HAHA.  

My wife and I are both infectious diseases physicians.  It's fair to say she is more ambitious professionally than I am, and several times I have remarked that I'd be quite happy to sit out and be a stay-at-home dad while our 3 kids were young.  My wife put the kibosh on any such plans for the very reasons you cite.  

''I know what would happen,'' she says.  ''You'd sit home all day and goof around in the internet, and then an hour before I got home, you'd scramble to whip something up for dinner, and if I wanted the house as clean as I want it, I'd have to spend my evenings scrubbing the goddamn toilets.  No fucking way!  You can work for a living, thank-you-very-much, and if I want to work too, we'll hire a house cleaner.''

She knows me, she does.

aeromonas,

A close male acquaintance of mine does exactly that as a stay at home dad, next-to-nothing till the last minute; perfect call by your wife.

I'd be the first to cop to precisely the approach aeromonas suggests would characterize his homemaking.  Most men (there are exceptions, but they are a minority) I know would similarly plead.

In the interest of speculation, ask yourself what that means: "To get the house as clean as I want it...."  Whenever I had this discussion with my own lovely wife, the best she could do in going beyond the "I want it" is some argument about how she does all that extra (to my mind) attention to the house for the family's mutual benefit - even though she tacitly admits that the rest of us don't really value it.  Lack of clutter does not improve our quality of life.   Beyond a basic norm, neither does additional cleanliness (I'm civilized enough not to induce ptomaine or cholera through slovinliness).

So, does this mean that the housework gap with which we men are constantly assaulted by bright overachieving women working double shifts to keep the home spotless and smooth-running is really just  their needs that they're trying to transfer to others?  Would civilization really suffer if we all stood down a bit?

Somehow I doubt it.

I'm not a dot com millionaire, although I used to be a web programmer.  Now I am a stay at home dad with three kids who are in in school this time of year.  Fortunately, my wife's income is enough to keep the family going while I deal with the kids and the house, etc.   To get around the house cleaning issue, we hire a cleaner to come in once a week which means I don't have to deal with the 'bathroom inspections'.     Instead of dealing with the house on a micro level (cleaners deal with that), I deal with it on a macro level, like rebuild the front porch (current project).  I also do all the cooking, food shopping, clutter control, kid control, chauffeuring, financial management, systems and network engineering (three kids = lots of computers around the house),  as well as take care of all the errands that we used to try to do on the weekends so that we can do something fun as a family instead.  I also volunteer on a few committees at the school and in the city as well as help out with a few of the local clubs.  I guess my point is that I don't typically spend the whole day watching Jerry Springer and then run around the house cleaning five minutes before my wife gets home...

aeromonas, and the fact that someone's there for the kids, goof-off or not?  That doesn't seem to enter into the missus's calculus.  Not to sound pompous, but to me they're more important than housekeeping or professional ambition (not that these aren't important, too, just in the order of things).  I mean, stay home for the kids, unless, I guess, they're just a pretext.  No, even if they are, someone needs to be home for the kids.

Strictly regarding housekeeping, my personal experience is that most men have a higher tolerance for unclean than most women. There does come a point where the bathroom/kitchen/floors are too dirty for me, and that's the point at which I would clean and vacuum on my own. My wife also has a "trigger point" for cleaning. It's just that her tolerance is measured in days between cleanings, mine is measured in weeks.

Our compromise is this: since I'm the cook in the family, I keep the kitchen as clean as I want it (which is actually pretty clean by typical male standards), and she cleans the perfectly clean bathroom whenever she likes. We're pretty in sync about sweeping and vacuuming, so that's the neutral zone where we pitch in about equally. We spend roughly equal time on chores with no nagging, and we're always ready for company.

The only flaw in this plan is that she travels for work more than I do, and apparently I turn our house into a filthy bachelor pad pretty quickly in her absence.

Thank you Wyllie, for describing my day almost to a T.  And thank you Jim Rice for that acknowledgment.  I don't judge parents who both work, but it's nice to see someone out there gets it.  

Friends, keep in mind that any discussion of a solitary male's living conditions must bear in mind the age of said male.

I'm in grandfather territory now, and have witnessed the following, (a) my senses (e.g. sight, smell) have deteriorated; (b) the volume of hair sprouting from and falling out of various parts of my body has increased exponentially; (c) things leak; (d) the batteries in my give-a-shit-o-meter burned out above 20 years ago; and (e) I am now secure in the knowledge that even a crib out of Architectural Digest won't help me get laid unless I have a fistful of twenties to put on the nightstand.

All of the above combine to turn wherever I live into a Perfect Storm of Yuck. Imagine what one discovers when one, say, drops a nickel in a remote corner of my kitchen or bathroom and has to get on one's hands and knees to find it.  It's another universe down there: entire phyla of stuff I can't see or smell from five feet above the ground, stuff being carried to and fro by ants and other tiny industrious scavengers, stuff that may or may not be alive, an archeology of stuff--pubes, Cheetos, scabs, kitty litter--compressed into perverse sculptures of unholy juxtaposition, if not gaily decorating a forgotten hairball.

And then there are the sticky places.

"perverse sculptures of unholy juxtaposition"

Is this the best phrase ever written on the Internet? If not, it's close.

...and then there's this, just out on the AP wire:

Men Who Do Housework May Get More Sex

By DAVID CRARY (AP National Writer)

From Associated Press

March 06, 2008 1:51 PM EST

NEW YORK - American men still don't pull their weight when it comes to housework and child care, but collectively they're not the slackers they used to be. The average dad has gradually been getting better about picking himself up off the sofa and pitching in, according to a new report in which a psychologist suggests the payoff for doing more chores could be more sex.

...etc.....whole long article....

Another classic thread. Thanks, all

My justification is that penicillin comes from mold and urine is bacteria-free. I'll stop there.