There is a dirty rumour doing the rounds: housework may well earn men certain favours, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
NOW THAT Ireland's male rugby fans have a little more time on their hands they might like to consider that an authoritative survey, conducted in America, has announced that men who do housework may get more sex. After an insider tip, this information was unearthed by The Irish Times on a little-known news site called, perhaps appropriately, Yahoo!
Surely the key word in that headline is "may". Men who do more housework may not get more sex, but they will be too tired to care. The other interpretation is that the key word in the headline is "get", which seems to imply that sex is doled out by stingy women who are wasting their sweetness on cleaning the kitchen floor.
Nevertheless, we have been urged to give this survey, conducted by the Council on Contemporary Families, maximum exposure. As one ruthless female put it: "They should be encouraged to think so."
It has been said before that housework is kind of like God used to be in the old days: everywhere, but invisible. It is amazing to think of the millions of words which are dedicated to the goings on in the Dáil, in Westminster and in Congress when it is much more interesting to discover, as I did recently, that your best friend is still using Vim.
Even public forums which specialise in the minutiae of everyday life are uninterested in the eternity that is the laundry basket.
On YouTube, the videos about housework in general and vacuuming in particular are all either pornographic or feature domestic pets (although the two elements have yet to be combined). There is nothing on YouTube about the hell of chasing fluff, or the limbo of the saucepan cupboard, with all those sticky stains that can never be excised.
Not so much dirty but clean as dirty but dirty.
We all know in our hearts that most of the people - mainly but not exclusively male - who are lecturing us on the Lisbon Treaty, whatever that is, have not cleaned a cooker in decades. It's kind of hard to take lectures on the evils of inequality and world poverty from someone who doesn't wash their own knickers and hardly knows who does.
There is a strong case to be made that the death of the Catholic Church arrived, not with the child sex scandals, but with the establishment of the institution of the priest's housekeeper.
The clergy emerged from monastic communities, where the menial tasks of domestic maintenance were part of their devotion to God, to being waited on hand and foot by a succession of Mrs Doyles who were brought, over their years in the job, to a rolling boil of rage. And the rot set in right there, at that division between important matters and domestic tasks.
The priests' secular equivalent are all those liberal lefty men who won't let their wives hire a cleaner, because it is ideologically unsound, and then have tantrums because they can't find their socks.
I would welcome any kind of public debate on housework, the pros and cons. I am neither interested enough to be efficient at housework nor blasé enough not to care.
The Council on Contemporary Families says that men's household labour has doubled over the past four decades, and that the amount of time they spend on childcare went up threefold between 1965 and 2003. But then they started from a pretty low base which lacked every virtue but clarity.
Now there are egalitarian couples who share the housework and the child rearing and have matching circles under their eyes.
However, housework is still somehow - no one is sure exactly how - a female responsibility.
So your average modern woman resents both the dust and the guilt - and emptying the bins, cleaning the sinks, pulling hairs out of plugholes, finding vests behind the radiators and chaos in the hot press, wiping the smears on the mirrors . . .
Where were we? Oh yes, housework is the final battleground in the war between the sexes, and the war is at its most savage between heterosexual couples.
There are women in two-income, two-job households who spend a surprising amount of time, in the memorable phrase coined by a friend of mine, "hoovering with hate". You have to say that this is not going to do anybody's sex life much good.
The housework rows do produce some extraordinary lines such as "I'm not going to clean the loo because you use it more than I do". And "What are you sweeping the floor for? You swept it yesterday."
Or so I'm told.
These battles usually end with the woman either (a) hiring a cleaner (which does not solve everything by any means), or (b) doing the whole damn thing herself (see hoovering with hate, above). Now they might also end with men doing housework on the rather insulting promise of sex.
The only sure thing in this battle is that housework will win. Housework abides. It will get us, both women and men, every, every time.