Grease and Dirt - Statements against Whitewashing Gender Distinctions?

Kitchen-Wars

Between the grease smudges on every available surface in the kitchen, the onion peal scattered over the tiled floor and the dried toothpaste in the bathroom sink, the mold growing in the shower - the new year seems to be off to a good start - "the same procedure as last year!". Still, despite the distrinct odour of rotting tomatoes in the fridge, there is a sense of continuity and tradition in the air, the air that is perfumed by stench of absolute incompetance and willful ignorance.
Cleaning out the pigsty should actually be a relatively managable task, between the three remaining tenants. However the two rather self-agrandized male flatmates, look at the dirt and grease and think it part of the decor: no cold shudder of distgust running down their backs! It's the post-modern Student Architectual Digest that had elevated the stains to a revolutionary new form of protest against whitwashing gender-distinctions, it's art.
Here a man is still a man, does manly things, such as starting to cook Spaghetti and meatballs at midnight, watching football matches and their re-runs, their analysis and the press-conferences, serenading disharmoniously at seven in the morning, leaving the loo without washing hands - apparently, so I was told, it adds seasoning to the chicken wings. And these two, ladies and gentleman, are future lawers and economists. The one is going to save India from itself, and the other will make a "shit-load of money".
Is this the future? An new gendered utopian empire of freedom and prosperity, grown from between the dirt and sludge in the trenches of gender warfare in the 21st century. It seems quite obvious that "housework" is still considered a woman's task. Of course, that stereotype is exploited and fostered to the extreme it seems in student housing - "if you want it clean, do it yourself" is the name of the game. The the lawyer-to-be helpfully commented: "Without you this flat would look like sty!" And it was indeed nice of him to notice. When he asked, if he should clean his room every month, it became quite obvious, he has never had to clean anything in his entire life. "At home my mother does it", he coninued. At the same time he quite insists in his understanding  "women are so much better than men" - do they need protectiong from the big bad world? Do they need to be kept at home, sheltered because on buses, in the streets etc they will be raped and beaten to death? Naturally his inability to keep the kitchen, bathroom or solarium clean has nothing to do with his seemingly natural patriarchal instinct, a quasi hypertrophic masculinity that is part of his culture or even the numerous biblical allusions that are scattered throughout his discourse.
Women are better - because they bare it? Anyway it is impossible to understand how the kitchen could actually look like a battlefield of gender steretypes?
Granted by now only hospital-grade sanitizer would do the job, but that is beside the point.  Apparently Germany has reached gender equality, that is what the media is propagating. We have Mrs Merkel, she is the most influencial women on this globe. If you dare to take a look at the gender-gab report from 2013, Gemany lost quite some ground to countries like Nicaragua or the Phillipines. While in 2012 we somehow managed keep a bad rank 13, now we are one down, directly followed by Cuba, Lesoto and South Africa. Germany is not among those 86 countries that managed to improve their "global gender gap". Germany my be the highest placed country (out of 136) among the G20, largely thankts to Mrs. Merkel, but how many more women are now members of the board of directors, how many women go on to univesity after getting better marks in their A-levels, how many of them get the chance to become professors, how many women are still paid considerably less than their male collegues for the same kind and amount of work?
The new year has started, and the mess in the kitchen is the same. Germay - in terms of gender equality has dropped in the global ranking and with a natrualness, born from a new masculine self-undestanding, grease and dirt have become the weapons in an age-old domestic war of gender perception. After all housework is not a male domain.




Gender Gap Report
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2013.pdf