Month: December 2025

Happy New Year

Who’s cleaning up after your party?

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Forty years later, I still regret helping with the dishes after my boss had a bunch of us to his house for supper.

Wait. Not “regret.” “Am furious with myself” is a better way to phrase it.

When supper was over, my only female co-worker, Cindy, and I got up to help the boss’s wife clear the table while my male co-workers sat there.

My only defense is that I was in my early 20s and unknowingly steeped in deep, deep patriarchy and that I sensed (I did feel great unease as I got up to help – why were the men still sitting?) I would have somehow been punished if I had not helped. Not consciously punished, but it would have affected how my boss – who once invited us all to attend his church (Assemblies of God, I think? Some denomination even more far-right than the Catholic Church, not that inviting us to a Catholic Church would have been appropriate, either) – saw me.

I think about that event a lot when I think about expectations. I think about other events.

When Mr T’s parents stayed with us for over a week for our wedding (WHY THE HELL DID I EVER AGREE TO THAT?), I made supper every night. Every. Night. Even though Mr T and I do not have a formal, sit-down supper every night. I did so because I knew that if I did not, his parents would talk trash about me.

(Why did I even care if they talked trash about me? They had already told him not to marry me and had threatened to boycott our wedding.)

Do we ever escape our conditioning?

I make a conscious effort to not jump into sexist, gendered roles anymore. I am not always successful – I am very likely to help a female friend clean up even if the men aren’t helping just because I don’t want the burden to be on my friend.

But also, most of my friends have partners who are not assholes, so it’s not like it’s even much of an issue for me these days.

I guess I assumed it was not really an issue for other women so much, either, but then I read this.

Dear Carolyn: I usually go to my partner’s sibling’s home for the holidays. I have noticed at the end of the meal, the men sit around and only the women are cleaning. My partner says it’s because when they offer to help, she is too particular or gets annoyed when they do something wrong. But somehow, it always ends up that I am taking people’s plates away and the two of us are in the kitchen cleaning!
I don’t want to leave her in the lurch, but the dynamic really grinds my gears. Since it’s not my household, should I even try to help fix this? If so, how?

Carolyn Hax

You might – or you might not – be surprised to know that there are a lot of women in the comments saying the letter writer should just shut up and help the partner’s sister and leave it at that.

There are a lot of women defending the partner for not helping.

There are a lot of women saying this is not sexism but a sibling issue and the LW should just leave it alone.

But their “leave it alone” does not include supporting the LW in not helping.

The LW is supposed to help clean while the men watch TV and is not supposed to question her role and certainly is not supposed to suggest to her partner that he get off his lazy ass and help.

The LW is supposed to help maintain the patriarchy.

Here’s a good New Year’s resolution:

If the men aren’t cleaning, we aren’t cleaning.

Amen.

The new urinary leash

Keeping women out of public life, one stupid rule at a time

I was all ready to be very crabby about the purse policy – only bags smaller than 2″ x 2″ or something ridiculous like that – at a local museum and write about how this is the new way of keeping women in line, but then when we got to the museum, I saw they had free lockers for anyone who brought a larger bag and so I had to dial back my ire.

But I still have ire!

I am still annoyed – no, pissed off – that for almost any entertainment venue where I go, I am not allowed to come in not only with my bigger purse, which is a whopping 12″ x 7.5″, but also not with my smaller one, which is about 9″ x 8″.

I don’t even care what their stupid justification is. It can’t be about safety – we already go through metal detectors and any items are searched for the ballgames and for the summer festivals.

It can’t even be about people bringing in their own booze because they are already searching the bags that are allowed in.

So why is a size restriction even necessary? WTF are they accomplishing?

It might be different if I could fit things I need into my pockets.

Hahahahaha.

The only pocket where my phone fits is in the back pocket of my jeans.

I don’t have pockets anywhere else except in my big winter coat and it is not practical to wear a big winter coat in the summer.

Or even indoors in the winter.

And putting a phone in the back jeans pocket?

Not safe from pickpocketers

Not safe for peeing because when you pull your jeans down, the phone falls out.

Have you ever heard the phrase “urinary leash” before?

I hadn’t heard of it until a few years ago, when I started learning more about public toilets and the lack thereof for women, an issue we have all lived. Either there is a women’s toilet and the line is three times as long as the line for the men’s toilet and we miss the beginning of the concert and spend the entire intermission in line, or there is no women’s toilet at all.

This has been a known issue for over a century.

And it was an intentional issue.

In Victorian Britain, most public toilets were designed for men. Of course, this affected women’s ability to leave the home, as women who wished to travel had to plan their route to include areas where they could relieve themselves. Thus, women never travelled much further than where family and friends resided. This is often called the ‘urinary leash’, as women could only go so far as their bladders would allow them.

Historic UK

It took women advocating for women for the situation to change but there is always backlash and here we are, decades and decades later, fighting the same damn fight.

And it’s not just about the toilets – it’s about whether we get to exist outside of the house. About whether we get to participate fully in public life. About whether we can grab our keys and go and not have to spend the time that we are away from home worrying about if the store has a public restroom or if there is a place under the streetlight to park if we dare to be out after dark or if we can carry the things we need – our glasses, our phones – in the space we are allocated for those things. About whether our children are safe if we cannot be watching them. About if we can even have children and how we accommodate parenthood with working for money. About if we can *not* have children if we do not want them.

The big social movements – against child prostitution/rape, against taverns having first dibs on male paychecks (the Temperance Movement) – have been led by women. The book that led so many people to become anti-slavery – Uncle Tom’s Cabin – was written by a woman.

Let me rephrase that. The big social movements that have curbed the rapacious, predatory actions of men have been led by women.

Because men are not going to act against their own desires.

And the men in power now know that women will push back. And that’s why they are trying to push us back – so they can have their power that they think they deserve because they think they are actually better than us. They want to put that leash back around our necks.