Are women cleaner than men? This question, subjected to a surprisingly extensive blog discussion last week, has elicited a wide range of anecdotes and claims by men that, in fact, women do more cleaning because they simply have higher standards of cleanliness. Says Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

at least some of the cleaning, folding, scrubbing and dusting that women do has very little to do with the presence, or absence, of men - and everything to do with the fact that women, as a general rule, like things to be cleaner than men. For instance, I am not the cleanest, most order-conscious person in the world. My desk at work is a wasteland of unfiled paper, scribbled post-its, forgotten notes, and heaped-up books. Nevertheless, since my freshman year of college I have lived with fifteen different male roommates, and only one of the fifteen has been more finicky about cleaning up than I am. (He was an incorrigible racist, incidentally - make of that what you will.) Which is to say that I’m pretty high up the ladder of male cleanliness . . . but my apartment looks like a guy’s apartment even so, and my bedroom like a guy’s bedroom - with stray socks and undusted floors and a hopeless lack of interior decoration. Whereas the single girls I know tend to have, well, female apartments - tidy, scrubbed, nicely-decorated, and so on. Why? Because that’s how they like to live. It’s a matter of choice, not male pressure: Women choose to clean because they like to be clean, and men choose not to because they often just don’t care.

Ross later adds that he thinks women are cleaner by nature, rather than social pressure from men:

my sense has always been that while the female culture of cleaning, like the female culture of beauty, may have begun as a way of attracting and pleasing men, it long ago passed into a realm of cleaning-for-its-own-sake that has very little to do with male expectations, let alone male oppression. So while my slovenly male friends may expect, based on their understanding of traditional gender roles, that their wives will keep a cleaner house than they keep themselves, they don’t expect the level of cleanliness that women tend to pursue - and if anything, they tend to be exasperated by their significant others’ zeal for domestic order.

I’m not so sure that this is the case. Let me offer a counter-example:

I once had a female roomate who was a complete pig. Her room was a wall-to-wall expanse of rumpled dirty clothing, mashed into the carpet along with random empty soda bottles, bowls dirty with the detritus of dried on Special K cereal, shoes, pens (usually exploded), papers, and briefing books. Her bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in years, by the looks of it, and when she finished a bottle of shampoo she just dumped it where it was, in the shower, so there were usually several bottles on the floor of her tub at any different time. (I had a different bathroom, fortunately.) The chaos was so overwhelming – even, apparently, to her – that at times she just bought new clothing instead of doing laundry (laundy, I might add, which she would invariably fail to sort by color or fabric type, shrinking whatever hadn’t shrunk in the wash by drying it on high for excessive periods)

And yet, she would, on occasion, still entertain. And when she did, she would prepare. Out would come the vaccum. Into the closet would go the clothes. The bed would be made. Pictures would be hung or arranged by the windows with care. Junk was stuffed into drawers. And so to any outside (male) observer dropping by, she would have appeared to be a normal, reasonably neat woman.

In truth, she was simply an extreme form of what many women are — secret pigs whose cleanliness is entirely socially mediated. It’s not that women clean only for men; it’s that they clean for public consumption. How women live and how they are observed to live are two very different questions, and it’s in the gap between the two that you find the most powerful social expectations.

The fact of the matter is that women, in their private lives, are much messier than they are often thought to be — especially by men. I know this from having female friends whose homes I have dropped by without prior planning. A super-styled contemporary apartment that is the pinnacle of urbane living may be marred by vast accumulations of papers during the week, which are swept and sorted into the trash before visitors arrive. Another may be so small that the living room functions, on more days than not, as a series of drying racks for sweaters and other garments that must be laid flat — sweaters rapidly stored before guests arrive. Yet another may disguise such routine disarray that mice roam freely in the dark of night with bohemian fabrics artfully thrown over damaged furnitute. The greatest difference between men and women is not just in how they chose to live, but in how much social pressure they feel to present themselves to the world as clean and orderly beings.

This gap — between the world of life as actually lived and the world of willed self-presentation in accomodation to social expectations – is among the most fascinating there is. And there are many such gaps in all our lives. All single people, for example, eat and cook food for themselves that they would never feed guests. The question is why women feel greater pressure than men to present their homes (and hence lifestyles) to the world as looking a certain way, even if they don’t, in actually, particularly care about how it is they live.

I think we all know the answer to that one.