This Thanksgiving, Just Do the Dishes

On Thursday, advice columnist Dear Prudence answered a question I realized I’ve asked my whole life. “Whenever I host large dinner parties, only the women offer to help with dishes,” asked the exasperated letter writer, who was feeling anxious about an upcoming Friendsgiving she’s hosting. “I’d like the men to help more, but I don’t want to ask any friends and guests to clean up if they haven’t offered.” Daniel Mallory Ortberg answers that it’s perfectly fine to “cheerfully conscript” your friends so that everyone is splitting the housework, and to even explicitly ask for men. Otherwise, “relying on an all-volunteer army usually means that the women notice you need help and offer to jump in, while the men seem to think dishes magically appear clean and tucked away in the cabinets the next day.”

I don’t want to be gender essentialist about this. Obviously, there exist plenty of men who immediately notice when a chore needs doing and jump to it without being asked, and plenty of women who won’t do a dish unless they are physically forced in front of the sink. For instance, my dad will basically take your plate out from under you while you’re still eating, and his kitchen is so clean you’d think no one lived there.

But this question struck a chord. I couldn’t stop thinking of every party and holiday—parties full of feminist, queer, progressive people—in which the women and non-binary people immediately started setting tables and helping prep, while the men socialized in the living room or backyard. Yes, they’d gleefully hop to attention when told they should. But they always needed to be asked, and then would ask what needed to be done instead of just knowing the way the rest of us did.

So this Thanksgiving, I’m asking early so the people in your life don’t have to ask the day of: Just do the dishes.

There are many phrases for this gendered phenomenon: emotional labor, the mental load, the second shift, the endless cry of “I don’t want to have to ask.” It’s the tendency for women to have a running list of household tasks that need to be completed on an ongoing basis for a home to be livable. Looking around my house right now, I see a sock on the floor that needs to be put in the hamper, and dust all over the TV console. I know it’s been a few days too long since we’ve vacuumed, so I need to set off the Roomba before we go out tonight. And if I have a spare minute, I need to change the sheets.

Men tend to only do those chores when they’re pointed out to them, and even then usually after asking what specifically needs to be done, rather than looking around the house and seeing all the things I just saw. There are many theories as to why this is. Some of it is the gendered way we expect women to be the household managers, so most of them internalize this sort of work as their Job from a young age. “Perhaps men simply can't see what needs to be done. They didn't see their fathers doing these tasks; and their mothers did their invisible work quietly and without call for recognition,” wrote Alexandra Brander in The Atlantic. Or it may be learned helplessness, a cycle in which men were never taught to do chores right, and now have resigned to not doing them at all since they’ll just mess it up. Some even argue it’s a biological thing, that men are more concerned with protecting the home from potential attacks than the minutiae of keeping it tidy.

When I asked friends about the Dear Prudence letter, I got many responses from women saying the solution was just to tell the men it was their job to clean up, while the women retreated to the living room to hang out. It’s a decent first step, but it left me disappointed. The whole point is that women shouldn’t be the only managers anymore. And that’ll only happen if men don’t just do the housework, but train themselves to remember it needs to be done.

There are a few ways you could do this. You can set an alarm on your phone that just says “housework!” and take 15 minutes to do anything you see. You can take over whatever your wife or girlfriend is doing and do it yourself. Make a chore wheel for yourself until it becomes second nature. Teach yourself the way you'd teach yourself any other new task.

But maybe, now, before Thanksgiving, your first step could be assigning yourself the job of clearing plates when the meal is over, without asking permission. This is a particularly useful strategy if you're not super into cooking but you want to be able to contribute to the labor load at next weekend's Friendsgiving. (You can even offer in advance to do dishes for your host, in lieu of bringing something.) Yes, you can ask if the host has any specific instructions (silver, fine china, and cast iron don't go in the dishwasher), or if they compost certain leftovers, but other than that, just start doing it. Maybe no other men will join you. Maybe you’ll miss the first part of the football game because you’re chatting with the women in the kitchen while you dry plates. But you’re man enough to handle that.