be fair, these domestic dynamics are all relatively new territory for me. Prior to my current relationship, I had never lived with a romantic partner. As much as I love the bloke who rattles around the house beside me, I’ve also often said that if our romantic relationship ends then I would never live with a man again. Why? Simple. The gendered conditions of domestic labour are still too deeply entrenched to be anything but a burden for most women living in hetero partnerships, and managing those conditions (whether you’re challenging them or conforming to them) takes a fuckton of work. Until we can confidently say the patriarchy has been destroyed, women who enjoy sex with men are much better off living alone and inviting them into our houses as guests occasionally. #truefact

  While the problem of shared domesticity as an adult is something I’m still navigating, it’s not like its existence has come as a surprise to me. For most of us, the impact and witnessing of gender inequality in the home begins when we’re children. I may have been raised by parents who instilled feminist values of independence and ambition in my sister and me (even if they didn’t call it feminism explicitly), but there was also a marked difference between what was expected of us and what was expected of our brother. He was never told to wash dishes, sort and fold laundry or—heaven forbid!—iron the shirts my father wore to work. Instead, he was given the wholly undemanding task of sweeping the footpath outside and taking out the bins, both of which he seemed to do only sporadically. Whenever I raged about the unfairness of it all (which was often), my mother would try to placate me. ‘It’s just that I know I can trust you and Charlotte to do a good job,’ she’d say. ‘If I let Toby do the dishes, I’d just have to do them again.’

  Because you make it so easy for him to get away with it. I’d scream inside.

  The gender split in my childhood home is still typical of most families. Girls are assigned chores that accord to a homemaking role (like washing dishes, sorting laundry and ironing clothes) while boys are generally given ‘dirtier’, more physical tasks (like taking out the rubbish and sweeping outdoor steps). The inequality here isn’t only reflected in the types of task considered appropriate for girls and boys, but also in the length of time required to complete them. Washing dishes and ironing clothes takes a lot longer than ducking outside to throw some rubbish in the bin.

  But the problem is even bigger than that. In 2016, a UNICEF report titled Harnessing the Power of Data for Girls found that girls worldwide spend 40 percent more time on household chores than boys. Taking into account the global population of girls, that equates to 160 million more hours a day. That’s 900 years’ worth of hours. A day.

  According to Anju Malhotra, UNICEF’s principal adviser on gender equality, ‘the overburden of unpaid household work begins in early childhood and intensifies as girls reach adolescence’. This work begins from the time girls are five years old and increases dramatically as they enter adolescence. On average, by the time they’re fourteen, girls are expected to perform more than half of the housework.

  This disparity in labour has a massive impact on the wellbeing and security of girls, particularly those in countries considered part of the Global South (sometimes referred to as ‘the developing world’). As Malhotra says:

  Girls sacrifice important opportunities to learn, grow and just enjoy their childhood. This unequal distribution of labour among children also perpetuates gender stereotypes and the double burden on women and girls across generations.

  In some cases, the work expected of girls—collecting firewood and well water, for example—puts them at direct risk of sexual violence. These demands can lead to girls prematurely leaving school, which in turn sets them on a path towards early marriage and motherhood—neither of which are necessarily chosen consensually.

  Perhaps the biggest slap in the face is how this inequality is compounded by its invisibility. It isn’t just that it’s easy to ignore; it’s also that the importance of it is dismissed entirely. Despite the lip service paid to how the work of caring, child rearing and domestic management is ‘the most important job in the world’, mainstream society largely treats it and the women who do it as bullshit.

  But it’s women’s work, right? This is what we’re naturally drawn to, what we’re good at, what we like doing. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s biology! Women have the babies and take care of the homes, and men go out and earn the money. Different, but still equal!

  First, who the fuck decided that keeping house for men was something women can’t hold ourselves back from doing? When I was asked as a little girl what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered the same thing: a secretary. It wasn’t just that it was one of the few jobs I saw women doing on TV—it was also that these women were always young, single and didn’t have to pick up after anyone else when they got home at night. It’s a pop culture staple to assume that women all grew up indulging fantasies of their wedding day, but I can’t ever remember daydreaming about what mine would look like. I assumed I would be married at some point, but only because this was what was supposed to happen to women once they passed a certain age. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. If these things didn’t happen to you, it could never be because you were off doing something more interesting; it was always because you had failed somehow. Women can only become fully realised human beings if they find a man to put a ring on their finger and a baby in their jukebox. Without these essential ingredients to happiness, women are just purposeless atoms bumping our way through the noiseless vacuum of space. (See exhibit A: Jennifer Aniston.)

  Second, let’s just put to bed right now the lie that ‘women’s work’ is truly considered ‘different but equal’. It isn’t considered equal at all, not by a long shot. It’s considered convenient and necessary to men’s more valuable and important success, which is hardly the same thing. And be assured that any opportunity that can be taken to discredit it will be.

  In 1988, Marilyn Waring published her seminal feminist text, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. This was Waring’s response to the fact that women’s unpaid work, from domestic labour to child rearing to care of the elderly and sick, had historically been excluded from the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). Her research uncovered the infuriating little tidbit (included in the original 1953 edition of the SNA standard) that women’s unpaid labour was ‘of little or no importance’, and this was the reason for its exclusion. Profiling Waring recently for The Monthly magazine, Anne Manne asked the formidable writer and activist how she’d felt on reading those words fo
r the first time. ‘Oh, terrible,’ Waring replied. ‘I wept.’

  Even today, the System of National Accounts doesn’t include the cost of unpaid labour alongside its measure of gross domestic product. Instead, there’s a provision for satellite accounts that allow it to be measured alongside GDP—an improvement, sure, but still a reflection on how the work of women is made peripheral to global economic outlooks rather than essential to them. As Manne writes in the Waring profile, ‘An Australian Bureau of Statistics study in 2014 revealed that unpaid work in Australia was worth $434 billion, equivalent to 43.5 percent of GDP.’

  But women do it for the love, we’re told, as if love will pay our bills and feed our children and take care of us in our old age. In fact, one of the most significant impacts of gender inequality and what ‘counts’ as value is the poverty faced by ageing women whose lifetime of unpaid work has earned them no superannuation or similar retirement funds. The fastest growing group of homeless people in Australia are women over the age of sixty-five—the same women who supported men as they established their careers, gave birth to their children and devoted their time to caring for them, and who were then frozen out of the workforce by a perceived lack of suitable skills. Even now, decades after Waring first started reading the System of National Accounts, unpaid labour is still framed as ‘women’s work’ and it’s still dismissed as ‘of little or no importance’.

  The fact is, there are overwhelming numbers of heterosexual partnerships in which this kind of labour is enforced daily in both subtle and not so subtle ways. The problem encountered by Jessica Rowe’s advice seeker—her need to outsource some of the work around her shared home to a professional, yet encountering opposition from the partner who is demographically far less likely to ever do it himself—is not uncommon, whether one or both are working outside the home. The idea that it is a luxury to spend money on work women are ‘supposed’ to do for free is widespread.

  Fighting over household chores might not seem like that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but the consequences of this go well beyond personal feelings of frustration and indignation. What we are exposed to in our homes is fundamental to the values and behaviours we grow up viewing as normal. It doesn’t matter how politically progressive your household is when it comes to aspirations outside the home and the limitless capabilities of women; if it’s made clear within those four walls that it is the responsibility of women to perform the unpaid labour of domesticity, this is the value system that children will internalise: boys are born to rule the world, and girls to clean up after them.

  Here’s another #truefact; no matter how much love there might be in the relationship, women who choose to live romantically with men are acting against their own economic interests.

  I know, I know. ‘More man-hating from the irrelevant Chlamydia Ford!’ screams the cohort of angry men who follow my every move on Facebook. Because why would something as meaningless and petty as the unpaid labour performed by women to the detriment of themselves and the endless benefit of the men in their lives possibly be a topic worth discussing?

  Except it’s not irrelevant. A 2016 study titled ‘Making money, doing gender, or being essentialist? Partner characteristics and Americans’ attitudes toward housework’, presented to the American Sociological Association’s 111th Annual Meeting, found that ‘most Americans still believe that women should be responsible for the majority of the cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping and child-rearing—even if the woman has a full-time job or makes more money than her partner.’

  That same year, the Australian Census data showed the average Australian woman spends between five and fourteen hours a week doing unpaid housework. Compare that to the average Australian man, who spends fewer than five hours on the same tasks. To put that another way, the typical Aussie bloke’s greatest output of domestic labour is still less than the typical Australian woman at her ‘laziest’—which is, as a plethora of posts on various mums’ forums tell me, a word that gets hurled at women all too often when their male partners come home at the end of the day and seem surprised they aren’t living in the boy heaven of the 1950s.

  Women aren’t born with a particular talent for scrubbing floors and washing clothes. We don’t instinctively know when to buy more toilet paper because the peculiar genetic condition we’ve been saddled with known as ‘womanhood’ makes us extra sensitive to the smell of pulped woodchips. The expectation that we not only service these needs but that we do so enthusiastically is part of the social and domestic conditioning most of us grow up with, and it absolutely quadruples in intensity for women who later choose to partner romantically (and domestically) with men.

  In a 2017 article for The Conversation, the academic Leah Ruppanner observed that ‘it’s during singlehood that housework time is most equal by gender’ (‘Census 2016: Women are still disadvantaged by the amount of unpaid housework they do’). But ‘most’ in this scenario still isn’t the same as ‘completely’. Ruppanner pointed to the findings of Australia’s 2016 Census to show that even when women are single or in full-time employment, they still perform more unpaid domestic labour on average than men. Worse, though, is this: ‘When women start to cohabit, their housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment status.’

  And they say we can’t have it all.

  Listen, I didn’t spend the self-esteem wasteland of my twenties sleeping with men whose chronically unwashed bedsheets had spawned entirely new ecosystems just to move in with them in my upwardly mobile thirties and become their long-suffering mother. Unfortunately, challenging this dynamic sometimes feels like being stuck in your own personal Groundhog Day, except you never get past the bit in the middle where Bill Murray keeps trying to electrocute himself. If having repetitive conversations about labour load feels exhausting to those of us who know how to use the phrase ‘fucking heteropatriarchal bullshit’ in a sentence, how much more frustrating do you think it is for women who aren’t in the habit of questioning sexism and gender inequality?

  But as annoying as these conversations are, we have to keep having them and demanding real follow-through, because it tends to get a lot worse once children enter the picture. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the tears and fractures that appear once you’ve delivered kids over the threshold of your humble abode won’t improve by themselves.

  Kind of like your traumatised pelvic floor, really.

  When I was still pregnant and blissfully naive about everything to do with children, I mentioned to a friend who’d already crossed the divide from clueless ingenue to harried mum that I planned to breastfeed because ‘breastmilk is free!’.

  ‘Yes and no,’ Ilaria replied. ‘Technically, you don’t have to pay for breastmilk. But it’s only “free” if you consider the mother’s labour worthless.’

  Theoretically, I understood what she was saying, but it didn’t fully hit me until my son arrived and became permanently attached to my nipples. I’ve been called a cow by trolls almost every week for the last decade, but I finally knew what they meant when I found myself acting as a never-ending milk supply to a baby whose appetite never seemed to wane.

  It’s an inescapable fact that the work of feeding a newborn baby can be labour intensive, particularly if the birth parent chooses to breastfeed (and is able to). In fact, as feminist economist Julie Smith wrote in her article ‘“Lost milk?”: Counting the economic value of breast milk in gross domestic product’, published in Journal of Human Lactation in July 2013, breastfeeding has an annual value of approximately $3 billion in Australia.

  In their first few weeks, a baby feeds for approximately eight hours of every day. Even if you were only doing the job of breastfeeding a three-week-old baby, you’d still be working a full-time job. When you consider the fact that there are no weekends, your work as a food producer actually outstrips the average Australian’s working week. Oh, except in addition to having to work seven days a week, you also get no sick leave, no lunch breaks, no
formalised training and substandard pay. Who negotiated the enterprise bargaining scheme on that?

  But in your average heterosexual relationship, lactating mothers don’t just do the breastfeeding. They also do the majority (if not the entirety) of work involved in rocking babies to sleep, massaging painful wind out of their bellies, dangling colourful objects over their heads to entertain them, supervising tummy time, keeping track of medical appointments, reading about and tracking milestones, not to mention all the other general housework—though apparently all that extra baby-related work is hardly real (and definitely not really hard). By the time you factor all of this in, you’re looking at a workload that spans at least twelve to fourteen hours a day and often a lot more. Don’t even mention the time spent trying to get the smell of dirty nappies out of your hair (my friend calls this the ‘shit shadow’). The slap in the face of it all is that, aside from the breastfeeding, none of this work needs to be done solely by the birth parent (who in almost all cases will be a woman). And yet, it’s amazing how the responsibility for it almost always seems to fall under her new job description, which could accurately be laid out as follows:

  An exciting new opportunity to join the organisation of Motherhood has arrived. Duties include being screamed at, vomited on, shat on, slept on, washing clothes, washing clothes again, washing clothes a third time, folding clothes, dying in a mountain of clothes, learning to tune out the repetitive sounds of The Wiggles, sweeping floors, resweeping the floors after your child uses their toy broom to ‘help’ you sweep them, stopping your child from eating the pile of dust and debris collected from the newly swept floor, putting on nappies, changing nappies, nappies again, poo, being woken up with a kick in the throat by a nineteen-month-old who’s spent most of the night sleeping with their butt on your face, negotiating tantrums, dishes, more dishes, booking appointments with the doctor, using Facebook to research childhood diseases, planning nutritious dinners that end up thrown on the floor, buying nappies, buying toilet paper, washing towels, wiping benches, memorising a catalogue of nursery rhymes, wiping crayon off the walls, more nappies, cleaning out the fridge, cleaning out the pantry moths, scrubbing the bath, cleaning poo out of the bath, scrubbing the bath again, remembering to wash cot sheets, more clothes to fold, being screamed at again.