What’s Wrong with This Picture

A friend recently posted a photo on Facebook that consisted of a list of what the wife does between the time she says she’s going to bed and actually goes to bed, on the left, and what the husband does in the same sequence.

It’s meant to show how uneven the domestic work load is. It’s meant to make us feel for the woman and turn against the man, the worthless shit.

I find so many things wrong here, so deeply, fundamentally wrong, something that rankles me to the core, that I’m surprised I’m not ranting and gushing obscenities as I write (it’s what I’d expected of myself).

It describes the woman I’ve always avoided, the domestic drone of 1950s conservative fantasy. The woman who knows her place. The woman who thinks the most important thing in the world is the perfect family, which begins with the perfect home.

Does she really consider all these activities more important than sleep? “Clean the glass on the back door”—you’ve got to be kidding.

I also find her self-deception disturbing. Why would she say she’s going to bed knowing she’ll do all those other things first? It looks manipulative and passive aggressive. It looks like she’s trying to show him up and put him in his place with guilt.

Without knowing his situation I’d have to nod along with everyone else that he is that worthless shit we’re supposed to see him as. Why wasn’t he helping with all those petty domestic chores?

There’s so much stereotyping.

What happened to feminism?

Why does this couple seem to linger in an outdated era playing meaningless roles?

A very important question neither asked nor answered in this poster is: what were they doing all day. Do both of them have jobs outside the house? Are their jobs stressful or physically exhausting? If they both have day jobs, did both of them do household chores before dinner, such as making dinner, helping the kids with homework, fixing things around the house?

My automatic response was that I don’t like either of them. I have long rejected the male roles that I was expected to occupy and I’ve rejected the women who would have complimented me in those roles. You can consider me selfish if you like.

Some of her activities are important, such as packing the kids’ lunches (assuming the lunches are for the kids and not the husband) and signing the school papers. Brushing your teeth and locking the door are also (probably) necessary and acceptable things to do after you’ve said you’re going to bed. But the rest? Is it really necessary to finish the laundry and dishes or to pick up toys?

Sleep should come first.

I’m not even going to get into the needs of an artist who has to work a meaningless day job and how that impacts the alleged importance of domestic conformity. Who’s life are we living anyway? Why would someone waste their life and health satisfying some pathetic social fantasy?

Yes, I am of the era in which it was important to find one’s self and fuck social expectations. Sometimes I think we were right and sometimes it made us a generation of selfish whiners.

I’ll tell you here and now that our relationship at home has come to resemble the stereotype more than either of us would like. We started out close to 50-50 on the domestic chores. Over the years I’ve backed away from the complexity and grind of raising a family, as well as succumbing to the exhaustion of earning a living. (I’m not going to discuss my partner’s possible flaws. I’ll just say it’s not entirely me being a selfish shit.)

What’s really missing in the relationship portrayed is any sense of a common goal, of discussing what really matters and agreeing on who does what. Those two people, and sometimes my partner and I, are just going through the motions of living.

 

Toxic Correctness

Before I go into this tirade against Political Correctness I need to draw a line on the ground, which I will surely cross many times as I write this (probably before the paragraph has ended). My political or social views tend to be in the left/liberal/progressive camp. My background is working class/rural (or north woods). The family I acquired at birth tend to be pretty conservative, though traditional or old fashioned might be a better way of saying it: on my mother’s side they strive to be polite in what they say and vote labor (in the United States that generally means Democratic); on my father’s side they’re more diverse, ranging from overtly bigoted, inflammatory Republicans to being as polite and class conscious as anyone on my mother’s side. Very few in my family are college educated and those that are tend to see it as a fancy vocational training rather than buying into the life style fantasies of an elite. The majority of my birth family are above average in intelligence, some very noticeably so, but none could in any way be described as intellectual.

My partner’s family is much more respectable and better educated. She herself had a very radical period in her youth and remains suspicious of all orthodoxies. I only mention this to say that our friends could come from almost any strata of society but tend to be of the more or less generic working people, blue or white collar, and that their religious and political beliefs are diverse.

And I mention her background to say that our children have grown up in what could be called a liberal or even radical household but that they have been taught to respect all and question all.

I also need to point out that I was born in 1957. That is, I was born into the Civil Rights movement and came of age with the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era, out of which sprang the Feminist movement, Gay rights, and the ecology movement.

In other words, sitting right with social equality and justice is as much part of my thinking as sitting right with Jesus might be for someone else. But probably more to the point is that my responses are not simple (if anyone’s are) and that my reactions tend not to be any kind of basic knee-jerk. I suppose my marking in the dust is so convoluted by now that it looks more like a hopped up pentangle than a simple line that can or cannot be crossed. I never see one side of a story.

So why do I consider Political Correctness toxic?

Almost thirty years ago I migrated from the north woods to the city eager for new ideas. At that time it seemed like a pretty good thing. It seemed like a step toward social justice. But that isn’t how it works in the real world.

I do know individuals who practice what they preach and have the best intentions in the world. But what I see most often, in daily usage, is very disheartening. First of all, the vocabulary and enforcement of political correctness seems like nothing more than the latest incarnation of middle class propriety (you know, “good people don’t use those words” and “we don’t call them that”…typically it’s ignorant and condescending). In most situations I see the middle class dictating to the working class and the poor how we will behave. Business as usual. I find the arrogance and presumption of this very offensive.

The most vile incarnation of political correctness involves the shaming of children. I see no difference between someone verbally assaulting a child, causing humiliation and shame, for playing with toy guns or dressing up as an Indian chief than I do for criticizing boys for playing with dolls or girls for playing with trucks. It’s fine if you picket the marketers or manufactures of these things, whichever side you’re on, but you should never shame children. The worst part is that it shuts down imagination, which I consider essential for the development of compassion. Or maybe the worst part is that you create human beings who never say or do anything without thinking, without looking over their shoulder first.

Another insidious side to political correctness, as put into practice, is that we’re being told that it’s not what we intend but how it’s interpreted. That is, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, it doesn’t matter what you meant to say: what matters is what the listener understood you to say. This goes in the face of our whole legal system. You have no way of predicting another person’s understanding of anything. If taken to court you could be vindicated but who has the money to do that? You could lose your job because someone misheard what you said, or twisted it to fit their own prejudices, and have very little recourse to logic, truth, justice, or sanity. If you work in an office environment, I’ll tell you, there is more prejudice shown against working class men than there is to almost any other group (we are not recognized as a group needing protection—I point this out not to ask for that protection but to point out hypocrisy.)

As it is, we are a culture of whiners. It seems almost logical these days to expect the rest of the population to curb their behavior because something hurts one’s feelings. (When my younger child was in grade school, in the class working on their fourth grade opera, they were told they had to change the story, which was about a perennially favorite childhood subject, orphans, because it might…what? Offend a classmate who is an orphan? Offend the teachers or parents who are orphans? In other words, the children should be restraining their imaginations to protect the feelings of adults? It might offend the parents who have adopted children and think the whole world should be shaped to protect them? Regardless of the bureaucratic motives the children were being forced to squelch their imaginations to protect someone’s feelings. I firmly believe the only way to protect children from harmful or painful words and ideas is to discuss those ideas with the children rather than sheltering them. Children should be sheltered from physical dangers, especially predators of one form or another, but not from ideas and feelings.)

So, society should be remodeled to conform to the fears of a few people? Or the anticipated fears? Too much, civilizations have been shaped by fear—fear of communists or witches or drug dealers or infectious diseases or terrorists—that we give up on our rights and freedom. Those in power use our fears to control us. This fear, though, is one of the most toxic I’ve seen in history. It will silence us.

We are going to go down in history as another blighted, puritanical age. But instead of being condemned in our own time as witches or terrorists we’ll have been condemned for not looking over our shoulders enough, for having said something incorrect, for having hurt someone’s feelings.