Over at one of my favorite blogs, Kloncke, Katie offers a look into her relationship with her boyfriend, and then examines it through wider lens of cultural critique. The whole post is really worth checking out, but I want to take up the following piece:
Ryan tells this funny joke sometimes about one method, half-conscious at most, by which person X tries to evade domestic work and pile it on a partner. “But you’re so good at [cooking, doing laundry, calming a fretful child]. If I do it, I’ll just fuck it up.” A passive-aggressive compliment-trap, which leaves the other person feeling obligated to do the thing they’re so much better at doing.
Obviously, this is one of the big problems with the naturalization of gender roles in heteronormative family requirements. Men are raised to believe that they don’t have to learn how to cook/clean/mend/mind children because women are so naturally good at it. Jay appears to have no clue that his wife was brought up to learn how to be a “good woman,” which means acquiring certain social and reproductive skills, including staying attuned to the needs of her socially-sanctioned husband and children. She might enjoy learning those skills; she might not. The point is, the skills aren’t endemic to her based on her gender. For a whole host of reasons that I won’t get into here, she’s not really free to self-determine her own gender identity and presentation, fertility, or (as a working-class person) the circumstances of her productive and reproductive labor.
First off, the “Jay” she mentions is a character from James Agee’s Southern novel A Death In the Family, which Katie offers readers a passage from just above the section I quoted.
The second thing that struck me was that after she asked me how I was doing, she said “Are you working yet?” I’ve been mostly unemployed the past year, picking up a bit of freelance writing here and there, while I’m going through a yoga teacher training program and expanding my online “presence.” Anyway, I told grandma that I hadn’t found a job yet, but was doing a lot of other things. She proceeded to talk more about jobs, as if anything else I was doing was secondary. And I thought to myself, “Would she do the same if she were talking with my sister?”
Now, a few things to add to this that complicate things. My grandmother and I haven’t always had the easiest relationship over the years. Whereas my sister seems to get along with grandma well enough to talk with her more in depth about her life, and what she thinks about the world. So, to some extent, today’s phone call to grandma was like most I have with her — short, and thin on specifics. Besides my relationship with grandma, there’s also the fact that Americans in general rely on “work talk” heavily to begin and/or even sustain conversations. Anyone active in the dating world can probably attest to the fact that work often is one of the first subjects that comes up on a first date.
However, even with both of factors, I still feel there’s some interesting gender role stuff to unpack in relation to that phone conversation.
As a man who has done an awful lot of volunteer work and unpaid non-profit development in the community, I have noticed over the years how such efforts aren’t taken as seriously by potential employers as is”paid work.” This is most definitely a function of capitalism’s definitions of “value” being tied to making money and producing, but I also wonder if there is a gendered element going on. Do women who put more time and energy into volunteering and unpaid community work get more “kudos” from employers, given that such unpaid efforts were often more in the “women’s realm” historically? Or perhaps a better question might be “Is volunteering and unpaid community work” just devalued in general due to it’s historical place as something more women did with their “extra time”?
The cooking issue, I think, is a little more clear cut. On the whole, as Katie mentioned above, men aren’t seen as “naturally” able to cook. And although I do believe things have changed to some degree in that there is less direct expectation that women take up the cooking duties in a household, I also believe that the majority of men are still raised without much in the way of cooking skills. Which tends to lead to situations like Katie’s “passive-aggressive narrative,” where dudes who can’t cook still figure out ways to lean heavy on the women in their lives.
This has definitely not been my experience. I started learning how to cook at around age 10. Having to help care for a little sister while your mother works puts you in a different position than the average kid might be in. I learned to cook, clean, and do my own laundry before I finished elementary school, and didn’t really consider the gendered quality attached to those household chores until much later on.
What do you think of all of this?
Photo Credit
Gender Symbols @ Wikicommons
Hi Nathan, Thank you for sharing this story about you and your grandmother. I relate with this and it’s so great to hear it from a male perspective. Gender role assumptions can limit potentials for meaningful and heartfelt connections between people.