"Domestic" Politics

After I graduated from college and left my dorm room, I moved back in with my parents for a while. At the end of next week, I'll finally get to move into an apartment of my very own. Well, almost my very own: I'll be sharing it with a good friend. This good friend happens to be male, and ever since we have shared our plans to move in together with our friends and family, we have been subjected to a never-ending stream of jokes and assumptions regarding our gender roles.

My parents have expressed happiness at my having a 'man in the house': Apparently, thanks to my roommate, there'll be no need for me to carry water bottles up to our 7th floor apartment, fix things that break around the house, put up pictures, put together my furniture after I move in, talk to the landlord about anything, ever, or worry about my safety.

It was the putting together of furniture, particularly, that got me. Two days ago, I bought a chest at Ikea that I plan to take with me. To make sure that everything was in order, I decided to assemble the chest right away. Over the course of the hour that it took me to screw together the pieces of a 3-drawer chest, several members of my family walked into the room to marvel at me wielding hammer and screwdriver. Even my grandfather, when hearing my hammering over the phone, expressed disbelief at hearing that his granddaughter was engaging in so manly a task.

And really? I've lived on my own for four years. I've lugged groceries from the bus stop to my dorm, I've fixed things that went bust and I've had productive conversations with the janitor. Oh, and my lanky, skinny, bookish roommate? Not going to be much help when it comes to defending me against a burglar.

But I'm not the only one who has to deal with gender role cliches. My roommate is experiencing them from the other side. According to his family and friends, he won't have to bother with aesthetics as I'll clearly be in charge of decorating the apartment, he'll never have to cook or clean anything in the house, and it will be a giant boost for his reputation that he's rooming with a 'hot chick'.

For the record, I won't be decorating any rooms past my own, and even then it's not likely to look like the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. I tend to value comfort and practicality over aesthetics. And while I am a perfectionist and a neat freak, my efforts will stop at the door to my friend's room. A maid, I am not. The one thing that's true is that I will do the cooking (though we've negotiated that he'll do the dishes), and that's because I love to cook and am good at it. Which is a passion I discovered only a couple of years ago - through my male partner, who's a chef. And when we're together? He does the cooking. While I'm the only person he'll allow in his kitchen while cooking, he gets antsy when I try to help and I tend to just leave him to do his thing. He's much better at it than I am, anyway.

All of these little prejudices and stereotypes seemed unconnected to me, until I started to view them all in context the other day. If you'd asked me before then, I never would have thought that anyone could apply the socially accepted norms of a heterosexual living arrangement to us. On our own, both my friend and I tend to be all over the map as far as gender stereotypes go, and while new acquaintances still always assume him to be gay, on the whole, people accept us for our quirky selves. So why, now that we're going to be living together, do people assume that we will naturally fall into our ascribed gender roles? And why do these assumptions seem so obvious to people that they never bother to question their validity and the extent to which they apply to any given individual situation?