Mar 14, 2008

Sex and the single family home

By Malcolm Fleschner / Humor Columnist

Contrary to popular belief, husbands and wives have traditionally shared equally in taking care of housework responsibilities. Specifically, husbands have typically been in charge of making the messes that wives have been tasked with cleaning up. For generations this arrangement worked perfectly, and was consistently rated as "ideal" by 50 percent of those involved.

Recently, however, the other half of the population has begun to raise objections and demand that husbands contribute more to the cleaning process than turning up the TV's volume and reluctantly lifting their feet while their wives vacuumed the carpet underneath. And to our credit, men have responded. According to recent research, men today do 30 percent of housework, up from 15 percent in the 1960s.

So what accounts for this change? Have men become more sympathetic to our wives' hard work around the house? Do we want to feel more connected to the day-to-day running of the household? Are we more concerned about the ongoing threats posed by common household scourges like soap scum, waxy buildup and ring around the collar? Um, maybe. But a more plausible explanation lies in an article I recently read with the following headline: "Men Who Do Housework May Get More Sex."

The accompanying article suggests that whereas men who don't lift a finger around the house send the message that they don't care, husbands who offer to help with chores are more likely to put their wives "in the mood."

I admit that I'm always suspicious of reports like this. For too long husbands have been getting tricked by the powerful married women's lobby, which regularly releases "studies" with bogus findings like "Being Nice To Mother-In-Law Adds 20 Yards to Golf Drives" or "Admitting You're Lost, Then Stopping to Ask for Directions Only Proven Method to Increase Penis Size."

If the housework article is to be believed, men have long been completely mistaken about what turns on the ladies. Could it be that women don't necessarily get all hot and bothered when we suck in our stomachs at the beach, shout obscenities at fellow motorists and get into fistfights with the opposing team's dads at our children's Little League baseball games? Could it be that, in what can only be seen as one of life's great ironies, all along we've been the ones who should have been donning the skimpy French maid uniforms and getting busy with the feather duster?

Sex certainly beats nagging, women's other, more common approach to getting men to pitch in around the house, but it's still not a perfect solution. "If I wanted to be having a lot of sex, I wouldn't have gotten married," is a frequent lament from today's married women.

A better idea is how my wife gets me to do her bidding, which is to trick me into thinking it's all my idea. Here's an example: for some time we had been talking about digging out a dirt-covered portion of our yard to fill in as a sand pit for our children. Oh, the joy we had, imagining all the fun the kids would have as soon as the sand pit got dug out, perhaps by helpful woodland creatures.

But then my wife had to go and ruin the fun by declaring that she had tried to start the digging, but that the ground was just too hard-packed and could not be broken with a shovel. Well, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the male of the species knows, the gauntlet had been thrown down. She might as well have said that my manhood was hidden somewhere in that dirt patch.

I grabbed the spade from her hands and attacked the ground with the ferocity of a Jack Russell terrier on methamphetamine. Frankly, if our backyard were big enough, we could have wound up with an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

So here's my suggestion for all the wives out there who are tired of having to appeal to their husbands' baser natures every time they want help with the vacuuming: start appealing to our other baser natures. Men are not only sex-crazed - we're also vain, competitive and thick-skulled. With that in mind, following are variations of a few phrases wives should begin to work into conversations with their husbands:

"It's not humanly possible to fit all of tonight's dishes in the dishwasher - we'll just have to do two loads."

"Not to brag, but my record for stripping all the beds and putting new sheets on is seven minutes flat."

"Alice's husband is too scared of heights to get up on a ladder to clean out the gutters. You don't have that problem, do you?"

In return for this advice, I only ask that, while your husband is "voluntarily" doing all this housework, you be generous and help out once in a while. Preferably in that skimpy French maid's uniform.


Malcolm is always eager for readers' tips for selfishly manipulating loved ones into doing his bidding at Malcolm@CultureShlock.com.