It Starts At Home

Feminist Praxis and the Failures of Leftist Men

Just do the damn dishes.

My parents are away for the week, leaving my eighteen-year old brother and I to take care of the house and dogs. Each morning, I’ve opened the curtains, walked and fed the dogs, and cleaned the kitchen. I’ve gotten the mail, emptied the trash cans, and vacuumed.

My brother hasn’t done a damn thing.

I try to keep my cool, politely asking that he please just help out a little bit. I explain that I don’t want mom and dad to return to a filthy house. It’s not fair, I say, and having to ask him for help adds a slew of emotional labor onto my already-full plate. That term — emotional labor — is dangerous. It careens into “feminist” territory.

My brother implodes any time I call him out on his misogyny. He’s a leftist, a liberal feminist, a communist. He’s gay. He can’t be misogynistic. Besides, it’s just a few dishes. This has nothing to do with feminism.

As I furiously scrub, soap bubbles rise alongside my anger. I think about every woman who was expected to keep house so that the men in her life could go participate in revolutions.

Unlike my brother, I don’t have time to Tweet about communism. I’m stuck doing dishes.

Hannah Mitchell, English suffragette and socialist, once said, “a lot of the Socialist talk about freedom was only talk and these Socialist young men expected their Sunday dinners and huge teas with home-made cakes exactly like their reactionary fellows.”

I tell my brother that “I don’t play wifey.” This is not to demean all of the important domestic work of married women. Rather, I hate that he expects me to cook and clean in my mother’s absence. He claims that it’s because he a few years younger. He doesn’t know how to turn on the dishwasher anyways, he says. When I remind him that he’s going to college soon, and he needs to learn to be independent, he brushes me off.

Leftist men want women to believe that the power imbalances we see in our daily lives are coincidental. They want us to believe that they — as individuals, not a collective, not all men — just so happen to be bumbling idiots, incapable of turning on a dishwasher. They want us to believe that patriarchy can’t breach the safe-space of leftist homes.

I wish I had an answer to this problem. I wish I knew how to encourage the men in my life to participate in feminist praxis. For now, I suppose I’ll just do the dishes, because otherwise they won’t get done.