Part of the women-are-wonderful indoctrination we get exposed to in education and at your typical office job is that men are slobs whereas women have an inborn inclination towards order. Women supposedly love keeping the house clean. Everything just looks nice and presentable with the mysterious female touch. Basically any woman’s house or apartment looks as if it could be featured in a magazine on interior design. In contrast, guys do not care about interior design at all and are fine with cardboard boxes full of unused things piling up in the garage.
Reality is a bit different, though. The messiest places I have ever seen were by women. I once had a female flatmate whose floor was covered in clothes. You could not even see the worn out parquet underneath. The apartment was pretty worn down, and thus cheap, so her trashiness fit right in. This woman also routinely threw out food because it had grown moldy. I limited my interactions with her to the bare minimum, but this nonetheless made me feel disgust whenever I came across her. Yet, if you were among the men who met her and did not end up banging her at her place, your perception would be completely off as she spent considerable time on her hair, makeup, clothes, and jewelry.
A few years later I dated a woman whose entire family was into interior design. Well, the mother was, and as she was making all important decisions. Her husband was one of the saddest specimen of a man I have ever met. She had plenty of time on her hands because her kids were all adults and she did not work, so she meddled in all their affairs. From her, I learned that decorative pillows are really important, and also that I should not pick up any of the magazines or thick books she so decoratively placed on the various coffee tables in the house because it will “ruin the composition”.
The daughter of this woman had a very appealingly furnished apartment, with a consistent “theme” in all 1.5 rooms, and carefully chosen colors. Everything was tidy, but only on a surface level. There were several seemingly decorative boxes in the apartment, and if you opened one, you saw random assorted objects, seemingly collected without much thought. Every cupboard you opened you wanted to close again right away. Once I dared to peak into her wardrobe when she was in the bathroom. As I opened the wardrobe, clothes, pillows and blankets were about to fall out. I hastily pushed this crap back in and locked the wardrobe again. This was beyond ridiculous. On a more positive note, in hindsight I can only commend this woman for the seemingly novel idea of turning her apartment into a reflection of her inner life. She was a total basket case, but for a while she could keep up the act of being the perfect woman.
The last example I want to mention is the house I am currently renting. When I was viewing it, I was quite impressed how clean everything was, and how well the then-tenants were using the place. After I had moved in, and ended up taking a much closer look, my perception changed quite significantly. There were some corners in the house that probably have not been cleaned for years. In the shower there was significant calcium buildup and, most disgustingly, several of the pipes were clogged with the hairs of the female half of the previous tenants. On top, there is an air filtration system that likewise appeared to not been cleaned in years. It was quite disgusting.
Of course, I am not making the claim that all women are filthy. However, I have never met any guy who just superficially cleaned his place. There is a refreshing honesty about how guys furnish their place, if they furnish it much at all. What you see is what you get. With women, you need to look behind the facade. This is true on many levels: make up, fake personality, behavior, and so on. With them, what you (initially) see is never what you get.
As a practical piece of advice, if you want to consider dating a woman who seems to put on a big show for you, pay attention to what is really going on. Does she really know how to keep the house tidy or does she simply hide all the messiness and dirt? Chances are that the latter is the case. In particular, moldy food in the fridge is a red flag because this shows that you are dealing with a woman who does not plan ahead, and who furthermore has low hygiene standards. If she throws out food only after it has grown mold, I think you are dealing with a woman who can barely take care of herself. You will learn that she has problems in many other parts of her life as well, such as forgetting to pay her bills or avoiding chores and errands.
Sometimes, what you not see is just as important. Once I met a woman who had a seemingly very clean apartment. Yet, I could not see any storage system for dirty laundry. Imagine my surprise when she told me that she puts worn clothes back into the wardrobe, mixed with her clean clothes! Dirty socks and panties she kept in a drawer. This was so absurd that I at first thought that she was joking. She was not, and women with similarly questionable hygiene standards are not nearly as uncommon as you may think.
As an appendix, I would like to add that “slut” originally was a derogatory term for women who could could not keep things in order. Amusingly, this is mirrored in the German equivalent, “Schlampe”. In that language, this connection is not entirely lost because the adjective “schlampig” can also mean “disorderly” or “sloppy”. As an exercise to the reader, think about how a pejorative for “disorderly woman” could turn into a shorthand for “promiscuous woman”.
Aaron,
Aside from having a messy house plenty of women also have messy cars with too many mechanical issues. It appears that women being messy might be a generational thing with Millennials and Gen Z. My grandparents and my parents always kept their house tidy. I’ve also met quite a few women who would not change their underwear, did not keep up with their health and would get yeast infections, their drainage system at their place would always get clogged because of their hair. A woman can be expensive once she moves into your place.
You can add to the list that they do not take care of their phones or laptops either. I think only a minority of kids get raised to take care of their belongings.
Thanks for mentioning yeast infections. I just recalled a woman who constantly suffered from those. At first I wondered if this was a sign of her having serious health issues, but she was just a filthy slut, in the old sense of the word.
yeah these bitches aren’t even good at cooking and cleaning which are the things they are supposed to be good at, they are only useful for breeding and as sex toys aint i right boys ?
This is a kind of red pill that I swallowed early on without any external help, after: 1) Noticing that my female siblings’ hygiene levels were less than extraordinary compared to their male counterparts; 2) that in my co-ed high school, where mild vandalism was rampant and severe damage to school property wasn’t unheard of, the single most disgusting incident I know of was inside a woman’s toilet as related to us by a female teacher; and 3) in my co-ed university dorm, where everyone had to take turns in the bathroom-cleaning schedule, again the most disgusting stuff happened in the female bathroom, with some girl telling us about a spectacle of used tampons on the floor *outside* the toilets.
Female tidiness has always been a myth. They do for the most part though have the cleaner-looking notebooks and/or handwriting, I’ll give them that.
I should clarify, when I said that my high school had rampant mild vandalism, in my mind I conflated all the cases of actual vandalism AND petty theft: not every day started with new damaged stuff or defiled walls (and even sacred symbols, since it was a Catholic school), but together with frequent cases of students stealing one another, I’d call it rampant delinquency in general. Everyone blamed to male population, but now I wonder how often girls dabbled in that as well.
It does not strain the imagination in the slightest to assume that girls engage in petty theft and vandalism, while putting up the facade of being “good girls”. I can vividly imagine such a girl defacing the school hallway, only to soon afterwards wish any teacher she sees a beautiful morning.
I have met women who stole habitually. I even once knew an outlier on the borderline spectrum who had a big cardboard box of stolen items at home which she neither needed nor used. It mostly contained books and CDs as well as cosmetics — garish makeup, which was not her style. I accidentally came across this box in her apartment and asked her what this was. She told me that this was “nothing” and hastily shoved the box back into the shelf it was on. I later on had a closer look and saw that she had torn out RFID tags from library books. With pocket books, she just tore off the back cover. There are apparently other methods for stealing, such as wrapping small items in aluminum foil, if I recall correctly.
Their clean-looking notebooks and legible handwriting are just another example. Furthermore, clean handwriting seems to go hand in hand with a vacuous mind. But someone who prioritizes appearance over substance would see little wrong with that.
>clean handwriting seems to go hand in hand with a vacuous mind. But someone who prioritizes appearance over substance would see little wrong with that.
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” – Einstein.
That being said,I do remember you tackling this very topic in your Meditation book and saying that it is a weakness worth addressing,if for nothing else than to be able to more easily find whatever it is you need on hand for whatever task you’re doing. No disagreements there on my part.
My own handwriting has never looked beautiful,but it is easily readable. (Unless you force me to write in cursive) and I think that’s really all that matters. Not once in my life has anyone ever complained about being unable to read what I wrote,but I have had multiple experiences with having trouble comprehending notes from my classmates.
I have entertained the thought of going out of my way to try and refine my handwriting,but its likely not worth the effort. Maybe for kids though,it might be a worthwhile thing to drill as it probably helps develop Kinesthetic awareness to some degree.
I thought Aaron would say just that re: female handwriting, and so I tried to convey a cheeky tone. Don’t know whether it came across as such.
I guess it makes sense. When I learned my cursives in early elementary school, I took it seriously enough to make it my everyday script but, come college time, the “getting things done” aspect trumps everything and I took some professor’s recommendation that in a professional setting, and as a courtesy to whoever might read you and have a few problems with your handwriting, that you should always use block letters and if possible, all-capitals. My handwriting sucks now compared to my own schooldays standard but at least I get no complaints by the people reading my logs for example. Some years ago, I had the idea of practicing my calligraphy as an aside to my work activities but I couldn’t really be bothered.
Re: female cleptomania, I could imagine the antics of Breaking Bad’s Marie Schrader are a more common occurrence than what most people think.
I’ve got to confess I’m guilty of having dabbled in shoplifting in my youth (very small-time: deodorants, mint packages and stuff like that, and not as mere compulsion but to save a few bucks from my allowance whenever I could), but that was way before I earned my first buck as a working person; I ended up being duly chastised (no legal action, thankfully). I hadn’t learned the value of money yet, and I found out that I’d never have entertained the tought if I had known what it was like to earn my own money, however small the amount. I guess some people never learn that into adulthood, and maybe a part-time job for your teenage son is a really good idea actually.