Spain: Male housework made law

[LostInSpace]

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SPANISH men will be required to scrub toilets and change nappies as often as their harried wives under revolutionary reforms aimed at shattering the traditionally macho Latin nation's patriarchal division of labour in the home.

Changes to the marriage contract supported by the Socialist Government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, along with conservative Catholic and right-wing politicians, will force men and women to promise not only fidelity but equal shares of housewor, childrearing and care of the elderly until death they do part.

As Australia grapples with Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward's report calling on men to do their fair share of household chores, Spain has used the force of law to propel lazy husbands off their couches and marital beds and into the historically female territory of the kitchen, bathroom and nursery.

The historically socially conservative Catholic country dominated by a male hierarchy is undergoing a delayed social revolution, evidenced by yesterday's decision by Spain's parliament to legalise gay marriage.

Yet despite the prescriptive nature of the new gender laws - due to pass the Spanish Senate this week - there is no means of enforcing equal sharing of unpaid work in the home in a nation where many mothers still regularly do their adult sons' washing and young girlfriends automatically prepare their partners' meals.

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The Spanish MP who championed the reform, the Basque Nationalist Party's Margaret Uria, said it was fundamentally a symbolic gesture that nonetheless "sends a message" to Spanish men who are notoriously allergic to household chores.

The reforms were something "feminists have been wanting for a long time" because the "idea of equality within marriage always stumbles over the problem of work in the house and caring for dependent people".

"We Spanish women are too clean, and we aren't good enough at moaning," Ms Uria said. She said that despite the focus on Spanish women's onerous housework burden the new laws were directed at men who foisted the responsibility of care for their elderly parents on their wives.

While Spain's women daily perform at least six hours of housework, men clock up only 44 minutes - plus 51 minutes of childcare to their spouses' daily average of six hours.

Four in 10 Spanish men do no housework at all, surveys show, and more than 30 per cent believe women should not work outside the family home. Under the new law men and women will pledge to "share domestic responsibilities and the care and attention" of young children and ageing relatives.

The new egalitarian domestic regime could dramatically alter the state of divorce in Spain, because judges will now consider men's commitment to this pledge when ruling on separations and access to children.

Attempts to blast Spanish males out of their cosy reliance on women as girlfriends, wives, chefs, cleaners, childcarers and custodians of the elderly include technological changes to household appliances.

The latest washing machine, named "Your Turn", prevents the same person - typically a wife and mother - from using the appliance consecutively by adopting fingerprint recognition technology.

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You gotta laugh at the technology part. What if the husband is at work and the wife needs to do multiple washes. You just gotta love socialist governments.

[LostInSpace]

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Originally posted by nomad:

The spanish socialist government has no link with the designer (yes, it's a designer) who conceived this machine. Additionally, you can't find it anywhere in Spain. So it was more a smart PR operation than anything else

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I know, but you still gotta laugh at the idea of the machine. I'm gunna look into this machine to see who was the developer of it. As for the law bit, you are correct it is just PR since it's been agreed that there is no way to enforce it. It's going to take a complete social behavior shift and not a law that will reverse this issue.

[Guest]

The thought of a law like this, should scare ANYONE...

When a government feels that it can even CREATE such a law, then the government has become insane, no matter how unenforceable it is.

Socialism and feel good BS, yeah, it makes them feel good to make such a law, even if it means and does nothing, but they do it anyway, because they are the "GOVERNMENT".

I'd love to compare this to the US government, but I can't, because the US government and state governments do stupid crap like this as well.

The governments need to stay out of it, it is NONE of their business, and a law that is not enforceable, is a stupid law, and should NEVER have been thought up, let alone passed.

[LostInSpace]

Well I found out a little bit about the designer: Pep Torres created the device - dubbed "Your Turn" - when he was asked to a design a Fathers' Day gift.

This was all I could gather on this guy. I was thinking it was probably a women who made it.

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He said: "The only way to override the system is to crawl around the back of the machine, unplug the sensor, take it back to the home computer and re-programme it - not that easy."

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