"Yes, Men Should Do More Housework."

Writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Key paragraph:

So, yes, we could all do with slightly dirtier houses, and nobody ever died saying their only regret was they didn't buy enough ceramic tile cleaner. But maybe, now that women are out-earning us in bachelor's degrees and (often) in marriages as well, we could stand to do oh-just-slightly more than 35 percent of the dishes.

I don't see why one spouse making more money than the other should matter (the way one working longer or harder hours in a job should matter). But if the reason for the man to step up and do half of the housework is that the woman earns more, then that's implicitly saying the reason women have been doing more housework is subservience to her man because of the money he has brought to the relationship.

All couples are in some kind of an exchange — like the man in the earlier post who seems to have been buying a lady shoes as a way to earn his place in the relationship. We idealize relationships that are mostly or entirely love for love. And how lucky you are if you're in a 100% love-for-love relationship. It's highly rewarding to feel the love, and the feeling is much better if you're in a position to give it, and you never run out. And you get love too.

But there are all sorts of exchanges among couples, from the stark clarity of the money-for-sex exchange that is prostitution on up to the pure ideal of love-for-love.

Where are you on that continuum?

"A popular, new trend in the United States is vaginal steaming and it is being offered through spas and holistic health centers from southern California to New York..."

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

"Don’t you just wish you were a dog, sometimes? Don’t you wish that all your intellectual human knowledge about sanitation..."

"... and all that ingrained human near-instinctive revulsion at dirt and contamination would just vanish in an instant, so you’d be free? Free of shame, free of rules, just able to eat anything you want whenever you want, to roll around on your kitchen floor and come up with a faceful of ketchup dribblings, then lie there and lazily lick it off your chin? Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s here. You can do it. You can do it right now. You’re free. You’re free."

"Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?"

From a great collection of anti-Communist posters and ads, some of which are far better graphically. I picked this one out to display here because it's an interesting mix of rational argument and emotional appeal... by a commercial advertiser.

If you think the NYT is inclined to explain the racial angle to all manner of stories...

... you should notice when it fails to do so, as here: "Era Fades for Helping Hand at the Washroom Sink."

The NYT readers did. One reader wrote:

I'm surprised that racism is not mentioned.... I have not seen many bathroom attendants, but I never saw a white man in the position and always felt that my tip was like a vote cast in favor of a miserable and humiliating caste system.

Ha. This is a reason not to tip?!

Another wrote:

In September I took my 14-year-old daughter to Manhattan and to our very special lunch in the City. More than the food or excitement of Balthazar's lively atmosphere, or the fantasy that she was in a Parisienne cafe, is her memory of the bathroom, and the bathroom attendant. She was astonished at the idea of a bathroom attendant even after I, her 70s disco clubbing worldly mom explained, even after our teachable moment about racism, economics, education, sexism, fine dining, NYC, etc. She thought it had to be the worst job ever -- cooped up in that tiny smelly space hoping someone would give you a dollar for a paper towel; how would a poor old lady have money to spend for a stranger's perfume? It looked like slavery to her, too. I have to agree; although I see the need for reliable sanitation throughout the workday it really is archaic and peculiar.

(I added the link to that last word.)

"It was the most inconvenient and the most delightful place ever seen."

Wrote William Morris of Broadway Tower (which was built in 1799, to please the Countess of Coventry).

The Tower... certainly was absurd: the men had to bathe on the roof — when the wind didn't blow the soap away and there was water enough — and the way supplies reached us I don't quite know; but how the clean, aromatic wind blew the aches out of our tired bodies, and how good it all was!

"In the morning I grab the clothes that smell cleanest out of the pile of 'clean' clothes on my floor to wear that day…"

"Would you say this is an acceptable way to approach fashion?"

Question asked in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" of fashion critic Robin Givhan. I consider it a rhetorical question, but she did answer it. No, of course, is the obviously right answer, but it's also obviously wrong, since to answer it is to misinterpret it. And yet, if you submit to "Ask Me Anything," aren't you implicitly offering to answer everything? A clever way out would be to say: I said you can ask me anything, but I don't believe you are asking me anything.

"The rhetorical question is... any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks."

Here's a nonrhetorical question: For what purpose did the above-quoted man ask his question?

"How to cleans the sweatie and sluttish Complexion..."

"Take thirty Snails prepared, a quart of Goats milk, hogs suet three ounces, camfre poudred two drams, beat them together, and distil them in an Alembick."

Advice from 1665, from the blog Ask the Past, which was linked today at Metafilter.

Let's try one more. This is "How to Tell Jokes, 1558":

"Where your pleasantries are not rewarded with the laughter of listeners, cease and desist from telling jokes in the future. The defect is in you, not in your listeners... For these are movements of the mind, and if they are pleasant and lively, they are an indication and a testimonial of the nimble mind and the good habits of the speaker-- this is particularly liked by other men and endears us to them. But if they are without grace and charm, they have the contrary effect, so it appears a jackass is joking, or that someone very fat with an enormous butt is dancing and hopping about in a tight-fitting vest."

Someone... with an enormous butt is dancing and hopping about... which is actually all we do these days, in case you want to Ask Last Night at the VMAs (go to 1:45).

Reading Elmore Leonard.

I paid some attention when Elmore Leonard died, but the truth is that I'd never read any Elmore Leonard books. I toyed with the idea of ordering an Elmore Leonard book, but I hadn't pulled the trigger. But then I was tearing everything out of the bookcases in the room where we just redid the floors. My agenda is to get all our books onto the existing bookshelves, a process that's involved filling 8 shopping bags with books to be taken to Half Price Books for recycling.

And what the hell? I find an Elmore Leonard book. See:



Of all the Elmore Leonard books that somebody — not me — might have left in the house, I find "Bandits." This solves the problem of which Elmore Leonard book to order. I start reading "Bandits." I get about 15 pages in and I'm onto his game. Not saying it's not a good game. It is. Not putting down people who enjoy reading this kind of thing. I'm just saying it's not my kind of thing to read. If I had to write a novel — and I'm always getting ideas about novels that could be written — I'd get a bang out of writing like this. It's an easy way to fill out a lot of pages, even as you make your target readers feel that it's all very fast moving. I am not one of those target readers. For me, it's slow going.

What he's doing is: He has a story. Something that happened in the past. We're hearing 2 guys talk about whatever 2 guys would be talking about while doing whatever it is they're doing. In this case — in the case of "Bandits" — what they're doing is preparing a corpse for burial. So there's this whole sideline routine, telling us about some area of human expertise, which you could find out about in a couple minutes reading Wikipedia or stumbling onto an episode of "How It's Made." And as these guys talk, it slips out, every half page or so, some little dribble of information about whatever that thing was that happened in the past. You're supposed to care. What the hell happened? Who was this dead guy and who was that lady he was with and so forth. I'm just not the kind of person who cares.

A writer who wanted to take the trouble to write out descriptions of this and that might show us some event unfolding so we picture it, seemingly as it happened. But here, the thing already happened, and 2 guys are talking, while they're doing this other thing, which is an ordinary thing that's somewhat interesting to hear details about, preparing a corpse for burial. That's a great formula for having fun writing, and I know many readers find that fun to read. But I'm thinking: There's some damned thing that already happened, that could be told in a few sentences, and I'm supposed to hang out in this blather and catch the bits of the story as they float by. What's my motivation?

"Miss Ruth Kellogg demonstrating correct postures for various forms of housework."

From 1921.

More pics at the link. Doesn't this make you want to perform diligent housework in a full-length apron?

"We live in an age of what William James called 'medical materialism,' so instead of fretting about a fallen world..."

"...we speak of a poisoned one."

In a modern version of original sin, the corruption of our environment is so thorough that it defies individual efforts to transcend it: “Even those making good lifestyle choices still shower with city water, eat meals at restaurants, and live, work, and shop in buildings that have been cleaned and fumigated with toxic chemicals,” writes [Alejandro Junger in "Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself"]. We might add to his list other features of daily life that we suspect may be dangerous but haven’t been banned by the authorities: cell-phone signals that may lead to brain cancer, endocrine disruptors that drive our hormones crazy, probably leading, again, to cancer. Distrustful of our surroundings, we try to close ourselves off to malign influences and to purge them. It is no accident that Clean dwells obsessively on defecation and elimination. Junger wants us to flush out shit, “toxic waste,” even mucus, which he says has “a dense and sticky quality; it resonates with and attracts dense, toxic thoughts and emotions.”

(Here's the relevant William James book, one of the great classics, including a free Kindle edition.)

ADDED: Having downloaded the free Kindle version of "Varieties of Religious Experience," I can give you the relevant text right here:

But when other people criticize our our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.

Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which — and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent. 

"Believe me, I’ll tell you what, I’ve been through a spin dryer here in the last 48 hours, and I wish I hadn’t assisted them so much to that end..."

"But somehow in the long run, truth and time travel the same road. And we are very blessed that the Lord that we serve will prevail in the final analysis no matter what."

Said Rep. Trent Franks’s (R-Ariz.), whose "bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide now includes an exception for rape and incest after his remarks about rape and pregnancy created an uproar."

I was going to slam Franks for saying "spin dryer," when the spin cycle is something that happens in the washing machine, not the dryer. Something about Franks never doing laundry, maybe. But it turns out there is something called a "spin dryer." Maybe Franks is this guy.

The Althouse Amazon portal users: free of dirt, lint, crumbs, and debris, all without the weight of an engine or the tether of a power cord.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And unless you write your name in dust we'll have no way of knowing that's you not making any noise and going both forward and in reverse.

BISSELL Sturdy Sweep Sweeper, 2402B

"Cleansing reduction" — the new trend of bathing only once a week.

The idea is to preserve the skin's natural oils. And the environment. Plus: lazy.

"Tiny mites crawling unnoticed over Our Skin. Small nibbles, less then the slightest pinprick..."

"... Baby Spiders while you Sleep. Bowels full of half-digested Cheerios. Microscopic Creatures swarming In the Bathroom, Always, and You With your Pants Down. Sweat pressed into the Bed Sheets in which you will Cover Yourself Again. Drool on the Pillow. Cat Drool on the Pillow. Wash your Hands with the Same Bar of Soap That Someone has Used to Clean Horrible Things from Their Hands. Toothbrush unprotected in the same Room with the Toilet. The Plunger in the Corner, with Memories of What Has Been Plunged. Dry off from the Shower with the Towel from the Day Before, tiny flakes of Skin now Damp and Reapplied. Washcloth. Public restaurant with Sneezed Microbes Hanging in the Air, Settling on your Dinner Plate. Don't Even Think about the Horrors hiding in the Food on That Plate. A Solitary Hair from the Cook's Beard, the Second-Hand Steroids in the Beef. Not Every Employee Washes their Hands. The Guy in the Kitchen washing the Silverware in a Sink of oily brackish water, perhaps with the Faint Residue of the Drain Cleaner used to clear the Reoccurring Clogs. Band-Aid on the Finger loosening in Same Water. Table considered clean by a Quick Wipe with a Dish-Towel Wet From the Tables Wiped Before. Air Ducts lined with Dust and Daddy-Long Legs. More baby Spiders."

A comments contribution — from betamax3000 — in yesterday's "Healthing" post (which was about the delusional spraying of disinfectant all over the house).

El Pollo Raylan offers the Rod Serling reading here.

"Healthing."

I'm not sure what bothers me more here — the word "healthing" or the notion of spraying germ-killer all over the house. What passes for cleaning these days? What passes for healthy? What passes for language?!

AND:



ALSO: I looked up "fungi" in the OED, hoping for some better pronunciation info, after many commenters said the "fun guy" pronunciation was correct and/or subliminally useful. I got distracted by the 1c definition of fungus:

c. A beard. Also face fungus n. at face....

1925 P. G. Wodehouse Sam the Sudden xiii. 89 Where did you get the fungus?
1936 P. G. Wodehouse Laughing Gas xxiv. 255, I had fallen among a band of criminals who were not wilful beavers, but had merely assumed the fungus for purposes of disguise.
1937 ‘R. Crompton’ William—the Showman x. 240 ‘Is it to be me or that ass with the fungus on his cheeks?’ demanded Richard belligerently....

"I was suddenly intrigued: What could sensory deprivation do for me?"

"There are only a few places to float in New York City. I first tried La Casa, a day spa near Union Square, which features a tank in large part because co-owner Jane Goldman loves to float."

On a weekday morning, I climbed the stairs to La Casa, took off all my clothes, and, after showering, stepped into a large tub inside an enclosed chamber.

Reading between the lines: The water is reused. Sorry, even though you took a shower, this is icky. I'm not getting the luxury of this at all. Why not take a bath at home with the lights off until you are beyond bored?

The water and air in the float chamber are skin temperature, the darkness is identical with eyes open or closed, and there is no sound—thus there is no external input. In turn, my brain decelerated until its output also slowed, and then stopped. I was suspended in a place with no space, or time, or purpose. Once in a while, some quotidian thought would begin to surface at the edges—did I respond to that email?—and then bounce around in the lonely void of my skull for a moment or two. But it would soon melt away as my brain realized it didn’t care. Back to the void.

The author, Seth Stevenson — I just noticed I wasn't reading an article written by a woman — fails to mention the thought I know what it's like to be dead.

Here's the Wall Street Journal article that inspired Stevenson. The Journal offers some more info on the ickiness factor:

Many tanks today have robust sanitation and filtration systems that use ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide, and the centers test the solution regularly. The volume of clients determines how often the fluid is changed. Floaters are required to shower before entering the tanks, and have the option of wearing a bathing suit, though the centers recommend not wearing anything at all.

I just want to say I hope no one masturbates. When you're in the tank, does that idea bounce around in the lonely void of your skull for a moment and then melt away as your brain realizes it doesn't care?

But this is the Wall Street Journal, and the really important thought is: What kind of business is a "float center"? The tanks cost $10,000 and floaters pay something like $75 as session. A float-center owner is quoted saying: "It's not a super-profitable business, but you get a lot of hugs."

How do you feel about running a business where you "get a lot of hugs"? Is that alternative compensation or is that another negative (along with the need for robust sanitation and the changing of fluids)? Here's Stevenson's description of himself post-tanking: "I emerged in a profound daze. I spoke slowly and quietly, like a smooth-jazz DJ." That's what will be hugging you.... speaking of things one might like to be sensorily deprived of.

The Althouse Amazon portal: 2 times more absorbent than the next leading national brand portal.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you tell someone who tells someone who tells someone else will we know it's you.

From the May 9, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Bounty Huge Roll, Select a Size, White

"We gathered for a simple purpose, to dirty our hands as we prepared to attend Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral."

"We were soiling our hands as a silent response to Cardinal Dolan's column last week in which he suggested that LGBT people were welcome in the church so long as they washed their hands. As we began to rub our hands together with pieces of ash, our hands took on the look and feel of the effort that has defined our work to receive an equal seat at the table of Christ in the Catholic Church. Those participating were not only LGBT Catholics, but also allies and, perhaps most importantly, parents of LGBT children. We gathered not in protest, but as a silent witness...."

ADDED: Many commenters complain that the linked article — by Joseph Amodeo at HuffPo — fails to link to Dolan's column. Here it is: "All Are Welcome!" It begins with a lesson learned from his childhood: His friend was welcomed to the family's dinner table, and his father told both boys to "go wash your hands before you eat." He makes the analogy to "the supernatural family we call the Church: all are welcome!" And what is the equivalent to the expectation that hands will be washed before dinner? Dolan refers to the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Jesus doesn't condemn her but tells her to "sin no more."

Dolan doesn't talk about sinners being unclean and needing to wash. He says "Hate the sin; love the sinner," and lists 6 examples of sinners who sins the Church does not "condone." Persons "with a same-sex attraction" are 5th on the list. The others are: 1. alcoholics, 2. a businessman who fails to "pay a just wage," 3. unmarried heterosexuals who have sex, 4. a woman who has an abortion and the man who impregnated her and encouraged it, and 6. rich people who don't give to the poor. 

"Friends and major donors insist that Mrs. Clinton is sincere in expressing ambivalence about seeking the presidency again..."

"... and they go so far as to assert that she is simply happy to have time to clean out her closets for the first time in decades."

Sincere... Clinton sincere... depends on what the meaning of sincere is.

The releveant OED definition of "sincere" is "Characterized by the absence of all dissimulation or pretence; honest, straightforward." Referring to persons, the word in English goes back to 1539, and the (unlinkable) OED has a lot of historican examples, but one stands out:

1824   Byron Don Juan: Canto XVI xcvii. 112   For surely they're sincerest, Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.

In context:

So well she acted all and every part
By turns — with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err — 't is merely what is call'd mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false — though true; for surely they're sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.

Right now, the closets are most near/To clean them must be quite sincere.