Microscoping the microaggression

Who're you calling 'nurse'??

There are certain findings that make the rounds, as if new, on a regular basis. Single moms actually do less housework than moms married to men, men who are not so much men as man-shaped piles of dirty socks. So, too, the thing where no matter what they say, and indeed no matter how high inflation goes, men want wives who earn less than they do. There have been studies. It is known.

Venessa Wong’s Buzzfeed story about these mixed-income households is therefore not so much providing startling new information as putting a human face—several, really—on a known phenomenon. (“One study showed that “‘the more economically dependent that men are on their wives, the less housework they do.’” And so on.) A phenomenon that anecdotally baffles me, but, again, the studies.