Choreplay: Housework gets sexy?By Michele Hoos
A new 2009 “Porn for Women” calendar features a broad-shouldered man with biceps and chiseled abs. Staring seductively into the camera, he wields a prominent, but unlikely, tool.
He’s vacuuming.
The calendar is based on “Porn for Women,” a book featuring hunky guys doing housework that has sold 140,000 copies in less than a year. The caption reads, “I love a clean house.”
For some women, the husband skilled in dusting and diapering has become the husband who knows good “choreplay,” defined in urbandictionary.com as “when a woman is turned on by the sight of her husband/boyfriend/partner doing regular household chores that she would normally be doing.”
For other women, insinuating that spring cleaning is as sexy as spring fever reinforces outdated gender stereotypes.
Most of the scenarios in the Porn for Women series “are based on what lovely men in our lives have done for us,” said Heather Peterson, “spokes-pornographer” for the tongue-in-cheek Cambridge Women’s Pornography Collective, which created the book. “We all know what porn for men is, but this is our version of porn for women.”
Other images in “Porn for Women” include smiling men donning rubber dishwashing gloves or loading the laundry before “taking the kids … so you can relax.”
“Calling this porn for women underscores the idea that once women settle down sexual satisfaction comes from seeing their husbands occasionally vacuum,” said Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch Magazine.
“I guess ‘choreplay’ is cute, but there’s a real issue here: we’re still in a situation where men in heterosexual relationships only do a slightly higher percentage of chores than they did in the 70s and 80s,” Zeisler said.
While male partners who scrub toilets are certainly in the minority, studies show that men who take on household tasks may reap the benefits of “choreplay.”
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