Photo: Roadside Attractions 
 
 Jessica Grose has an interesting piece for The New Republic observing — and also decrying — that husbands may be catching up with childcare and even cooking, but still do way less housework than women. (“When it comes to housecleaning,” she writes, “my basically modern, egalitarian marriage starts looking more like the backdrop to an Updike short story.”) 
 
 Grose casts around for explanations, but does not consider a possibility that probably explains a big part of the gap: Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it. 
 
 Viewing housework inequality as entirely a phenomenon of exploitative men free-riding off of female domestic labor makes sense only if you think men derive equal enjoyment from a cleaner and neater home. If that were the case, men who lived by themselves, or with other men, would have to keep their own homes tidy until they could conscript a wife or girlfriend to do their cleaning. 
 
 Does anybody think that’s true? In college, I lived in a group house with newspapers for carpeting and pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling. My brother’s three-dude college apartment was so filthy it was condemned by the Ann Arbor board of health. It had a spilled milkshake on the floor that stayed there all year, forming a permanent, unearthly silver blob that became an object of curiosity. (To be clear, this was my brother, not me — I was content with the pizza box tower, but if it was my floor, I’d have cleaned up the milkshake.) My post-college group house was vastly neater than my college home, yet still messy enough that my girlfriend refused to set foot in it, insisting we spend all our domestic time at her place. 
 
 We’re now married, which seems like the proper place to note that the mental image you have probably formed of my domestic habits is not accurate. Mainly because I work at home, and her in the office, I handle more than half the parental responsibilities. I buy all the groceries, cook dinner every night, get the kids ready for school, and walk them in the morning. We split bedtime. If one of them gets sick, my wife still heads to work, and it’s up to me to take care of them. 
 
 When the kids were born, we got a housekeeper once a week. Obviously, that’s a luxury many people can’t afford. I mention it because, when Grose bemoans “the drudgery of vacuuming day in and day out,” I think, Really? Day in and day out? We pretty much figure the weekly vacuuming we pay for takes care of our vacuuming needs. The cover of New York, featuring Lisa Miller’s story on feminist housewives, has an image of a mom holding a duster. We don’t dust. Ever. 
 
 The assumption of much of the feminist commentary surrounding household chores assumes that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship, and that level is determined by the female. I think a little cultural relativism would improve the debate. The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong (except perhaps when you reach the antagonizing-municipal-authorities extremes of my brother’s pad.) My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled — fairly, I think — on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would. She does a little more housecleaning than I do. But it’s not that much more than the time I spend doing the man-work of trash-clearing, lightbulb-replacing, heavy-object-hauling, and screw-turning. 
 
 The tricky thing in allocating the responsibilities between partners is that not all “work” can be equated. This neat chart from Pew Research has been making the rounds: 
 
 Photo: Pew Research 
 
 All these things are not the same. Marching the kids through their morning checklist and getting them out the door is stressful work, where every morning feels like I’m trying to pass a bill through the Senate and my kids are Mitch McConnell. Walking them to school is nice. Reading Harry Potter to my daughter, or wrestling on the carpet with my son, is incredibly fun. All those things are “childcare.” Sometimes on weekdays, I have a sick kid on the sofa while I work in the room next door. Look — according to that chart, I performed nine hours of child care and nine hours of paid work! (Okay, eight — we took some story-time breaks.) 
 
 Housecleaning is all drudgery and zero fun. But while some of it (like laundry) is necessary, other parts are purely discretionary. I like having magazines strewn across the coffee table. My wife doesn’t. I won’t protest when she stacks them up somewhere, but when she does it, I don’t regard it as her participation in the shared household duties. She handles our household finances, which is a gigantic contribution, out of all proportion to the hours it consumes owing to its stressfulness. 
 
 Cooking lies in between, though it depends on the person. I don’t like cooking, especially — if I could magically conjure the meals instead of prepare them, I would. But it does come with the satisfaction of watching your family enjoy the meal, except that sometimes it comes with the frustration of your spouse coming home late and making it cold, or your kid announcing they won’t try it and marching to the pantry to make a peanut-butter sandwich. 
 
 A Pew-style chart of my household would show that I do both more paid work and more childcare than my wife — mainly because I don’t commute. But that would present an inaccurately slanted picture of our relative contributions. Having more time around the kids while she slogs through the Red Line is a perk I enjoy, not a cost I’m bearing. 
 
 For differing reasons, both feminists and anti-feminists have sandblasted away the distinction between different kinds of work, but the distinction matters. I think Grose’s general point, about the unequal demands faced by women, stands. But the specific indictment about housework doesn’t seem quite as solid. 
 
 Feminists want women to work like men do, right? Why not try living like men, too? Put down the duster. It’ll be okay. ||||| Only about 2 percent of commercials featuring men showed them doing domestic tasks. 
 
 In a phone interview, Arlie Hochschild, the author of The Outsourced Self and the foundational feminist text on women and housework, The Second Shift, makes the argument that a women’s desire for a clean home has deeper origins than just marketing. Cleaning, Hoschild says, is not simply physical work. It’s emotional work. “Letting the house go is in a way letting something deeper go. … You get a sense of safety in an orderly home,” Hochschild says. 
 
 But assuming both parties care about creating a sense of safety in the home, why does it fall to women? I suspect that women are more driven to keep a clean house because they know they—before their male partners—will be judged for having a dirty one. When I lived with two female roommates, I was much more of a slob. None of us was particularly responsible for the emotional tone of that apartment—no single one of us was more likely to be shunned for the state of our bathroom. But when I got married, the dust bunnies hopping across our floor started seeming like a personal affront. Although it was my husband’s father coming over, I was the one who insisted we clean. I was worried I would be judged for the beef jerky wrappers (on both aesthetic and gustatory grounds), despite the fact that my father-in-law has never once made a peep about the state of our abode. Somewhere lodged within me was the message that it was my responsibility. 
 
 Unfortunately, the notion that women will be the first to be judged for a messy home and the first to be commended for an orderly one isn’t much of an incentive for men to pick up a mop. In the instances in which men actually do the majority of the housework in their partnership, women are still the ones getting credit. David Michael Perez, the publisher and editor of Kindling Quarterly, says that though he does more decorating and cleaning than his spouse does, “often when people say ‘your house is nice,’ it’s directed more at my wife.” If they’re not even going to be rewarded for it, why bother at all? 
 
 With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do? Philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner suggests on the Atlantic’s website that couples sit down with a list of questions like, “Do I do half of the laundry and half of the dishes every day?” to figure out where they’re slacking off in comparison to their mate. This sounds exhausting and impractical. If I do one load of laundry, it’s easier for me to do the second rather than wait for my husband to mosey over. (Bradner also says that when men do traditionally female chores, they’re enacting “‘small instances of gender heroism,’ or ‘SIGH’s”—which, barf.) 
 
 I’m much more inclined to take the advice of Jenny Anderson, the co-author of It’s Not You, It’s the Dishes, which applies economic theory to household tasks. A lot of women shoo their husbands away from cleaning because they know the men will do a sub-par job of scrubbing the sink. Anderson says you should divide up tasks according to the economic theory of comparative advantage. Let’s say a woman is twice as good as her husband at doing the laundry, but only 20 percent better than her husband at doing the dishes. In that couple, the husband should always do the dishes. What’s more, he’ll get better at it through repetition. 
 
 Another solution is for women to lower their filth thresholds. Did I really need to clean up the house for my father-in-law? Would he have cared if there were a few glasses sitting out on the kitchen table? Probably not. But it’s harder to stomach this fix once you have children, when the threat of a Fisher Price plastic hell-scape is perpetually around the corner. One of the women I interviewed for this piece, who doesn’t want to publicly shame her husband, said that when she came home after a weekday night out, it was so messy that it looked like she had 40 kids instead of two. If she had left the living room like that, it wouldn’t have been very good hygiene modeling for her kids (and, at some point, might get social services called). 
 
 One last suggestion comes from Magary, who so emphatically declared that cleaning sucks: make cleaning more fun. He says that when the Swiffer first came on the market, it was sort of enticing. (Swiffer reps said they had no information to share with me about men and cleaning.) “We like gadgets and stuff,” Magary explains. “If there was some new electronic hovering Apple product that cleaned the bathroom, I’d try it.” Are you listening out there in Cupertino? You have a huge, untapped market on your hands for toilet-scrubbing iPods. I bet my husband would buy one.
– The world is becoming more egalitarian, with men doing a much larger share of things like cooking and childcare these days. "It’s seen as socially admirable and masculine for a man to be on diaper duty or to sous-vide a steak," writes Jessica Grose, whose own husband handles half the midnight baby feedings. "But there are no closet organizing tips in the pages of Esquire, no dishwasher detergent ads in the pages of GQ," and her husband hasn't scoured a single toilet during their six-year relationship. Cleaning, she writes for the New Republic, is the "final feminist frontier." She shares a few theories as to why (cleaning just isn't fun, laundry detergent is still marketed as a women's product) but ultimately posits that society's instinct is to blame the mess on the woman. "Unfortunately, the notion that women will be the first to be judged for a messy home and the first to be commended for an orderly one isn’t much of an incentive for men to pick up a mop," she writes. But in New York, Jonathan Chait sees something else at work: Women simply have higher cleanliness standards. The underlying assumption is "that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship, and that level is determined by the female. I think a little cultural relativism would improve the debate. My wife and I ... settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would." Click for Grose's full column or Chait's response.