To think that this FLY business is just another way of trying to convince women that service is what they are meant for?

[madamez]

We've had house-work-is-what-FAther-Xmas-made-women-for.
We've had housework is the standard on which a woman's morals are judged.
Now we have housework as therapy: FInally Loving Yourself. What's loving about knocking yourself out with drudgery? Surely it's more self-loving to say, bollocks to doing more than the minimum, mess is no big deal and my time is far too precious to wipe skirting boards twice a day?

LOL at NKF. What the frick are purple puddles? Is that what happens about four hours after eating beetroot?

Quattrocentro I don't understand your question "Why don't you?" in relation to outsourcing the cleaning, gardening, oddjobs and the normal duties of an au pair. Surely the answer for most people is that they can't afford it? It would be more than my monthly salary paying for those jobs to be outsourced, that's for certain.

Just so that other posters understand it's possible to pick and choose what you want from the FLY stuff, I post on the FLY thread several times a week but I don't go on the FLY site nor do I receive the e-mails. I pick the bits that I want and ignore the rest. Do others really think that FLYers follow it all to the letter?

She claims, like a sulky teenager, that she doesn't know how to clean the bathroom, as she just ends up moving the muck around. [quiet despair emoticon]

Barbara Einrich (spelling probably wrong) thinks that feminists have just given up on the housework debate and now hire other women to do it.

lol that's sort of ironic isn't it NFK and not very feminist or they'd hire men to do it.

Surely nobody actually cleans the oven though dittany? Unless the door won't close anymore.

If you say so, although most of those jobs are effectively minimum wage - it would only be more than you earn if it were less than the minimum wage, surely?

Dittany, the reason that women are in this position is because of well, collusion. Women are doing it to themselves. Just being firm about equality helps. Maybe it's an assertiveness thing. Or maybe (and this is a worse thought) women do actually want all this housework shit to feel good about themselves.

ARGH

fly lady does NOT say that the woman should just do the work and not bother the husband

get it right

someone has to do the housework shit though, don't they, i certainly don't do it to make me feel good about myself. it just has to be done by someone. i think people are over analysing it.

It depends where you live, Quattro. Cleaning costs £8 an hour in my part of London. So to equal that, someone needs to earn £12 (after tax etc). You don't need me to tell you that many people earn less than £12 an hour, even in London. To have anything left after tax and the cleaning, you need to be earning more than that. It's more than the minimum wage definitely.

Not everyone can afford a cleaner, Quatt.

And if everybody could, where the feck in blazes would you get one from?

I just looked at the FLY website. There is a section for working mothers that STILL makes it clear that they are the ones who should do most of the work. The most the husband and children have to do is put away their own clothes (after the woman has washed and sorted the laundry).

Is who does the housework really so much to do with feminism?
I work long hours and rarely do housework. Dh does it all and I dont expect to do much tbh. I also dont see how hiring a cleaner means passing the buck and giving up. If dh worked too then we'd have a cleaner. Neither of us like cleaning and would rather spend spare time doing something else.

It's unfair if both work outside the home and only one person does the housework. But I do think women have some blame for this too.

I follo flylady.

It has helped me devise a system for the housework. I like lists. By having a system that works, I spend less time on it. Therefore I have more time for my children and work. If that means loving myself, then fair enough.

As a 'mentor' Flylady is too religious and often quite weird but over 600,000 people are signed up to the emails, and I imagine quite a few spend in the Flylady shop so perhaps it is actually just a capitalist enterprise... as opposed to an anti-feminist movement.

i do fly and have used it purely as a tool to get more organised about the housework. i cannot pay a cleaner and tbh nor would i want to. i work two short days a week and dh works 6 full days so it is only fair that i do the lions share of the housework. however he does still pull his weight and at the moment is doing most of the cooking and does his own washing.

i dont feel that it is my responsibility cos i am a woman just that i am home.

and yes fly is very full on, i hate the principle of home blessing hour - how naff but but but the mechanics of it do work.

If you want to clean your house regularly, it's up to you. Same as if you want to spend time and money on hairdressing and make up and skin treatments. But women do way too much housework in many cases (not just because their partners don't do enough, but because far more is being done than needs to be done.) And a website or organisation pushing the message that housework matters that much and that it's good for women to do it, oh FFS.
As with marriage and motherhood, the more women wake up to the fact that they don't have to do this servicing shit any more, the more intense and continual the propaganda gets. SOmetimes you get the dubious statistics about how women who won;t agree to service men are responsible for the breakdown of society, sometimes it's rubbish suggesting that women who want more out of life than a new pair of rubber gloves are mentally ill or going to be... Western society runs on women's unpaid labour, because if women didn't do it then the world would fall apart. That is, men might have to engage with some of the caring and servicing that needs doing (looking after children/the old, as well as washing dishes and clothes).

Bollocks! My dh does much more housework than me. He prefers it tidy, I'm not much fussed either way.

As Southeastastra has said, there's too much over-analysis going on.

If you want to live in a shit-hole, that's fine. It's also fine if you don't. But this idea that there's a man cracking a big, bloody whip is all a bit Germaine Greer for my tastes.

So why do it then? I am be rather unfussed by mess but I dont feel I need to have a sparkling house and I do get irritated by dh who is more houseproud than me. I think why should I have to do more housework than I think is necessary just because he is.

I am not saying there arent shitty lazy men out there.

So who is to blame for the unpaid labour? I dont think it's reasonable to say it's mens fault that women are doing this unpaid labour.

DH does lots of unpaid labour however by me going to work and earning enough so he doesnt have to means our kids have the benefit of someone being at home and dd goes to a great private nursery. It's a partnership with no one cracking a whip or being enslaved.

I agree that if you are a stay-at-home parent (of either sex) then it is reasonable that you should do the lion's share of the hoursework.

A more useful indication of whether a male-female relationship is based on equality is: how much leisure time does each partner have? (That's time without childcare, housework, cooking, shopping - just plain free time.)

AFAIK, pretty much every study that has assessed leisure time between the sexes concludes that men have a great deal more leisure time - by a factor of about five, IIRC.