The Gender Gap in Environmental Practices

Women tend to be tidier than men, at least the women in my life--mother, girlfriend, wife--have all been able to see dirt before I do, feel disgust before I do, and act to clean up before I do.  Not to say I'm a slob, not anymore at least.  Growing up with all brothers started me off deficient in hygiene (among other deficiencies), which I've worked to mitigate with the more or less constant, um, encouragement of mother, girlfriend, wife. This gendered relation to hygiene is certainly far from universal.  Indeed, my daughters tend to take after dear old dad in this regard; as one daughter famously articulated the problem when she was three and facing the task of cleaning her room: "It's so uneasy for me."  Nevertheless, I don't believe I'm wrong to say that women are tidier than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

Normally I'm inclined to defend my relative slovenliness--cautiously, in very limited contexts.  For example, order for the sake of obsessive orderliness is certainly unhealthy to individual minds and interpersonal relationships.  Plus I think that science will prove, if it hasn't already, that exposure to pathogens is healthy for the immune system and thus longterm health.  Why else would kids eat a peck of dirt?  In short, I argue, cautiously and in limited contexts, cleanliness is not always next to godliness.

I am, thus, abashed to consider the issue of gendered relations to hygiene in the face of environmental issues that are essentially issues of housekeeping, such as recycling, pollution, conservation of resources, which is to say, those issues that individuals typically can control.  This occasion to think about gendered environmentalism came from my students.  I asked a class this summer to do little research projects focused on environmental behavior.  Among many interesting projects and results, several student projects found clear correlations to gender.

• One student counted the number of people at a grocery store using canvas or other re-usable shopping bags.  She discovered to her surprise that the overwhelming majority of them were women.  She even interviewed a male friend who insisted that carrying recyclable bags cramped his style, which involved hitting on women in grocery stores.
• Another student found that his fraternity not only recycled nothing, but a survey of his housemates revealed they had zero interest in changing their behavior.  Apparently, they had enough trouble getting all the trash into the dumpster every once in a while.
• Another studied the amount of water usage.  He hypothesized that women used more than men--they're cleaner after all, longer showers, more washing dishes and floors, etc.  The subjects of his survey, evenly split between male and female, agreed with his hypothesis, as did the entire class when he asked them--mostly women--at the beginning of his oral presentation.  In fact he discovered that, despite the universal belief that women used more water, actual usage, as measured by water bills, showed that men used more water; indeed, the lowest man's bill was higher than any of the women's. (One women in the class suggested that this unexpected result might point to the fact that women more often sleep at their boyfriends' place than the reverse.)

Abashed, but also intrigued, I did a quick search for publications in the area of gender and environmental behavior and found exactly one.  A Canadian study of people actively committed to cleaning up the environment found that, even in this group, women were more apt to participate in environmental organizations and more apt to perform environmental acts in their personal life--recycle, compost waste, use alternative transportation.  While more research is clearly needed, I suspect it will overwhelmingly confirm the inevitable:  Women are better environmentalists than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

These days, the maternal superego originates with Mother Nature.

The Outdoor Room

We love our outdoor room, to hang out, to eat, to use as the main entrance to the house.  Even now when it's getting California cool, the room beckons us into the air, encouraging us to be hale and hardy at home.  Plus Robin's touch looks great, no?

Soapbox brow

George's blog features an epigraph extolling the combination of high and low brow cultures to the exclusion of middle brow.  I tend to agree.  I'll happily leave the middle brow to, for example, the Average Man 's proud tv-holic obsession with quality programming. 

Yet it may be I enjoy higher highs and lower lows than George.  To his low brow tendency toward esoteric punk, for example, not at all in itself a bad tendency, I prefer something more on the lines of this bar band called Soapbox I rocked to recently on my trip to Florida, whose broad appeal may not sink quite so low as tractor pulls, but defintely pleases the same impulse.

First, you have to imagine the band much later in the Bud Light night than in the (deilightfully homemade) clip below, at the point when the lead dude with his raspy silk voice and beer belly screams Hank Williams Junior's questions to the crowd, which the crowd lustily answers:

Why do you drink? To get drunk.
Why do you roll smoke? To get high.
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote? To get laid.

Second you have to realize that this band has a pretty boy fronting a couple of ridden-hard and put-away-wet female musicians fully looking the part of rockers who stay up late and party hardy, biker chicks who've chosen to ride their own electric guitars, and do it as well as the next good ol' boy.  They covered everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Nirvanna to The Beatles and The Stones to Van Morrison and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, as well as, of course, Lynard Skynard and Marshall Tucker. 

I felt I got a taste of Southern fun.  Along with everyone else (except my mother, who got a little too much fun), I had a blast.





I'll leave my argument for higher cultural highs for another post.

The Park

To commemorate signing the lease for another two years at our place in Sycamore Canyon, I'm posting (with the enabling assistance of my first digital camera) a series of pictures, especially as an enticement for those friends and family who have not yet visited.  The first series is of the most distintive part of the spread, the party part:  The Park (as dubbed by the friends who moved us in, though we found out the previous residents also called it The Park), which is accross Coyote Creek from the rest of the property.

Agribusiness and the Obama health plan

Michael Pollan wrote in the NYT about the "elephant in the room" of the health care debate:  American obesity, which is the prime driver of higher health care costs.  He sees the uncontested provision in the Obama health care plan that insurance companies will no longer be able to exclude sick people from coverage as the beginning of the end of agribusiness as we know it.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

I like not only his unimpeachable insight into the food industry but also his political savvy.  He understands how corporate money runs this country--and how laws might be manipulated to get the money on the good side.

The Clarity of Robert Reich

Most everyone I know has been disheartened--make that sickened--by the healthcare debate.  Robert Reich explains why in The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care .

Big Table Designs

Check out the blog for my furniture: Big Table Designs.