timeimmortal

Mind you, it’s also good to see a number of women standing up against it. I think I have to agree with The Anchoress‘ description of this MSNBC columnist as a “miserable toothache of a woman” — she, and her views, are at least despicable enough to warrant that label.

Not that I don’t agree that husbands shouldn’t do their part to participate in the day-to-day upkeep of the family home, of course. What I disagree with is the level of cyincism and outright contempt being poured out on this columnist’s poor husband — who, she admits, does his part around the home! — in such a widely public forum as the MSNBC news/opinions website!

I admit that my husband helps out more than many men, but here’s another news flash: It isn’t because he’s such a fabulously enlightened being. Left to his own devices, he would doubtless park himself in front of the TV like some sitcom male-chauvinist couch potato while I did all the work. The reason Jeremy “helps” as much as he does (an offensive terminology that itself suggests who’s really being held responsible) is simple: He doesn’t have a choice.

From the beginning of our relationship, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be any husband’s unpaid servant. If Jeremy wanted to be — and stay — married to me, let alone have kids, he couldn’t stick me with all the boring, mundane stuff nobody wants to do. We were going to share the work, or we were going to forget the whole deal.Unlike my first husband, who announced after our wedding that he didn’t like the way the French laundry did his shirts and he now expected me, the Wife, to wash and iron all of them, Jeremy recognized both the righteousness of the principle involved and the intransigence of the woman he’d married, and proceeded to pitch in.

That was 17 years ago, and while we haven’t exactly achieved equity, we’ve come a lot closer to it than most of our peers, judging by all the dreary surveys proving that men are slugs and their wives are superwomen. So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.

Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.

Precisely what is she talking about, O Reader? Another human being? Or is she in the process of breaking in a small animal, as though training it not to pee on the carpet? Does her husband put up with this?

I realize that I’ve been quite lucky in marriage when I read stuff like this; Grace is a wonderful wife, and feels no need to exert this sort of control over every detail of my life. I’m grateful for that, because my tolerance for the sort of attitude our crusading columnist here displays is…rather miniscule. I wouldn’t be surprised if the aforementioned husband didn’t start working late hours at the office simply because his co-workers were preferable company to the shrew of a spouse he found for himself, who sees fit only to demean and insult him in her published online column.

What I hope the good Reader realizes is that in the end, this columnist — whose name I see no reason to articulate here, incidentally, for fear of lending her undue credibility — is chauvanistic and steeped in misandry. In her quest to proclaim her liberated-ness as a woman, she has become the very thing she decries, although in reverse.

Don’t believe me?

You’re supposed to insist, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s not as if men don’t have leverage these days; despite the progress that feminism has made, men are (we are told) still earning more money on average than women, and many men are still the primary wage-earners for their households. And yet women, it seems, initiate a good two-thirds of divorces. What does this tell us about their relative levels of satisfaction within marriage? What does this tell us about the relative gratitude of the sexes?

And while I recognize that gender stereotypes are risky, in my experience women are a lot like children. They will get away with whatever they can get away with. When you put your foot down and make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer, somehow the kids’ rooms get cleaned, the groceries bought, the laundry folded, and the sex had. It really does work, I promise.

Had this column been written by a man, and had he ended it as I have edited the ending of the existing column above, MSNBC would have handed him his pink slip within an hour of the article’s publication. And rightly so! But this columnist gets a pass because instead of being a man, she has made men her victims subject?

~ by Kenneth on April 22, 2008.