Chances are that the thought of housework - you know: ironing, dishwashing, laundry folding, vacuuming, and window-cleaning - does not turn you on. But what if you think about someone else doing it? Now what if that someone else you are picturing is not a wonderfully chipper Mary Poppins-esque character but, instead, your husband. Does that turn you on?
If so, you're not alone. According to CNN, one expert says:
A more equitable division of household duties may lead to more intimacy in the bedroom.
"When a man does housework, it feels to the woman like an expression of caring and concern, which then physically reduces her stress," says Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework.
"A guy can be completely stressed out and want to have sex to burn it off, but women are not wired like that," says Coleman, who is also a member of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research organization. Instead, he says, women need to feel relaxed in order to feel sexy -- and it's hard to unwind when there are chores to be done and a husband who's oblivious to them.
And there's even more good news! According to the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research:
Men are doing more than they used to...For example, in 1976, men did about six hours of housework per week; in 2005, that had increased to about 13 hours. Women, meanwhile, decreased their weekly housework from 26 hours in 1976 to 17 hours in 2005. Researchers based their conclusions on economic, health and social data collected on 8,000 American families since 1968.
So is everybody getting more nooky nowadays? Well, not quite. The problem is that "men create, on average, seven more hours of housework a week for women," so while they're helping out, they're still only doing about "30 percent of the housework, according to a report released in March by the Council on Contemporary Families."
The bottom line? The more egalitarian the housework is, the more happy everyone will be in the bedroom.
Read the rest of the article here, including 4 ways to get the menfolk to pull their own weight around the house.
What do you think? How evenly do you share the work? Does watching your man vacuum get you all hot and bothered? And for the men out there, is there anything sexier (or perhaps decidedly unsexy) about watching a woman wash your dinner plate? Tell us below!