Have a wonderful holiday weekend. There's jack to blog about out there, which isn't a terribly bad thing, what with the public pools now open and the weather so nice.

By the way, Caitlin Flanagan gets pinned down on the subject of men by Jeffrey Toobin in a radio interview on WNYC. (Thanks Greg!). Here is my rough transcript of part of this:

[Toobin brings up] the relative absence of men in the discussion, particularly at home ... especially men taking equal responsibility for some of the issues we're talking about: child raising, home making. That doesn't seem to figure in your take.

[Flanagan, saying that tasks aren't split as equally as some men believe] If you get the mother alone, she says, 'I'm the one who feels like I'm doing the lion's share of all this.' A lot of women feel for lots of complicated reason that no matter how equally they're sharing the work of the household and particularly the work of the children that the hardest past of it or the most essential part of them is still falling on them.

[Toobin] Is that immutable?

[Flanagan] I think women do have an interest in issues of housekeeping and homemaking ... they have an emotional investment in homemaking and housekeeping that most men don't have.

[Toobin] Should we give up on them, then?

[Flanagan] I think men are really willing to help out around the house. I think that's really being solved. I don't think we'll ever get them to be really womenly about that. ... There will already be a little tension.

It's hard to argue that some men -- even those in more egalitarian relationship -- are probably not doing as good a job of pulling their weight as they could be. But Flanagan seems to either a) miss the point or b) ignore the fact that men are doing more than ever before. And a quickly growing minority of us are doing a *lot* more around the house. In short, gender roles aren't immutable, and they're less stiff than ever before.

Flanagan seems to believe differently, and that's what continues to chafe. Near the end of the interview, she lets loose with this, about kids: "They're a part of our hearts and conscience's in a way they're not a part of men's hearts or consciousness." That may be right in some cases, but I hate to see it stuck out there as an iron law of nature.

Finally, let me put out my own iron law out there: no one has an emotional investment in housework. A clean house, maybe, but not the act of housecleaning. That's the real myth. Break out your copy of Free to be You and Me and follow along with me:

"Your mommy hates housework,
Your daddy hates housework,
I hate housework too.
And when you grow up, so will you."