Don't Close the Fucking Bathroom Door

I lived alone for about 8 years but currently I have a girl staying with me.  It’s a little strange but mostly fine but let me tell you about one change that annoys me….

When I’m living by myself, I don’t close the door to the bathroom when I’m in there.  Why would I?  I’m the laziest person in the world and opening and closing doors expends energy.  There’s absolutely no reason to close the door when you’re alone in a locked house and nobody else has the key (except my mum for emergencies.)

Of course, when someone is visiting or, as of right now, staying with you for a longer term, you need to close the bathroom door when you’re using it.  And that’s fine, I can deal with that.  I like my privacy and I don’t want to know what anyone else is up to in the bathroom either.

But what drives me crazy is when people shut the bathroom door again after they’ve finished with it.

When they do this it becomes impossible to tell from the outside whether it’s empty or not.  Sure, you can do a sweep of the house to count whether everyone’s accounted for… but remember how I started by saying how lazy I am?  I just want to be able to walk into an empty bathroom and use it without taking a risk that I’m going to walk in on someone.

The only reason I’ve ever seen for this behaviour is people who've made a smell and they don’t want it getting out… To that I say - it’s going to fade a lot quicker if you let some fresh air in!  I don’t want to be the next sucker who goes to the bathroom and discovers there’s a terrible smell pent up and waiting to ambush me!

Are you a bathroom door closer?  If so, what is your excuse?  Please stop that immediately (or at least at my house).

The Gender Neutral Housewife

I came across this photo on the Humans of New York facebook page (which is a page I highly recommend liking).  In the caption it says "He loves to cook and clean. He's a great housewife."  While I’m sure she was teasing him, I also like to take it as a serious statement.  Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where ‘housewife’ is a gender neutral term?

Being good at cooking and cleaning doesn’t have to be feminine of course.  Nor do any of the other tasks that fall under the responsibility of the housewife role.  If you look at the rather extensive list of tasks that a housewife does on wikipedia, there is nothing that couldn’t be done just as easily by a person of any gender.  Yes, some people have a natural proclivity for housewife tasks but that tendency has nothing to do with your gender.  Personally I am a female and I believe I would make a terrible housewife and I know many men who far exceed me in this area.  I also imagine a lot of men would quite like to be housewives if they felt it was an option.

The more technically correct gender neutral term is ‘homemaker’ but I kind of like the idea of taking the gender out of the words instead of changing the words to be free of gender.  Maybe we can even change the meaning of the base word ‘wife’ in the long run to truly describe a role rather than a gender.  Changing the meaning of words seems to me to be a much more effective way of taking away their power than trying to stop their use, although I admit it’s a long and hard road to do so.

This also makes me wonder what other roles and words we should be pushing to make gender neutral...

Everyday Sexism: Leadership for Women

I was recently signed up to some leadership training through my work.  While investigating the website of the folks running it I discovered another leadership course:  "Leadership for Women".  How, I wondered, could this course be different from the one I was already signed up to?  Or more to the point, why would it be different?

I read through all the information looking for some explanation as to why the organisers of this course believe women need different leadership training.  All I found was subtle implications that women are more emotional than men.  This is framed both positively and negatively, with references to women needing to keep their emotions under control but also being more intuitive and empathic.  Regardless of how they spin things, this is sexism at work.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but men have emotions too (yes, it's true!) and it is just as important for them to learn how to use and control them effectively in a leadership environment as it is for women.  I refuse to believe that any part of the "Leadership for Women" course wouldn't be just as relevant to male leaders.  Male leaders need to learn how to maintain work/life balance just as much as female leaders and male leaders need to learn how to ‘deal with guilt, jealousy and criticism’ effectively as well.  Why would you target a course covering these specific topics at women?  Why would anyone want to attend a course where the organisers were already displaying such prejudice against you?  I find it hard to believe that this is even an effective marketing tactic.