02.02- Do Men and Women Perceive Cleanliness differently?

Down and Dirty: Do Men and Women Perceive Cleanliness Differently? 

2012 Gregory McNamee December 5, 2012

Anyone who is fastidious about washing hands, avoiding grime, and keeping a neat immediate environment would probably want to keep a safe distance from my office, which is a chaos of slopped coffee, teetering piles of books and papers, dust, and assorted flotsam and jetsam.

I now have a defense for this studied disorder: namely, my chromosome count.

In a study published in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Arizona examined 450 samples of bacteria taken from offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Tucson. These bacteriaand forgive the ickinesscame mostly from the skin, nose and mouth, and the digestive tract, and they were found mostly on chairs and telephones, with lower concentrations on computer keyboards and mice and on [physical] desktops.

The researchers’ findings were various, but one of them was this: In the workspaces of men, the bacteria count was significantly higher than in those of women. The implications are immediately obvious: Men are, well, just not as tidy as women. Remarks an authority cited in the study, “Humans move through a sea of microbial life that is seldom perceived except in the context of potential disease and decay.” If that is so, then men, it would appear, are enthusiastic body surfers while women barely dip their toes into the mess.

It is dangerous, always, to generalize on grounds of gender and sex. Yet there does appear to be significant variation between men and women in some categories of perception; reports a recent paper in the suggestively titled journal Biology of Sex Differences, women are superior to men in discriminating among fine distinctions of color, while males are better able to discern details in any given viewscape from a distance. This finding supports the so-called hunter-gatherer hypothesis, which proposes that certain biological adaptations occurred as a result of different divided-labor roles in human prehistory. Since men were better at spotting things from afar, they hunted, and since women were better at distinguishing colors, they chose which mushrooms to eatthey gathered, in other words, and apparently they developed the ability to discern dirt where men could not.

It seems to me, of course, that it is possible that those biological differences preceded the roles, that function followed form. But no matter: I’m busily scanning the horizon for gazelles, and therefore I can be forgiven for the chaos immediately before me.

The world is a dirty place, then, even if men don’t seem to know it. But let’s let dear Jane Austen have the last word on the matter. In this scene from her 1815 novel Emma, our heroine has been brought into a roomcall it a Georgian man cavein which women rarely tread, much to their horror:

“Emma,” said she, “. . . Look! in places you see it is dreadfully dirty; and the wainscot is more yellow and forlorn than any thing I could have imagined.”

“My dear, you are too particular,” said her husband. “What does all that signify? You will see nothing of it by candlelight. It will be as clean as Randalls by candlelight. We [men] never see any thing of it on our club-nights.”

The ladies here probably exchanged looks which meant, “Men never know when things are dirty or not” and the gentlemen perhaps thought each to himself, “Women will have their little nonsenses and needless cares.”

On second thought, maybe I’d better take some bleach to this keyboard and chair after all.