She missed a bit...

The delightful Laurie Penny grinds out a splendid article using the CiF template. It is almost poetry in the way she effortlessly strings together every leftie half-truth she can think of.

She warms up the crowd by bunging in a good old fashioned untruth under Myth 1, i.e. "In recent years, both men and women have found that their working hours have increased...", but let's skip to the fun part at Myth 2:

Myth 2: Men work harder, longer hours than women

Men do work longer hours in many industries – but only if you subscribe to the view that paid work is the only work that counts. Women's unpaid caring, childrearing and domestic labour contributes tens of billions of pounds to this economy...

It is quite true that women do most of the housework (whether that's 'fair' or 'unfair' depends on your point of view. I find that Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage applies here as much as anywhere else) BUT...

a) Who says it's unpaid? Most couples pool their income and/or share expenses, and on a rough and ready basis, I would hazard a guess that women who do little paid work and most of the housework benefit from stuff like, ooh, rent or mortgage payments, utility bills, weekly food bills etc to just the same extent as their husbands (who by definition, must be paying for all this). Quite how they split the bit that's left (to the extent that there is any left), I do not know, but isn't that up to each couple to decide for itself?

b) If you're a proper hardcore feminist, why stop at "caring, childrearing and domestic labour"? Why not add: "provide sexual gratification to an uncaring and thankless brute of a husband"? Apparently proper call girls charge over a hundred quid a pop for full sex, and that's with a condom, so if you multiply it all up, that's probably about fifteen per cent of GDP or something, and must vastly outweigh the value of a bit of vaccuuming or something (which women largely do because they value cleanliness far more than men do).