<html> <body> Absolutely, DRM.  It's about picking up after yourself. I would make one other point.  I'm surrounded by people with 4,000 sq. foot houses, huge lawns, and all the rest of it, and those who don't hire people at meager wages to tend to their palaces spend all their time whining to me about how they don't have any free time because they have to mow this and trim that, yada, yada.  I'm sick of listening to it and stopped being polite.  I now say "I don't want to hear about it.  Next time buy a house that actually suites your needs, not your wants."  They don't like that response anymore than my students do when I say, in response to their excuse of "But I had to work!" 'Okay, let's sit down and take a look at your budget and what you spend your money on and if after doing that I can clearly see that it's for basic food, clothing, and shelter, then I'll accept your excuse."  They don't like that response much either.  I takes me all of 45 minutes a week to do my share of the domestic labor in our 2 bedroom, 2 bath place.  When my daughter is with us it might take 20 minutes longer, but then I enlist her in the work, so it doesn't add much.  The more property and crap you have the more your life is consumed by its upkeep.  I have lots of time to read the 1844 Manuscripts, practice putting, and watch Seinfeld reruns. Cliff <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>My mother made a point of teaching me, starting at about age 8, to cook for and clean after myself. Later, in college, living with a group of young men who didn't benefit from similar training, I found myself fighting an endless, two front war against the filth of my housemates and their lack of understanding that they had a responsibility to share in the work of keeping entropy at bay. This situation only disappeared when I changed from a house of guys to a house of women; which created other challenges but that's beyond the scope. The guys I lived with were spoiled.  That's it. Beginning, middle and end of story.  In a large sense, they were spoiled by patriarchy.  In a more immediate and manageble sense, they were spoiled by their mothers who picked and cleaned up after them (following the obligatory amount of yelling - sometimes) and the fathers who provided a model for the non-helpful male. In a very real and very practical way the only solution to the continuing problem of men not pulling their weight at home is to stop helping them not pull their weight at home. If this means some struggle within the home until a generation of domestically self-sufficient young men is produced (not simply a statistically noteworthy cohort) then that's just what it's going to take. When I was a boy, my mother told me that she didn't want me to be a "burden on the woman you're going to marry."  She knew what she was doing.  She understood that girls only assume these responsibilities because they're trained to and that a boy could receive the same training. This was real feminism in action at home.  Not high minded speechifying at some conference, supported by imported domestic labor at home. DRM __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software <a href="http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com/" eudora="autourl">http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com</a> ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk" eudora="autourl">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </blockquote></body> </html>