Projo Offbeat Blog

The headlines are enough to catch a guy's eye: 'Men who do housework may get more sex,' and 'Best foreplay is husband who cleans house.'

The headlines tout research suggesting that men help more with the housework than we did 30 years ago, and that the guys best at cleaning up the house may also clean up in the romance department.

One of the stories, by the New York Daily News, quotes psychologist Joshua Coleman, who says, "If a woman feels stressed-out because the house is a mess and the guy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming, that's not going to put her in the mood."

Coleman is author of "The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework." But the Daily News wasn't willing to just take Coleman's word for it. The newspaper interviewed a few men, including two who cast doubt on the premise. One of the men, a 26-year-old from Long Island, said, "I do all the housework, but I don't get all the sex."

The Daily News also ran a survey asking, "Would you give your husband more sex if he folded the clothes and did the dishes? As of midafternoon, 81 percent of the survey's respondents answered, "Yes."

Is there a chance that men and women define "doing a lot of housework" and "having a lot of sex" differently?

I guess we guys could pick up a vacuum cleaner and do our own research, but then we might discover the correlation between housework and sex is myth, all part of a grand conspiracy to get men to do more mopping and dusting.

But that's not the only risk. If the relationship between housework and sex is real, more sex could lead to more kids, which would inevitably lead to more housework, more sex and even more kids -- a cycle that could easily spiral out of control.

Maybe we guys are better off just staying on the couch.

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