On "Choreplay"

She gets: clean floors. He gets: to clap cheeks

Heads up before we get into it: I gained a bunch of new subscribers this week because of my study on women’s fashion and how it appeals to different genders. Since I’m sure some of you joined just to see the results of that study, I wanted to let you know that I do this kind of thing all the time, and you should stick around, because I’m doing another one on men’s fashion, as well as an updated one on women’s fashion—both of which will remedy the issues with the first female fashion survey (namely, not accounting for bisexuals, not enough outfits, not enough 2025 outfits, and an unconscious bias toward lots of pink and crop tops.) So I hope you stick around, for all of those things but also the 5+ weekly articles on lots of topics, from relationships, to sex, to fashion, to mental health, to parenting, to…an interview with Will Stancil?

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Apparently, most heterosexual marriages share a particular dynamic—she wants more chores done, he wants more sex. And apparently, there’s one secret trick to getting your wife to fuck you more often: doing the dishes!

A sociological study of 700 women (a smaller sample size than most of my surveys, by the way) determined that women are more likely to want sex with their partners if they share the burden of household work. In 2018, GQ told men that the “hottest thing they could do” in their relationship was to do the dishes. Sheryl Sandberg also insists that the best way to get laid is by doing chores around the house (if you’re a man, that is.)

All of this aligns nicely with the current zeitgeist, when (at least if you’re a married mom) you can’t open Instagram without being reminded of all the thankless “invisible labor” you do, and how any husband—no matter what he does for a living or how hard he works—is doing less than you are. Lazy and unappreciative husbands obviously exist, but I can’t help but feel that there’s some degree of social contagion going on. Constant reminders that all women are living as thankless Edwardian scullery maids help activate a seductive narrative for anyone regardless of gender, which is that we are the perpetual victims of our lives.

This is ageist.

So what’s an overworked, tired, and (perhaps rightfully) frustrated woman to do? Perhaps buy into the idea that if only her husband helped more around the house, she’d want to have sex with him. Maybe make that apparent to the husband, too. Because if there’s one language men understand, it’s sex. This is something on which both women who hate men and men who hate women seem to agree. The latter believes, somehow, that men are the only ones qualified to hold positions of power or vote, and yet, they’re nothing more than simple-minded creatures who will do anything if touching a boob is part of the deal. So you’d think this narrative—that helping your wife will make her want to fuck you—is the perfect solution, even if it’s not entirely true. The women get what they want (shared burden of labor) and the men get what they want (coochie.)

Just one problem—if you don’t want to have sex with your husband, the chores aren’t why. Perhaps the laziness and the lack of sex are both symptoms of a bigger problem, but fixing one in a vacuum is unlikely to fix the other. And by insisting that these two things are linked, we are doing something pretty egregious: attempting to create Nice Guy Husbands, scrubbing a plate between fedora tips, with the hopes of acquiring a crumb of ass.