We don’t notice it when the house is clean and well ordered, with furniture arranged neatly, things put away in their places and dust-free surfaces. When meals are ready on time, dishes and cutlery are washed and placed correctly, the laundry is done and the bathrooms are clean, we don’t really notice. However, we notice instantly when these things are not done. One woman decided to see if and when this came to the attention of her husband.
@MissPotkin is a Twitter handle that posted this tweet and a thread of subsequent tweets about her home experiment. She was tired of doing the dishes and cleaning up afterwards so she decided to do this. she wanted to see how soon this would be noticed and corrective action taken.
She also stopped doing the laundry. It all started to pile up soon enough.
Things ran low: toiletries, TP in the loo and so on. Suddenly the person who did all of this stuff seamlessly and seemingly invisibly was no longer doing it.
…it was not switched on. To be clear, it can be agony not to do the work when one has been so used to doing it all for so long.
This was something she did consciously for three days – not washing, picking up or tidying, to find out when he noticed all that she did each day.
No dishes were being cleaned so when all the dishes were dirty, this happened.
Apart from all the other stuff there is all the untidiness and the clutter that piles up, seemingly mysteriously. Where does it come from? Where should it go? Who should answer those questions and why?
Homemakers do what they do out of love, not because it is their job. And doing it all – the cleaning, the putting away, the arranging, the marketing, the replacing – every day, without pay and without appreciation or even acknowledgement can be tough.
All that homemakers want is not to be taken for granted – particularly by the people they love the most.
Others spoke about ‘communication’ and demanded to know whether the woman had a ‘job’. They were revealing in what they said and didn’t say.
The fact is that women are disproportionately expected to be caregivers for the family, regardless of whether they have paid jobs. Some men had the self-awareness to acknowledge this fact; that they needed to do better.
A lot of the responses to the experiment were about urging the couple to ‘communicate more’. Why don’t you tell him what you expect him to do, was the gist of these comments. Here’s the thing though: why should anyone be told to look after their own house; be told to pick up after themselves? Why is this not something done as a matter of course by all the adults in the home? This image – now the unofficial image for mansplaining – is for all those who didn’t get it: the idea behind the experiment.
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