>Men as a group don't benefit from having full-time unpaid housekeepers, etc?
Men _as a group_, however, don't have full-time unpaid housekeepers. A good number of straight men do. Single men (single in the sense of not having any partner, not in the sense of being unmarried) don't. Gay men don't (unless they adopt the domestic division of labor that is modelled upon the heterosexual nuclear family idealized in the "family value" discourse). Feminist men who in practice share household labor equally with their partners don't. Some men are full-time unpaid housekeepers, sometimes for their partners, other times for their parents, grandparents, etc. Bourgeois men have paid housekeepers.
In other words, while capitalists are *by definition* expropriators, men aren't, so the latter, unlike the former, don't form a class with a shared interest in expropriation.
Children, the severely physically disabled, the severely mentally disabled, the very sick, etc. of whichever sex are dependent upon unpaid household labor and/or paid labor of others.
Women _as a group_ are not full-time unpaid housekeepers. Bourgeois women don't do household labor; household labor in bourgeois families is performed by (often well-paid) personal servants, service workers, and/or self-employed individuals. Well-paid petit-bourgeois and working-class women do a little of it themselves and have the rest done by (often miserably paid) service workers or self-employed individuals. Most, though not all, working-class women do, some of them doing a lot, others doing a little. Lesbians don't serve men, even in a partnership in which one does unpaid household labor for the other(s). Homeless women cannot even afford to do household labor (except cleaning themselves and taking care of their dependents if they have any the best they can), since they don't even have their own homes to clean & maintain. It is impossible to make a case that all women are "exploited" by all men _even if_ you define exploitation as a "transfer of labor under coercive circumstances" as you do; therefore, neither "men" nor "women" are *classes defined by their contradictory relation to expropriation*, thus such categories are unlike capital and labor that are so defined.
Some women are capitalists & thus exploiters, by whom some men are exploited.
>Sure, capitalists benefit too, but why more than if men and women
>shared equally?
Women are presumed to have a double shift and/or to prefer serving their family to wage labor (even though not all women do), and this presumption is one of the ideological grounds for discriminating against female workers in hiring, compensation, promotion, firing, etc.
Moreover, a woman who bears and/or raises a child or children and/or holds the double shift has burdens that impede and often interrupt her participation in wage labor. This becomes, once again, an ideological ground for discrimination against her.
The unequal division of labor at home between straight men and straight women that is common often becomes a reason for disunity of the working class, weakening solidarity.
So, the ruling class gains from sexism in many ways.
>The situation is exactly the same as wage labor: there is a transfer
>of labor from women to men due to coercive circumstances. It's
>exploitation.
If a woman doesn't do any housework and is well supported economically by her husband or lover or admirer, whose "labor is transferred" from whom?
How do you define "coercive circumstances" in intimate relationships? An intimate relationship becomes a coercive one (a) if a woman has no other economic choice but to enter into one to survive or (b) if there exists domestic violence. What of other relationships in which neither (a) nor (b) is the case? Is household labor, if done by women for men, by definition coercive?
Yoshie