Taken To The Cleaners

This week - why I never trust survey results.

Women, please take note: According to the Media, we have officially made peace with domestic chores. Indeed, according to a story making its way around the world, we have not only made peace with them, we now *embrace* them as "mentally therapeutic."

I'll pause here a moment to allow all my male readers to say, "Yes!! I'm saved!" while all my female readers say, "Ha!"

Now, I can think of several ways to describe housework. These include "mind-numbing," "tedious" and "a necessary evil" but definitely do not include "therapeutic."

However, if I were to believe this survey, I'd feel I were quite alone. It claims that 59 percent of women think that cleaning makes them feel in control of their lives, while only four percent believed cleaning to be a waste of time and effort. And fully one third of respondents claimed that cleaning gave them more satisfaction than sex.

I'll pause again, to allow all my male readers to stop giving each other high fives long enough for that last statistic to sink in.

Since the article claims that, "Where 20 years ago housework was seen by many as a sign of female subjugation, the tide appears to have turned." I decided to look a little more deeply at this survey.

First, it was commissioned by Discovery Home and Health TV, and conducted online. While I don't have figures on this channel's audience, I'd be willing to bet that it consists of people who would make Desperate Housewives' Bree Van De Kamp look like an amateur. After all, if you watch the channel and also surf the website, chances are you are already very interested in matters of hearth and home.

This is kind of like surveying Martha Stewart's audience as to whether they like pine cone wreaths versus braided twig wreaths, and then claiming that 68 percent of *all* women preferred pine cone wreaths. There needs to be a third question, for people like me, which is: What's a wreath?

Second, the most touted results of the Discovery survey don't tell the whole story. Elsewhere it says that some 58 percent of respondents said that they felt depressed if the house was a mess, and 59 percent said that untidiness made them feel tense. Well yes, a messy house depresses me too. A messy house can make me angry, because when I step on one of my son's Lego bricks, it bloody well *hurts.*

Read just a little bit further and it says that 57 percent of women found that cleaning exhausted them and that... wait a minute... only 22 percent actively enjoyed the cleaning and tidying itself. (I'll bet that number drops even further when they learn that the average woman spends roughly nine *years* of her life cleaning things.)

So... what the survey is actually saying is not that women enjoy housework, but that they like a clean house. This is akin to saying that men like a perfectly manicured, green, lush and weed free lawn. They don't necessarily find pushing a heavy lawnmower around on a 42C summer day "therapeutic." Heat-stroke inducing, perhaps, but not therapeutic.

I think the headlines on this story might have been different had the survey included questions like:

1) If you could afford to pay someone to make your house spotless every day, would you?
2) Would you support research into robotics technology designed to clean your home?
3) If you were granted three wishes, would one of them be to have a self-cleaning house?

Although knowing the way things get spun in the media, the headlines would likely be:

The Impatient Modern Woman: I Want It All With The Push of a Button

Lazy Luxury? 97 Percent of Women Would Pay to Have Housework Done for Them

Which just goes to show you: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. And even worse, humour columns about statistics.

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MAILBAG:

Dear Chandra,

While I acknowledge that most residents of the US can't distinguish between Australia and Austria (and indeed would have trouble finding either on a map) I am happy to inform you that it snows in many places in southern Australia (including the outer suburbs of Melbourne where I live - though here we usually don't get enough to ski in you can certainly toboggan, build snowmen etc.)

The Blue Mountains are immediately west of Sydney and are part of the Great Dividing Range which goes right down the east coast. It does snow there but again not enough to be useful for skiing (not far enough south)

The Snowy Mountains, which straddle the border between Victoria and New South Wales, are also part of the Great Dividing Range and as you can tell from the name are actually snow covered all year though the ski season runs only through winter. Australia's highest mountain (on the mainland) is here and there are many ski resorts in the Snowy Mountains National Park and in northern Victoria (look up Thredbo, Blue Cow, Mt Buller, Falls Creek etc etc). In fact the world's oldest ski club which held the world's first ski races is at Kiandra (founded 1861!) I have included a photo from 1900 of people enjoying the winter sports there.

Find a copy of the film "Tha Man from Snowy River" and you will see the wonderful alpine areas of northern Victoria in summer (though you should probably ignore the rest of the film in which one of our nationally beloved poems was got at!)

Tasmania of course gets a lot more snow. I have walked through drifts up to my knees in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park in Tasmania's central highlands on New Year's Day (ie the height of our summer).

Australia has been competing in Winter Olympics in a range of sports since 1936 (only missing 1948, I think, as many countries did after the war) and many European and North American winter sports enthusiasts spend your summer enjoying our snow (and New Zealand's) and working in our ski fields.

We have ice rinks even in tropical Brisbane - a big centre of speed skating - and even further north. Come and see before global warming mucks it all up!!

Cheers from a Melbourne winter's night (it's about 3 degrees C outside)

Sue McLeod
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Chandra,

As a compulsive follower of your column (arrives on Monday - my day off. Highlight of the week after a long sleep in and indulging in the first caffeine fix for the day), for about the last 3.5 years, I gotta comment on our ability to ski competitively.

1) Only 90% of Australia is dry, arid and barren. The rest is almost liveable. But always with a propensity to be short of rainfall.
2) We do have good skiing fields attracting masses of people in season - for about 3 months. Unlike Canada which reverses the scenario. And our snow is only 10 feet deep (as opposed to 30). But how much do you need? Ditto have some excellent ice skating venues - skating being a hobby of my 15 year old daughter. Who also plays hockey, but we have rarely managed to combine the two. One day, one day. Snow in the Blue Mountains is about as common as an honest politician and makes National headlines on about the same regularity.
3) Heating ain't such a big issue. Maximum South latitude 45o. Vancouver about 50 North. Where I live in Brisbane (approx 27o South) temps rarely fall below 5 degrees. Max. in summer around 30 - 33 and everyone retreats into air conditioning. Cars, houses, offices, shopping centres. If it isn't air conditioned - don't go there. And I never wear shorts and a loose-fitting T-shirt (except behind closed doors, with the air conditioning burbling happily in the background). Ditto, have never owned or ridden a surfboard. Sharks a big deterrent.
4) At least when we go fishing, we don't have to dynamite a hole in the ice to do so. And that's all year round.

Regards (tongue a leedle in cheek),
Peter Hodges.

PS. C-ya when my 13 year old son is on the podium with the winning Australian team at the World Ice Hockey Championships. Competitive spirit and dreamin' the impossible (?) will do it.

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Hi Chandra.

Goodness me - seems you might be falling into a bit of an abyss of ignorance (could it be abyssmal perhaps?) - at least when it comes to the Australian snow and our high country. I believe that our skiable regions are larger than those claimed by Switzerland. And the Kosciusko region is quite beautiful to boot - sans the sand.

Falls Creek, Charlotte's Pass, Mt Hotham, Perisher Valley, Blue Cow (holy cow no Batman or Batwoman), Smiggins, Guthega, Tumut, the Snowy Mountains in general) - and I know I have missed a lot of the other names - suffice to say there is more snow abounding in Australia than even the strongest Canadian can shovel in a day.

Oh, by the way, "our" gold medal was won by - would you believe - someone who was born in Canada - but liked the way the Aussies just got on and did things.

By the other way, Australian skiing is great for alpine stuff, cross country and so on. But when it comes to down hill - we go "across the ditch" to our neighbourly Kiwis and enjoy Queenstown, Ruapau, Mount Hutt, and so on - especially helicopter skiing.

Cheers,

Paul Dillon
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Chandra,

Yup, might be stoopid, but they can prolly afford to do it. There's an arena in Saudi Arabia and I think one in Japan too. After all they don't spend billions or trillions on war machines, weapons, and wars, and that's just a start. They mind their own business and don't get in others. Seems that's why our forefathers came here to create this nation if I'm not mistaken.

Steven


AND YOU THOUGHT I WAS KIDDING:

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