Next Up, Researchers Suggest Water May Run Downhill!

Lux Alptraum of Boinkology links to the NYT article about same-sex relationships that's been making the rounds and says (italics mine)

Apparently, without the expectation of gendered roles and responsibilities (no husbands or wives), same-sex couples are more egalitarian:

...

And, perhaps as a result of this, the more egalitarian same-sex couples were better able to communicate and resolve conflict than their heterosexual counterparts. All of which has some researchers thinking that maybe problems in heterosexual relationships aren’t due to inborn differences — maybe they’re more about how we’re taught to act in relationships.

She said it here.

I live in the part of town and my children go to a public magnet-type elementary school where work-away moms and stay-at-home dads are pretty standard features at parks, mid-day coffee shops, school field trips and the like. And as a stay-at-home parent I have direct experience as well. Oh yeah, and I also used to work in an area of content management technology with a higher than usual percentage of women (former teachers) who substantially out-earned their partners (often still teachers.) And... yeah, even then there's still a lot of constructed gender stuff going on (about which more later) there's even more *situational* stuff going on.

By situational I mean things like the work-away parent comes home exhausted and dying to just unwind and/or get centered on not-work again colliding with the home-all-day parent who's been up to his or her neck in children, diapers, and so on. Whoever it is that spent 30-90 minutes cooking has to yell, sometimes repeatedly, for everyone to come to come eat while it's hot, and as little as 10 minutes later to yell at all the retreating backs to "come carry your dishes to the sink." And then there's coming down the stairs after putting the kids to bed, or (if you fell asleep with them again) coming down to make coffee in the morning and realizing your partner (again male or female) who was "just going to catch up on email first" didn't finish cleaning up dinner after you cooked. The point being that from the away-parent's perspective they really are contributing, and they're always contrite when you call them on it, and there's *nothing gendered about it at all!* That's what I mean about it being situational.

Now there are some areas where gender really does come into play, but once you get the hang of it it's usually pretty clear what people mean when they say gender's a social construct and not innate. And because this is nominally a sex blog and the endlessly repeated but never absorbed "amazing discovery" that gender might be constructed ticks me off, the most flippant example I can think of is that I'm pretty sure not even the most devout stay-at-home father has ever said "there's nothing sexier than a woman doing the dishes." Nor, conversely, have I ever heard a work-away woman say "there's nothing sexier than a man helping me review a Declaration of Conformity document stating that the radio-frequency emissions limits on my workgroup's product are within the FCC Part 15 rules." Even though those are probably similarly onerous, thankless tasks they're *gendered* tasks and therefore subject to a vast array of cultural, social, historical influences. But, again since the "nothing sexier than housework" response almost never shows up in egalitarian or swapped-role households there's no reason to believe there are any *biological* influences.

I could go on but since I get it, and Alptraum gets it, and since I'm not surprised that non-hetero couples would get it really all anyone really needs to say to the researchers from the Times article is "try a little role leveling or reversal yourselves some time." Sheesh!