CNN Reports Men Responsible For All Relationship Issues

CNN has one of the most ridiculous articles I have read in quite some time. The premise of the article is that there is a lack of equity in the division of labor around the home and that as a result women bear an unfair load.

Let's grab some excerpts and see what is contained within.

"I am very turned on when he's doing housework," says the 36-year-old Camden, Delaware resident, a middle school teacher.

"If there's a sink full of dirty dishes, he knows I'm going to take care of that before I want to get intimate. If he wasn't helping with the housework, I would not find that very attractive."

Simmons' attitude is pretty typical of married women, researchers say. They like it when their spouses share the household chores, but also find that -- paradoxically -- a husband may also create more work for them, or not contribute as much as women would like. In other words, science has once again proven what many people already suspect: Relationships take work, especially when it comes to keeping a happy (and tidy) home."

This doesn't provide a real breakdown of who is doing what around the house, just a suggestion that there is an imbalance. But if you ask the author science has proven this theory to be more than supposition.

Not only is there no breakdown of responsibilities to analyze, it doesn't spend any time discussing what happens if one of the spouses is a stay at home parent. The article then goes on to discuss how doing chores around the house may lead to more intimacy. Ya know, some people would argue that someone is trying to use sex as a tool, but we'll ignore that too. Let's take a look at some more of what was written.

"When a man does housework, it feels to the woman like an expression of caring and concern, which then physically reduces her stress," says Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of "The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework."

"A guy can be completely stressed out and want to have sex to burn it off, but women are not wired like that," says Coleman, who is also a member of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research organization. Instead, he says, women need to feel relaxed in order to feel sexy -- and it's hard to unwind when there are chores to be done and a husband who's oblivious to them.

Blah, blah, blah. Who pays this guy for such insight. Women need to feel relaxed to feel sexy. They'd never see sex as a way to relax, they can only put out if there are no dishes in the sink.

But the best part of those two paragraphs is the last sentence "and it's hard to unwind when there are chores to be done and a husband who's oblivious to them."

Talk about editorializing. Why not just call all men lazy and insensitive. Why not indulge in promulgating stereotypes, I guess that it helps to sell more books.

"Now, the bad news: The same research found that men create, on average, seven more hours of housework a week for women. That extra work may not be as obvious as doing the dishes or mowing the lawn. So-called "emotional labor" -- tasks like writing holiday cards, scheduling doctor appointments and planning family gatherings -- is too often left to wives, says University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock.

"As long as the invisible labor is borne by women, things aren't going to be equal, even if surveys show they are," Smock says. Such work can be a major source of mental stress, she adds."

There are a lot of questions here. It doesn't account for how many hours each spouse works outside of the house. I know a lot of families who are lucky enough to have a stay-at-home parent. They're all women. And since they stay at home with the children they're usually the ones who take the kids to see the doctor, which is why it is only natural for them to make the doctor's appointments.

You could also make the case that since they don't have a boss looking over their shoulder it makes sense for them to make arrangements for family gatherings. But of course that sort of data is not included in this article as it makes it much harder to blame men for relationship problems.

The rest of this article is really just more of the same. "Poor women, they have such mean husbands. If only they did something to help them they'd prance around the house with smiles plastered across their faces.

I wonder why they didn't spend more time talking about the division of labor. I'd call this narishkeit, but perhaps they could have talked about who handles repairs of household items and automobiles. Who takes care of yard work. If you are going to engage in stereotyping why not go for broke.

Blah, blah, blah. Articles like this just make me role my eyes. The bottom line is that every relationship is different and unless you are in it you can't really say what is going on.