The problem with Fair Play, and other systems for gaining household equality
But have you tried equality? And have you tried trying?
A year ago, I wrote about Fair Play, the supposedly groundbreaking book on household labor inequity, and how to achieve balance. In the intervening time, I’ve talked to hundreds of women about their experiences with the book, and I have yet to find anyone who has achieved full equity with it. I’ve even had a few journalists writing about the book contact me to see if I can connect them to someone who has seen radical improvements with the book.
And we keep coming up empty-handed.
Yet Fair Play has become its own profitable industry, with highly paid consultants, loads of partnerships, a documentary, and tons of commercial appeal. I can’t post anything about household labor inequality without someone telling me I need to read Fair Play to solve it all.
Isn’t it interesting how much time and money have gone into backing a system that is not working for the majority of women who try it? And isn’t it interesting how this system continues to be lauded as a revolutionary game changer in spite of that reality?
Fair Play has joined couples counseling as the thing men turn to when they want to appear to be doing something, without having to actually put in the work of equity. It’s a distraction, a way to buy more time, a way to create the appearance of progress while getting credit for tiny, inconsequential behavioral changes.
This isn’t a slam on Eve Rodsky. Her work is a valuable contribution to the project of labor equality. The first half of the book gets everything exactly right. She painstakingly documents how we devalue women’s time (and therefore their lives).
Her error is in framing the husbands she writes about as fundamentally good guys. Because wrapped up in that idea is the notion that men are just too stupid to know very basic facts about running a household and managing not to kill or neglect children or pets. And that’s just not the case. Men are raised with a sense of entitlement, and unless they work on that conditioning, they feel entitled to women’s time and labor.
These are not good guys, and they’re not stupid. Nice guys don’t steal their partners’ time and labor.
The men Rodsky writes about are men who want more free time than they give their partners, and they don’t care how much that hurts the women they claim to love. Inequity is not an accident. It’s a tool of the patriarchy. And when the patriarchy is threatened it lashes out. So too do the men upholding it. Maybe that’s why I’ve heard from so many women whose marriages imploded or turned violent when they began demanding equity. Fair Play has no solution for this reality—and doesn’t even consider its existence.
Instead, the philosophy of the book seems to be, “But have you tried equity? Try equity! Men will embrace it as soon as you tell them about it! Have you tried trying?” My own research shows that women talk to their partners about labor inequality an average of 27 times a year. Talking isn’t working, because men do not want it to. Patriarchal men do not want equality; and in an unequal marriage, the odds are very high that inequality exists because that is what he wants.
This is the ultimate failure of the book. But let’s dive a little more deeply into why this, and other tools for equality, fall so miserably short—and how they often end up becoming tools of oppression by purchasing men more time and more excuses.