Why Sharing It All Turns Me On
Turn Astri loose in an airport bookstore and you can be sure she will return with the most cringe-worthy publication imaginable: “The Price of Motherhood,” for our initial flight across the Atlantic, “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” on our way to Spain, “The Feminine Mistake” for the flight to Moscow. Though it made my deep-seated insecurity that full-frontal feminism is just so unattractive instantly resurface— she was sitting next to me! everyone could see the cover!— I admit that, behind closed doors, I read them all. I even learned a thing or two.
 Still, when Astri came back from a recent trip to New York with Caitlin Flanagan’s “To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife” in tow, I figured she had completely lost her mind. She had gone to New York to visit her boyfriend, a beloved friend of mine and the scion of a traditional, Catholic family. Had she decided she was going to give up her own numerous professional ambitions and become the bun-making matron of her secret fantasy? Was I going to have to kill “Bob,” a dear— but ultimately sacrificable— friend?
As usual, Astri recited tid-bits from the damn book every couple of seconds, entirely unable to contain her excitement (why do you Americans throw such lavish weddings?! sexless marriages?? nooooooooooo!!). As usual, I eventually caved and picked up the book— now full of asterisks and underlines and exclamation points— myself.
I’m about half-way through with Flanigan’s supposedly modern manifesto and I must say it’s not all bad. I wholeheartedly appreciate her sobering assessment that a formal white wedding is a contemporary invention, much like Valentine’s Day, where merchants of all sorts (wedding planners, jewelers, that ubiquitous Martha Stewart character) hope to cash in on class confusion. Forget the stretch Hummer limo and ice sculptures! I won’t be duped into debt for “The Philiadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.”
As a social observer, Flanigan certainly has her moments— and as a writer, she’s incessantly entertaining— but I would say that her commentary doesn’t apply to the younger generations (me + you = Gen Y). She argues: “It turns out that the ‘traditional’ marriage, which we’ve all been so happy to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today’s most stubborn marital problems, such as how to combine work and parenthood, and how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order. What’s interesting about the sex advice given to married women of earlier generations is that it proceeds from the assumption that in a marriage, a happy sex life depends upon orderly and successful housekeeping.”
Flanigan insists that this “orderly and successful housekeeping” is within the rightful purview of the wife, not because men should expect wives to do the housework, but because it’s deplorably unsexy for a man to: “I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture,” Flanigan asserts, confident we readers are begrudgingly but affirmatively shaking our collective head.
Speak for yourself, lady! Are you crazy?? If my boyfriend told me he was going to skip watching football for the umpteenth night this week, and scrub anything (I’m not entirely sure what a Lazy Susan is) instead, he would get laid in a heartbeat! Because, above all, work-life balance turns me on. And, since American women still do 80 percent of the childcare and two-thirds of the housework, demonstrating a willingness to do those ultimately time-consuming daily household chores, without pleading or prodding, means that I might eventually get some- work-life balance, that is.
Fellows: in time, your hot body will succumb to gravity and beer (it always does, ladies), and even that charming sense of humor will get old. But the piece of mind that comes from knowing you’ll be willing to share the workload at home will last forever. And that, my friends (Ms. Flanigan, included), is so very, extraordinarily, mind-blowingly hot. - Vetta
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