Anti-Climacus

This, pretty much:

"None of this has anything to do with gender or even with roles as such. It’s just about figuring out (a) what needs to be done and (b) who, at the moment, is better placed to do it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?"

I'm pretty sure this is the rule in our household, minus a few weeks of the year when everyone is stressed and has no time. But that's what pizza delivery is for.

(I'm also in the process of reading Michael Chabon's essays about manhood, which I for the most part find to be of indifferent quality, hence the very slow process of reading. He has an essay on this topic where he does a pretty good job of demonstrating the way in which gendered home expectations have changed over the generations. But I'll also say this: when my grandfather, definitively of the old school, was all of a sudden made to be the one who had to do everything, he did it. And didn't seem to particularly complain about it, either: taking care of my grandmother meant a lot to him, and he would recount the various things he had done with pride, and very little concern about whether they would be perceived as masculine or feminine. They had to be done, so they got done.)