Q: What happens when a man puts a fresh roll of toilet paper onto the holder?
A: Nobody knows; it’s never happened.
Or, if you don’t like that joke, there are about a fucking billion exactly like it. Turn on your TV to check if you want: three seconds should do it. It’s taken as cultural gospel that men are, by nature, sloppy, unhygienic, and generally filthy. Women, by contrast, are neat and clean and constantly exasperated by the unending tide of filth that is the male gender. Indeed, a standard way of calling a man’s masculinity into question is to show that he is neat and well-groomed (i.e. thousands of throwaway gay jokes, or every episode of Frasier).
This is part of a larger cultural narrative, one that I’ll call the “civilizing” narrative, wherein men are grunting, violent, ill-smelling brutes, and women must overcome these disgusting attributes and train the men to ape the manners of civilization. (Usually via their role as sexual gatekeeper, dontcha know.) The men often experience this as emasculation, but come to enjoy being “domesticated” because it lets them have the suburban nuclear-family existence we’re all supposed to want. This is a pretty popular model; you see film theorists analyze Westerns through that lens, conservative pundits like to write columns about why this “fact” means that traditional marriage is necessary, and of course it’s the go-to model for sitcom writers too hung over to do any work that day.
Thing is, I’m pretty sure it’s just made up.
Certainly on the slob thing, its predictive value is crap. To call back to the original joke, I always feel compelled to put toilet paper onto the holder properly, and a good thing too, because none of the women whose bathrooms I use ever do it. I’ve seen both men and women with bedrooms whose floors weren’t visible, except for a narrow path between the bed and the door. I’ve seen both men and women carefully cleaning the glass on the front of the microwave. I’ve seen both men and women be wildly inconsistent in their neatness, keeping the inside of their car pristine and the inside of their house looking like a grenade went off in a hobo jungle. I’ve seen both men and women put yesterday’s clothes on because fuck it. Just because there’s a million of this meme doesn’t mean there aren’t a million more of this one.
Nobody’s saying that there are no cases where women straighten up after slobby dudes. I’m sure there are many such cases. I’m also sure I spent years following one girlfriend around, putting the lids back on things she opened, because otherwise nothing in the house would have had a lid. I’m saying that from what I’ve seen, human experience fails to match up very consistently to the cultural narrative.
Shorter version: If you’re correctly calling a flipped coin 50% of the time, don’t expect me to be impressed with your predictive abilities, or to laugh at jokes about how you always call the flip correctly, amirite?
So here we are, awash in a cultural narrative that is, unequivocally, insulting to men. There’s no hidden up side to being referred to as smelly and disgusting; the oh-but-I-love-him-anyway excuse in commercials is usually “He doesn’t know how to do laundry, but he can fix the car!” or some such shit. Is there a way to combat this that doesn’t just trigger reflexive sneering about “metrosexuals” or whatever equivalent gender-policing term is being used this year?
@IDiom: “As an avid fan of Fraiser I found the show empowering and indeed the only show on television in which the protagonist was not a ‘normal’ heterosexual man as portrayed by ‘Everyone Loves Raymond’, ‘That 70s Show’ etc.”
Ok, you’re right that “Everybody Loves Raymond” presented a “‘normal’ heterosexual man”, but Ray – the “man” – was the but of many jokes, as his father (who was also a “man”) and his brother (less so, but a bit).
No, I’d take that as a sexual reference. Sorry – both were in poor taste.
“But I think the idea is more that men are exploiting women so that they don’t have to do work, rather than that they wouldn’t do the work if they didn’t have women to do it.’ I think that is the point of confusion, Xakudo. However of course the meme is general throughout the culture and it’s not unusual to hear women voicing this kind of thing, so to the extent feminists are women in this culture, it’s not much of a reach to expect them to hold similar views, in their unreconstructed moments. “and WE HAVE GODWIN! ” Noah,… Read more »
@Jim: Um. Dude. German =/= Nazi. Brownshirt = Nazi. If I’d mentioned bratwurst, would that also be a Nazi reference by this standard?
Haha! I thought Uncalledfor had the faintest glimmer of an argument until he quoted the Daily Mail to characterise feminist thought. For those who don’t know, the Daily Mail considers feminists to be The Devil, just behind immigrants and teh gays.
@uncalledfor: I am having great difficulty finding anything via google (as you suggested) that actually shows a feminist herself/himself making the claim that men are slobs compared to women. Can you provide some links? I have personally never seen this claim from a feminist. However, I have seen the claim on one or two occasions on feminist sites that men do not do an equal share of the housework, which seems related. But I think the idea is more that men are exploiting women so that they don’t have to do work, rather than that they wouldn’t do the work… Read more »
Uncalledfor is getting piled on and cursed at. I hate that shit.
@noah:
Noah, seriously, do you just have an uncontrollable urge to provoke people?
I agree with a lot of what you write in your posts, and I certainly disagree with uncalledfor in this thread. But… good god. This is not the way to create a safe environment for dissenting opinions.
If the shirt fits, wear it.
I’m not saying it’s noble or admirable to enjoy watching it, but we all know that guilty shiver of schadenfreude, don’t we?
Brown shirt back from the cleaners, I see. Bet you look sharp in it.
And WE HAVE GODWIN! I knew it was only a matter of time. Anyone so ignorant they think men being slobs is a foundational premise of feminism would be sure to go Godwin sooner or later, but I have to admit, doing it via such a complete non sequitur is impressive.
Not nearly as entertaining as you, Noah, devolving into snark, the last refuge of those with nothing substantive to say. I, at least, can be wrong in principle, since I’ve actually said something; you’re just a clown.
Rae: “I think the quoted comment is claiming that feminists would have us believe that male slobbiness is some kind of epidemic. I disagree with that claim” Good Lord, you’re actually serious, aren’t you? The idea that men are, typically, some combination of lazy (ie not willing to do domestic work) and sloppy (not caring if domestic work gets done), and so insist that women do all the “women’s work” has been a bedrock staple of feminism for over fifty years! (here “epidemic” just means widespread, not contagious) You don’t have to be on the mailing list to get this… Read more »
Who here is kind of enjoying watching Uncalledfor dig himself deeper? Start by fundamentally misunderstanding the premises involved, and just keep doubling down on that bet… hilarity ensues. I’m not saying it’s noble or admirable to enjoy watching it, but we all know that guilty shiver of schadenfreude, don’t we?
Rae, I can’t fault your inner lawyer on that one. That’s pretty much how I would read that too.
I don’t claim to have any kind of encyclopedic knowledge of either academic or internet feminsim, but that that is one I have never seen or heard any feminist anywhere mention at all.
@Jim, my inner lawyer is probably getting the best of me here, but I was referring to this comment by Uncalledfor: If (i) there really are so many women in the world who are living with slob men, that this is some kind of epidemic as feminism would have you believe… I think the quoted comment is claiming that feminists would have us believe that male slobbiness is some kind of epidemic. I disagree with that claim (though I agree with the point the original post is making about the wider culture, and do not take it to imply the… Read more »
” It is the dominant narrative; it’s a part of the dominant narrative that many feminists and many masculists are fighting against.’ Feminists used to fight against it tooth and nail. It was the cornerstone of the “woman’s place is in the kitchen” meme. Then things somehow changed. For one thing as women started moving into the corporate world. They were welcomed with the same hostility that young men are welcomed with, but they came with significant vulnerabilities, like expecting older men to treat them the way their fathers had treated them instead of the way fathers treat sons. They… Read more »
I misspoke (er, mistyped). I’ve never seen any feminist say it’s not-terrible for men and be taken seriously in a feminist space. It is the dominant narrative; it’s a part of the dominant narrative that many feminists and many masculists are fighting against.
“And I’ve never seen anyone say it’s not-terrible for men, which doesn’t mean no one’s ever said it.” Herchele, it’s the frickin’ dominant narrative in the culture. You rarely see it in feminist spaces, but you see it in spaces wher ethe generla public commnets – newspaper articles and so on. Men just make babaies and disappear off to fun in the sun at work all day, or we jusyt come home and put our heads in the tube, or whatever. Check out comments on articles that detail the hormonal changes fathers go through during pregnancy. The gender essentialist Creationism… Read more »
I wonder how much of the viewpoint about men and neatness attributed here to “feminism” is actually traceable to people who are notable for feminism, in any sense narrower than “notion that women are people.” Because I’ve seen similar remarks from the likes of comediennes and lifestyle-section columnists, but not feminists qua feminists.
I would like to go on the record as saying that I would be taken as a woman by the average PUA, and I am not sexually interested in self-centered, aloof egotists, as a study of my sexual history will easily discern.
BlackHumor: Women decide whether a man is hot ENTIRELY WITHOUT REFERENCE to whether or not he does chores, just like you do. My, what narrow thinking; pry open your eyes just a tad and you’ll see that this is silly once you consider closely related and predictive behaviors. If it is true, as the PUA’s would have you believe, that qualities like self-centeredness, aloofness and egotism in men are widely and deeply attractive to women, then IT’S NOT HARD TO SEE that men chosen for these qualities will also VERY LIKELY be lazy and expect to be waited on hand… Read more »
@Uncalledfor: Wait… feminists would have us believe that male slobbiness was some kind of epidemic? I must’ve missed that memo. I think that wanting to be with a guy who basically cleans up after himself is like wanting to be with a woman who doesn’t go on a crying jag every time you fail to buy her roses: it makes sense as an expectation, but it’s not really the sort of thing you praise people for succeeding at, or fetishise sexually. (I mean, no offence to anyone with an unusual sexual fetish… it’s just not the main mechanism for enforcing… Read more »
@Rae, continuing from above: To make the point more directly, if a woman is attracted (through whatever mechanism you believe to be at work) to men with whom she can’t establish a happy life, then that bad state of affair is primarily her own problem and does not give her a license to publicly complain that “all men are like that” if, in fact, not all men are like that. To take the obvious example, if a woman finds herself persistently attracted to men who abuse her, then she’s in a tough spot! and may have a hard time leading… Read more »
@Uncalledfor: That’s a false dichotomy; chores aren’t sexy to anyone except fetishists. Men who do chores aren’t hot. Men who DON’T do chores aren’t hot. Women decide whether a man is hot ENTIRELY WITHOUT REFERENCE to whether or not he does chores, just like you do. Though now I think of that, my mom is actually the least neat person in my immediate family, including me. I’m confidant that if my dad left her alone for a week the house would turn from “pigsty” to “biohazard”. (No insult intended; nobody in my family can really be called “clean”) —- @superglucose:… Read more »
“And sure, I’m messy. I hate cleaning and always have: I find scrubbing the counters after my (female) flatmate made yet ANOTHER mess while cooking (and to play off the gender dichtomy a bit more, she’s not even a very good cook) to be disgusting. ” In Ranma ½, a rather sexist comedic manga written by a woman (and yes, it’s her entire comedic style to punish male characters for perceived slights, by female characters, often in megaton punch star-in-the-sky way. Ranma is the male main character, who turns female when touched with cold water, and turns back to male… Read more »
Fair’s fair. Would that it were so, Rae. Men may not consider neat Jane particularly sexy, but as the OP discusses there is no corresponding cultural meme accusing women of generally being slobs, either. Do you grasp that the situation is not symmetrical? Women complain about men who won’t do their share of work, which implies that they want men who will; but they chose the kind who won’t and then complain as though this was something forced on them. That’s hypocrisy, as practiced by women. Under the heading of sloppiness (other subjects are a different matter), I’m sorry, but… Read more »
Whoops, link.