Real Men Clean Their Homes

Nobody likes squalor, but too often we just get used to it as it builds up until it finally reaches the point where it’s overwhelming and too daunting a task to deal with. Both sexes are capable of this and it’s a sure sign of an unhealthy lifestyle. Cleaning that shit up makes the world seem at least a little bit better.

All of this week’s tips and suggestions for how to clean your home are useless if you’re one of those so-called ‘men’ with a thick streak of perpetual adolescence and you don’t clean in the first place. For you there is still hope; perhaps it will be that you someday wish to have a girl at your place and you’ll need to pick up your shit to get her to stay, or at least feel comfortable when she does.

On the other hand, you could be one of those old world misogynistic cockhammers who feels that cleaning the house is woman’s work.

I won’t fool myself into thinking that my pithy article will change your mind. If your father and mother so thusly screwed up your world view, you need some serious therapy to work through that one, but the odds are that you’re of the mind that there’s nothing wrong with you anyway. If that’s the way you want to go through life, so be it. Just please don’t married and pretty please with bourbon on top, do not pass that shit on to another generation.

I know a few couples for whom this attitude is their way of life, and in each case both partners are unhappy. The woman has allowed herself to be repressed and controlled, the man dominates and loses more and more respect for his wife as a result. It’s an outdated model, sustained by the small-minded and the insecure. It’s a heartbreaking recipe for disaster and misery.

However, if you’ve gone into your marriage/relationship fully cognizant of equal worth and responsibilities, with mutual respect and understanding, and you both consciously choose for the woman in the relationship to be Suzy Homemaker and the man to be the breadwinner, that’s a different story. Hell, it’s even kind of nostalgic-romantic, I suppose. If this is what she wants, and you want a woman to be little more than a domestic goddess, well, power to you. When she gets bored of that (an inevitability, I suspect, in this day and age), I hope like hell that you can roll with it. But you should still pitch in and help her out when and where you can; think of it as a romantic courtesy if nothing else.