"You pick up "His" drycleaning? Do you have any?"

I am a costume designer and a mother of two. Sure, I have some dry-clean-only stuff: ball gowns, a suit, and a few blouses and pants. But they don't get worn regularly. I prefer clothes that can stand up to hot water from the dye bath, dust from working on my knees to set hems, safety pins that I stick into my shirt tail during fittings, finger paint, toddler snot, spaghetti sauce, and anything else my day throws at me. Unless I'm on a date, an interview or a conference, I'm pretty much "wash and wear."

My husband, who has a desk job that requires business wear: pressed shirts, ties, sport coats, dress pants, wears dry-clean-only 5 days a week. And since I do enough ironing for my job, I'm happy to have the dry cleaner press his shirts.

Since any given week 90% or more of the dry cleaning is his, and it's much easier to go to the cleaner's without two small kids "helping", he shleps it back and forth himself. Unless I do him a favor, which generally makes his day.

Feel better now?

He has no incentive to do dishes in order to have sex with you because he's getting it all at home during the day, through the wonders of the internet. The power is in the palm of his hand...

It is a silly proposition that doing chores would make your man more attractive sexually. I don't sleep with the help. My maid is not an increased target of my lust. My gardener and lawn boy don't receive forward advances. My man brings home the money that pays these people, and that makes him extremely sexy. He is sexiest after he changes the flat tire in our car, or steps in between me and an aggressive panderer. Man jobs.

Watching him on hands and knees scrubbing the floor just doesn't do it. Sorry.

It's that he cares enough about me not to think to himself "if I ignore this task long enough, she'll do it and I won't have to." It has nothing to do with subservience or reversal of gender roles. It just means he cares about me. Like buying me flowers, but infinitely more useful. And I DO find it sexy when the man I love shows he cares about me. Who wouldn't?

Once again, we get the old myth: women were forced into the role of domestic slave, there to enact his every whim. And "his every whim" more determined by today's fetishes than those of the time.

Pantyhose were invented in 1959. Up until then, all women wore garters or garterbelts. They hadn't become a fetish object yet. Does anyone with an agenda about the past ever do a survey or something of the men and women who actually lived in that time? Or is one screed by Betty Freidan (who no one in the feminist camp even listens to anymore) as far as research goes?

Yes, it is, the problem is the female definition of parity: "everything/everyone is exactly the way the woman wants it to be", after all she is right about everything so the only possible basis for a man to object to everything being her way is sexism.

...but can we please bring back this mythical time of housewives in garters (and maybe French maid aprons/outfits) - at least, say, on a Saturday night when the kids are out hanging with friends??

=)

It’s about perceived power differential and autonomy in the relationship. That’s all about underlying control and dependency issues, which play into sex because sex, among other things, is very much about vulnerability and security, which are tied ultimately to sense of personal control and autonomy. That’s one reason (along with others related to the biology of mating) that sexual intimacy will inevitably suffer in any type of contractual or committed arrangement. As you know.

But the personal losses and emotional distress do generate enormous revenues and interest in doomed solutions for “putting romance back in your marriage”. That’s gotta be good for The Economy, right?

I was brought up in a household where Dad (a farmer) pitched in as necessary with childcare as well as housework (once declaring "Oh dammit I just changed because I had calf shit on my trouser leg, and now I have baby shit on the clean pair!"). And I find the whole 50s subservient thing truly creepy.

But PLEASE can we agree the garters stay?

but childcare, according to female friends, a strong man tenderly protecting and caring for a child, is a very sexy thing. Works with other defenseless creatures, too, puppies, kittens, the elderly.

Getting satisfaction online is like the difference between drving to work in a BMW or riding a crowded train/bus with your face in someone's unwashed arm pit. Both get you where you want to go, but one is completely unsatisfying.

Don't fool yourself, masturbation is never a substitue for the real thing, it is most often borne out of boredom.

OK, I admit, I did let the situation get out of control, but I have a choice to do the damn chores or listen to hubby whine about having to do them. Either I'm resentful or he is. BTW, he doesn't do "man" chores, such as taking out the trash or fixing the running toilet, either.

I could care less if he whacks off all day to the internet because quite frankly, I am too tired to even think straight at the end of the day. Thank GOD we don't have kids!

It aint so mythical, the garters, maid outfits, etc.....you should see the action at my house on a saturday nite when the kids are out.....Sorry I already promised not to distribute the pics.

Let me get this straight

When women do housework, dressed in high heels and garters, no less, men don't find it sexy. Men don't like their partners to be subservient.

BUT when men do housework, women find that sexy. Women must like their partners to be subservient.

Jeez, guys, what is this, a custom made post for Brightstar, or what?

The contradictions are glaring, and I think the base assertion is stupid. I start to believe in a femi-nazi agenda when I read this stuff.

Women: housework is not sexy, relax on the couch. Men: housework makes you sexy, get to work.

Fucking dumb.

It is easy to mischaracterize something when the underlying trajectories (there is a better word for this I am sure) are ignored.

The two sexes feel closer automatically when one picks up a few of the other gender's supposedly stereotypical tasks. As someone said, she snowblows, he does dishes, it is all good.

As for whether it gets more sex, it just gets more enthusiastic sex, I am guessing. And then only in the introductory stages of a relationship, but I may be wrong on this point.

I am just shocked that women seem to live in their little vacuum, totally separated from reality when they suddenly act shocked, sideswiped by the news, that guys to not want a female servant for a wife.

That is so pathetic, because any conversation, were women to just listen to men for once, would tell you most men find that arrangement bilious. It just underscores that WOMEN DO NOT EVER REALLY HEAR WHAT MEN SAY, preferring their own internal reality model, as completely backwards and irresponsible, and disrespectful, as it is.

No wonder the sexes seem to far apart...