Gwen of Sociological Images, discussing a reality show called “Househusbands of Hollywood,” quotes one of the participant bios (ellipses hers, emphasis mine)

The pair… made a deal as newlyweds that she would bring home the paycheck so he could focus on his acting career… Katherine emails Danny a daily to-do list...

Read the quote in context here.

One of the deeper problems with gender roles, related the “super-mom” overtasking of the 1970s and 1980s, is that even when men, especially stay-at-home men, take on more of the “homemaker” roles women still consider household tasks their responsibility.

In my first, second and third-hand experience this shows up in the following ways

• Other women frequently “complement” or congratulate the working female partner for having a “helpful” partner; other women frequently complement the man for helping his partner. And meanwhile…
• The men in question rarely take ownership of their roles or push back.
• Working women tend to remain the “task master,” setting standards, determining priorities, and even, as in the quote above, “emailing daily to-do lists” to the stay-at-home man. And meanwhile…
• The men in question rarely take ownership of their roles or push back.
• When men take over primary domestic tasks working women often fill in the freed-up time they… probably wouldn’t do if they were themselves performing the primary tasks, and meanwhile…

• The men in question rarely take ownership of their roles or push back.

And on. The point being that the idea of men being responsible for housework is still so tenuous that even when men do take it on (how well or how poorly) it’s still almost universally assumed to be women’s work in the sense that women are merely seen — by themselves, by other women, and even by their partners — as, at best, delegating housework to their partners instead of sharing or dropping it.

And yes I’m aware of all manner of arguments for why this should be, from still-internalised traditions of women’s worth being assessed entirely on their domestic prowess, to women’s “higher” standards and/or men’s “lower” ones, to women being more delicate and prone to “infections” and men being coarser and “killing giraffes,” to men still not thinking in terms of taking ownership of their roles and instead deferring to pan-gender peer pressure, to the domestic sphere traditionally being the only place women were permitted autonomy, expertise, and authority.

But whatever the reason if we’re going to get closer to a genuinely egalitarian society we’ve got to cut it out. And the thing is (as I may have over-hinted) this is one of those things where it’s not going to be enough for women to give it up. In this case men have to pick it up. Or nobody’s going to be happy: the current alternative where women give up being housewives in favor of men becoming houseboys isn’t orthogonal.

One suspects this will never come up in Fox’s new program.

Update: Sarah Haskins brilliantly illustrates the social gradient.

Sure, like we’re going to let you going to leave him in charge of the house so you can… um… have a complete, not-my-problem career as primary breadwinner!