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Point of View
Some cultural differences are just plain garbage
By Carl Heintze
Of late I've been speculating on the differences in culture. Well, actually my ruminating is not as deep as all that. I'm not an anthropologist like Margaret Mead, who spent some time checking out the sexual mores of South Sea islanders, or Hortense Powderman, who made a pioneering study of Hollywood's movie production culture.
But I have been thinking about how we middle-class Americans live.
There's a certain set of cultural mores we follow, some of which are easily explainable, some of which are not.
What's more, in our lifetime, or the lifetimes of a lot of us, anyway, there have been big cultural shifts.
The day was when most men couldn't boil water, they didn't know how to change diapers, and they wouldn't be caught dead doing housework.
My supposition is this all stems from the days of hunter-gatherer societies where the men went off chasing game and the wives stayed home tanning hides and minding the children.
In pioneer days this same division of duties took place. Men hitched up the wagons, went looking for game if there was any around; the women built fires, bore children, cooked, cleaned, sewed and darned and stayed home. Men might go off to the saloon to drink and play poker, but women didn't--at least not if they wanted to preserve a good name.
Well, of course, that's all changed. Many men are househusbands, they share household duties, they don't often go to bars alone and they get to sit in the delivery room when babies are born. Women are chief executive officers, police officers and firefighters, and before long one is likely to be president of the United States.
But there's one task which seems immutable, never to be surrendered by men or, perhaps putting it more fittingly, never to be taken up by women.
That's taking out the garbage.
For some reason, in middle-class society, removing the garbage from the kitchen to the garbage can is solely a male privilege. In equal measure, lining up the garbage for the garbageman also is only done by males.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and wondering why.
There's no real reason why women can't get the garbage from the kitchen to the garbage can. It's seldom very heavy, although it is messy and smelly. Even moving the garbage can from the backyard to the curb is not that heavy a task. These days most garbage cans have wheels. All that's necessary is that you grab a handle and roll the can to the curb.
After the garbageman empties it, it is easy to roll it back where it belongs in the backyard. But it's seldom that a female hand is placed on the garbage-can handle, and it is even more seldom that anyone but the male of the house carries the garbage "out."
Of course, sometimes the garbage gets emptied when it is dark outside, particularly in winter. Some wives claim fear of the dark. Or if not afraid of the dark, they develop a sudden night blindness, to wit, "I can't see anything out there."
Males presumably can see better in the dark, or at least as far as the garbage can and back.
Beyond all these reasons, real or imagined, are, it seems to me, even deeper cultural differences between men and women. Women do not really appreciate garbage, a sentiment that is, of course, shared by some men. Presumably, however, they believe that garbage is something like cleaning game must have been. It was a male responsibility. If you didn't clean game right away, it tended to spoil or taste terrible. Men cleaned the game they brought home, even if they turned it over to their wives to cook.
So perhaps women, clinging to that cultural tie, think men really do like to empty the garbage. It equates with being sure the food their wives are going to prepare is going to taste good.
There is one other reason that I have not mentioned. I bring it up only as an outside possibility. It may be that women just don't like to take out the garbage. Thus believing, they have come to the clever conclusion that if men don't empty the garbage, it just isn't going to get emptied. This, as I say, is only a very remote possibility.
I can't believe any woman would simply tell her husband to empty the garbage because she didn't want to do it herself.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
