Owen Jones on Twitter today

[Bouledeneige]

twitter.com/owenjones84/status/1260134887165739009?s=21

A tweet that middle class people should pay their cleaner to not work quickly descended into 'rich women paying poor women to clean their homes.' So frustrating the casual sexism. Why is it assumed women are responsible for cleaning their homes and not men. Most working women who can afford a cleaner do so because they have 3 jobs - their work, their childcare and their household. Why aren't the men they are married to taking more household responsibility?

we're a completely standard hetrosexual married couple. So are our cleaners. where does that leave us with Owen?

I absolutely describe myself as Childless as opposed to childfree. To be childfree would be to assume it was a proactive choice I made, it was not, it was the result of ectopic pregnancies. The distinction is important.

And yes agree Blackberry OJ was 100% making it about women not people

Ikeasucks, what are you getting at?

But him being lazy and leaving to his wife doesn't make it the responsibility of a domestic cleaner.

Her affront was at OJ's assumption that a) we all have more free time and b) that teenagers are a labour saving device. And by the way I'm firmly committed to teaching household jobs to children but anyone who argues it saves time or effort is not someone whose opinion I value.

I think OJ's error here is one that is pretty common among people without kids, be they male or female. They just underestimate the effect of having so many people together in a household, and how much time kids take.

I do think that teens can be pretty effective in a household as workers, though it's become difficult because we don't expect enough of kids early on. So even as teens they typically aren't practiced enough to be helpful. If you ever see households though where there is more expected early on, it is startling how much teens can contribute.

I absolutely describe myself as Childless as opposed to childfree. To be childfree would be to assume it was a proactive choice I made, it was not, it was the result of ectopic pregnancies. The distinction is important.

Completely agree.

I'm childfree by choice, but wouldn't default to describing others that way because it's just clodhoppingly insensitive if the person you're talking to would have really loved to have had kids but couldn't.

It seems Owen and another journo called Ash Sarker really trigger Sarah Ditum and associates.

I've always said childfree until / if the person corrects me. It seems (to me at least) insensitive to assume the worst without knowing.

You know that person upthread who said that sometimes it's obvious that it's not worth engaging? Smart woman, that person.

I agree Prodigal This particular area of the site really unsettles my spirit whenever I browse it. The group think at least. Was very much engaged in discussing trans-gender issues but there's no room for anything else.

Vladmir even though I feel privileged to be a parent there have still been times when I've also found it exhausting, enraging and brain numbingly dull. It's both the most rewarding and the hardest thing I've ever done and I have little time for anyone who thinks they're equipped to give advice on something really difficult that they've never done themselves.

What Owen is enjoying is in fact male privilege. The fact that someone stupidly criticised him for having childlessness privilege, which doesn't exist, doesn't negate that.

Vladmir even though I feel privileged to be a parent there have still been times when I've also found it exhausting, enraging and brain numbingly dull. It's both the most rewarding and the hardest thing I've ever done and I have little time for anyone who thinks they're equipped to give advice on something really difficult that they've never done themselves.

Completely agree, and also about how slow and wearing it is to teach/supervise young people to help around the house. I assume Talcum X tweeted about people having plenty of free time at the moment without thinking about the reality of living with children and teenagers under lockdown, which is quite revealing in itself.

Sarah Ditum fired off a short email response to that without thinking too hard about the wording, which is easily done. If she'd said from the off that she didn't have a cleaner and wasn't therefore asking a working-class woman to risk infection by coming to her house to tidy up after her family she would have saved herself a bit of grief.

I assume Talcum X tweeted about people having plenty of free time at the moment without thinking about the reality of living with children and teenagers under lockdown, which is quite revealing in itself.

Yes, and in particular about which sex is disproportionately likely to bear the burden of any difficulties, given what we already know about the split of domestic work.

If she'd said from the off that she didn't have a cleaner and wasn't therefore asking a working-class woman to risk infection by coming to her house to tidy up after her family she would have saved herself a bit of grief.

Her point was valid whether she has a cleaner or not. Expecting women to express themselves perfectly and include all factors the listener may consider relevant is a problem women have always faced.

Surely childless/free privilege does exist. Generally comes with significantly higher levels of disposable income and more ability to move for work etc. And on perhaps trivial notes cheaper term time holidays and being able to knock yourself out with wine and Valium on long haul flights.

I adore my son and he’s probably kept me alive but I do tend to advise young women to stay single and get a dog

Of course, but it's easy for anyone to trip up on social media, especially Twitter. 280 characters don't go far when you're trying to express a nuanced argument and it's easy to dash something off without realising another way it could be taken.

Funnily enough paying a window cleaner or for your car to be washed never gets abuse.

However in current times if I did have a cleaner, ergo could afford one, I’d be paying them to stay home.

I'd like a moratorium on the word privilege. That awful phrase 'check your privilege' especially.

The flipside to all the things TheHoneyBadger mentions are the aching void felt by people who wanted to be parents and didn't get the chance, loneliness, fear of being alone at the end of life, all sorts of negative things. Having children is the best thing that ever happened to me, for all the difficult times and expense of it.

And that’s why it’s really important not to conflate Childless & Childfree

As someone who is childless I mourn every day for the child my husband & I will never have and for the fact that when one of us dies, the person left will have no child that brings to mind his smile or my eyes.

The idea that a few extra holidays or Saturday lay ins could ever make up for that.....well I don’t think it needs spelling out

Of course. There’s a world of difference between choosing not to have children and being unable to conceive or adopt.

I simply meant when looking at groups there are some tangible economic advantages that advertisers have interest in tapping.

My sister couldn’t conceive and was bereft and inconsolable and didn’t want to adopt and was torn as to whether ivf was moral (due to religious upbringing). She did have ivf after much agonising and managed to conceive and has grown up triplets now.

I was talking merely about purchasing power really

So what’s the final verdict? Do we force cleaners to come to professional middle class houses in the middle of a pandemic, that has already killed many cleaners because this is a feminist issue? Which already implicitly assumes that we think without the cleaner it is the professional woman who has to do the cleaning.

Bye the way, OJ only mentioned middle class professionals. It was the professional women who said his take was misogynistic because without cleaners it is the women of the household who have to clean.

Yes many households don’t have more time during lockdown but to make that the main point and completely ignore the lot of cleaners was very callous, specially declaring that cleaning is killing them and implying that justifies asking hire help to risk their own life. Yes SD declared that she didn’t have a cleaner but she was arguing for the right to summon a cleaner in a middle of a pandemic! Many key workers are risking their lives for the rest of us surely we can all do with a bit of hardship of not having a cleaner for this period and paying them to be safe. Surely this should not be controversial!

OJ initially said middle class professionals. Then when a woman responded to him telling him how much more domestic labour she's had to do since lockdown, the language he used made it abundantly clear that he saw the issue as her problem and responsibility to solve, without any acknowledgement of the societal context and structural factors that created the situation where women do so much more of it. He then followed with that heroically stupid claim about parents having more time due to lockdown. An allegedly progressive man just not seeing women's labour or structural sexism is hardly a point in his favour.

You can agree with his initial premise whilst understanding what a misogynistic display that was. It's a point that could've been made without mansplaining. But wasn't.

Actually it seems like both OJ and SD were being twats in this conversation, and neither of them seems remotely concerned about the safety of cleaners or any worker.

Yep. They were both using cleaners as a stick to beat each other with. The dimmest comment award definitely goes to Owen though, for the more time claim.

This is my favourite piece on white feminism, by the brilliant Raquel Rosario Sanchez. www.feministcurrent.com/2017/07/26/white-feminism-thing-gender-identity-ideology-epitomizes/