Saturday, September 12, 2009

Women's Porn

No, it's not what you think. I was garage saling today and found a book thusly labeled ("Women's Porn") and I wouldn't have picked it up, of course, if the owner of the garage had not told me what was inside. What was inside? It was pictures of men in aprons vacuuming and cooking. This is the equivalent of porn for women: men actually helping in the house, taking over jobs that have been relegated as "women's work" for over a century now and doing them. It was humorous, but the only reason it was humorous was because we don't see that happening every day, and we take it as an anomaly. If our world was perfect, the book wouldn't be funny at all: it would simply be reality, a reality in which men and women share household chores just as they share space in the working world. But our world is not equal yet, and so pictures of men doing their fair share at home strikes us as funny, because it is unexpected and unreal.

No comments: