"Domestic Labor" Also Means Sex

The tricky world of your husband being your "boss."

The Internet loves itself some downstream TikTok analysis, and recently we’ve been handed a lot of good stuff in the “traditional vs. evolving gender roles” discussion. The big daddy of them all recently was Harrison Butker’s speech telling mostly conservative Catholic women that it’s OK to aspire to just motherhood, which was tone-deaf broadly but overanalyzed contextually.

Within the same week or so, you had some “momfluencer” going and discussing how she doesn’t do “domestic labor” for her husband, i.e. laundry and making lunches and scheduling doctor’s appointments.

That stuff deeply triggers conservatives who want good little wives at home, so Matt Walsh came out with this:

Now, personally I agree relationships (esp. long-term relationships) shouldn’t be a check-box or point system, but of course many are. You did this, so I must do this. Ideally, all relationships (including friendships and co-workers) would be a partnership, but human psychology is far too complicated and trauma-fraught for that to work consistently. Most marriages do have score-keeping, and to ignore that would be folly.

Within all these discussions, you have a lot of sub-discussions about “domestic labor.” In a conventional sense, “domestic labor” means “things of the home,” which is meant to imply laundry, dishes, trash, regular errands, and “the children.” (It’s always funny to me, as someone going through infertility, how people often describe their children as an amorphous blob, i.e. “the children” or “the boys”).

The part we don’t talk about out loud is sex, and that’s an important thing to note.

In fact, here’s the Megyn Kelly show analyzing thaat same “momfluencer:”