Penny Wiseacre

What "Gone Girl" taught me about slacking on the housework

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait suggested that maybe women could get over their disgruntlement over doing more housework than their male partners by just ... well, by just doing less. Or as he put it:

Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it.

Let us skip-hop around the stereotypes innately baked into the assumptions about hetero partnerships here and break down the risible assumptions in the passage above. Then I will explain how they tie into last summer's breakout novel, Gone Girl, which will eventually be used by time management consultants as an inspiring story about the power of a well crafted to-do list.

Women opting out: The classic LBD of lifestyle reporting

It had to happen. After two female CEOs -- Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg -- succeeded (albeit in different ways) of drawing national attention to things like "work-life balance as a concern universal to all U.S. workers" and "persistent gender inequities at all levels in the American workplace," it was time to move the debate away from a direction in which anything productive might actually get done. 

Time to divide and conquer! What works better than the twin loci of class feeling and feminism? 

Nearly ten years ago, Lisa Belkin penned "The Opt-Out Revolution" for the NYT, and succeeded in focusing a nation's ire on privileged women and/or the feminists who did/didn't defend them. This week, Lisa Miller's "The Feminist Housewife" wears that same rut in New York.

Because there really is very little that's new under the sun, let me predict what will happen next: