I have become aware recently, partly through one YouTube video in particular (I think this one) , and partly through passive social media, and some bell hooks interviews/conversations, that there is a very large divide between household labour of a man and a woman. This refers specifically to heterosexual monogamous couples, I have no idea if or how it extends in other directions. In general, the women do more household labour (as measured in time spent per week) than men do. This is worse the more children there are. This still the case if the woman is the primary breadwinner. That is an absolute mindfuck, to me at least. If we take a rose-glassed view of the past and imagine a father whose single income is enough to support his wife and three children, the argument makes sense that he performs labour external to the household to generate money, and the wife performs labour internal to the household to keep thigns running at home. Presumably, the level of labour is similar, in terms of time spent. I have no idea if it was. Possibly with terrible work conditions it could have been reversed. All things being equal, we'd expect that the amount of time spent 'working' for the household is equal. That's the desired goal, of an equitable relationship.
There are a few caveats. Firstly, I like cooking, and I like baking. If I never got to cook or bake I would be unhappy, or less happy than I might otherwise be if never got to do them. I consider myself to be a hobbiest baker, not really a hobbiest cook but still I definitely don't dislike cooking. It would be strange to me if I never got to do those tasks in a relationship. Cooking and baking can be seen as labour in a household. I am better suited to those tasks, because I enjoy them, and competancy and efficieny often follows enjoyment. Especially if my partner were to dislike or not enjoy those tasks. Is it still fair to call the time that I spend on those tasks labour? It clearly should not be because they are things that I enjoy. But much in the same way that I can enjoy cake, but would not want to eat cake as my only sustenance, I may not enough doing them continually and continuously. Further, when a hobby becomes a task, the joy is sometimes lost. There have been many times in my life where I did not wish to cook. Or I did not wish to think of what meal to cook. Or where to cook what I wanted I had to go to the supermarket. Or to go to the supermarket I also had to plan out the next few meals. More on this in a later paragraph. This confusion over whether an enjoyable chore is labour can be a sneaky way of imbalancing the labour done in a relationship. I don't actually have an impression or view on how to resolve this, that'll be a requirement for future gardening. The idea arises quite quickly if you slap down silly ideas about gender as your foundations for thought: women naturaly like cooking, so you should naturally like cooking, because you like cooking it's not really labour, you actually get to enjoy your time and have fun, unlike me, I work in a coal mine, it's much harder
work, but that's because I'm a man and that's what I'm supposed to do. It's the man's job to hunt down prey and risk my life. I WOULD DIE IN A WAR so you can cook, clean, wash, hoover, shop, manage my social calendar, my wardrobe, my children and a fake orgasm once a week. I saw a comment on Instagram (a platform which I am trying to use less, perhaps thoughts on social media will be worth writing about but I don't think I have anything new to add. Side note - it would be good to add a way of viewing footnotes somehow because this is really quite a long thing to put in brackets and there's absolutely no reason for me to do so) which requires a little bit of context. It was a joke video about how the husband couldn't see the ketchup in the fridge because it was stationary, but could detect some pixels moving in his video game. The comment said that this trait: the ability of women to differentiate colour (presumably the very tricky task of discerning red from white) and of men to detect movement came from when people were hunter gatherers. Women gathered and so needed to be able to tell colours apart (to detect fruit on a bush, ignoring the fact that gathering includes leaves, mushrooms, and roots, the latter of which is the very hard to see colour of under the ground) while men hunted so needed to be able to detect movement from far away. This idea seems, to me at least, like a very silly thought to say as gospel. It could be true, men are more likely to have colour blindness than women, and very rarely some women have four colour cones rather than three. So the average women sees more colour than the average man (I should discuss this more with some more general thoughts on gender in a separate plot [I need to work on the language that I use to refer to things in my garden]). There was a paper, from a very brief internet search, which suggested that women could match colours by shade quicker and more accurately than men. I would expect that this difference, colourblindness aside (the paper used 30 men and 30 women, so 2-3 of the men would be expected to be colourblind in some manner, using internet numbers, and it could be higher or lower because of randomness) if it still exists is caused by socialisiation. Although the paper was published in an Indian journal, and I know little about Indian cultural practices, I would believe that women typically use more beauty products, and spend more time worrying about their dress (and the colour of their outfits) than men. Both are activities that might require one to be more capable of differentiating colours. The point of this example is to show that there is very commonly a reference to genetics and past history as an explanation for behaviour today, even though there's a whole host of reasons why that might not matter (The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland is a good book about how impactful randomness is). This idea extends to that of protection. Men are on average physically stronger than women and faster than women at short distances. These differences do make men typically better at physical fighting than women (at least as far as I know. If the fight involved an 80km chase sequence maybe women would be better. If the fight involved being in a small tight cramped space women might be better. If the fight involved discerning colour of objects which are possibly camouflaged women might be better). This is used to explain why men go off to war and fight. The possibility of maybe having to fight and die in a war can be used to excuse a huge amount of labour. I, a man, have a very serious and dangerious possible responsibility that I use to excuse myself from less dangerous, less serious, Sissiphyian responsibilities that I leave for a woman to do. It is rather laughable when put in this form. I do not mean to discredit the coal miner, that is a dangerous and very real task that still continues today. There is a conversation to be had about the risks of a job, along with the associated stress, and how that is balanced (perhaps this is a seed of a further idea).
A task which can be viewed as quite simple, like cooking, is actually a lot more complicated and labour intensive than it might otherwise be.