Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

What at first seemed to be individual grudges amongst the women and girls I interviewed turned out to be a universal complaint: even though they know perfectly well that there is no logical reason for them to be exempt from the sponge and the loo brush, all that men and boys have to do to avoid chores is dig in their heels and refuse to acknowledge the dirt; sit and moulder in their own accumulating grime; wait out the filth. Eventually, a nearby female will reluctantly roll up her dainty sleeves and wipe up the mess.
     
    It is not so much that men have a higher tolerance for dirt – on the contrary, recent studies have shown that roughly the same percentage of adult men and women care “a lot or quite a lot” about standards of hygiene and domestic comfort. Rather, domestic equality stumbles against the fact that men, as members of the domestic bourgeois, have so much more to lose as individuals and as a privileged group by facing up to the base cowardice of that ‘can’t’. What we are facing here is not series of separate household slanging matches but a systemic offensive against women’s rights as workers.
     
    My generation, born after the supposed victory of feminism, grew up with that labour dispute on our doorsteps, our infant identities held hostage in the subtle violence of domestic negotiations. Kathryn, 35, from Winnipeg, Canada, is just one of the growing army of women who will do anything not to have to bear the pain and frustration that our mothers faced:
     
My mother seemed to be tired and stressed out pretty much all the time. I don’t remember her being happy often. I honestly think that by the end of the day, she had nothing left to give us, emotionally speaking – she was worn out, and even the fact that she was out there earning a paycheque had no appreciable impact on her total responsibility on the domestic front. Watching my mother become a tired automaton had a huge impact on my life. I vowed never to end up with a man who didn’t do his share. I failed at that the first time, and I ended up hiring a cleaner to save my marriage. I couldn’t stand that he wilfully ignored dirt, and I couldn’t stand things only got done if I had a meltdown. I feel very strongly that my girls should see me smile and laugh as often as possible. I give them a lot of physical affection and tell them I love them every day, because I don’t want them to feel the lack I did.
     
Big babies
    There are, of course, some occasions when ‘can’t’ really does mean ‘can’t’. And this should give us pause for thought. Why, in a culture which has had universal electrical provision for barely seventy years, do so many men lack the basic practical skills to prevent themselves and their loved ones starving, freezing, sickening, burning or choking to death in their own homes?
     
    Like any bourgeois class, men have been kept ignorant and dependent on a class of labourers with subordinated bodies, and encouraged to see that ignorance and that dependence as empowerment. Boys in the post-war era in particular have been denied even the basic tools of housekeeping, and three generations of young men have now grown up watching their fathers do next to nothing in the home, apart from the sanctioned male activities of lawn maintenance and garden barbecue operation. Keeping men dependent on women to take care of them reinforces the double-headed axe of domestic disenfranchisement, ensuring that post-industrial capitalist homemaking is seen as the only viable option for people who want to live comfortable lives and raise healthy families.
     
    The genius of this strategy has been to persuade men that their learned incompetence in the home is strength, when in fact it is weakness – terrible weakness. That weakness places immeasurable restrictions on the choices of men and boys both within and outside the home.
     
    The deliberate domestic disempowerment of men did not begin with no-fault divorce laws. On the contrary – the empowerment which men really have lost in the home is not about dominance, but about self-sufficiency: not a man’s right to sit at the head of the table or to have ‘access’ to ‘his’ children, but the power to cook a meal that feeds a family or to keep himself and his loved ones from squalor and sickness. For many years, men and boys have been deliberately deprived of these skills, and adult men and women have colluded in that deprivation, which is two-horned in its faulty logic: not