In the final installment of the Daily's Battle of the Sexes series, we explore males' and females' differing - and sometimes disturbing - approaches to keeping their houses clean.
The Tufts Off-Campus Housing Resource Web site is quite clear regarding its official position on Massachusetts law providing against discrimination in housing on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, ancestry - and gender. It devotes its second introductory paragraph to the issue, demanding that no landlord deny tenants housing based on any of these categories.
In practice, however, gender may come into play despite this demand. "Our landlord definitely wanted girls," senior Elaine Chao said. "At one point he had a bad experience with boys. He told us a few horror stories."
It's likely he had tenants such as Tufts senior Mark Sigal. Sigal described the state of the house he shared with six other males off Curtis Street as "frat-like." Nothing ever really gets cleaned up from party to party."
Or possibly the landlord's previous tenants resembled senior Brian Potskowski and his house of eight males on West Adams Street. "You trip on your trash on the way to the bathroom. What upkeep?" Potskowski said.
Yet many girls report similar living conditions. "It's awful," said senior Mary Humphreys of her 11-girl house. "We have an entire room dedicated to Beirut - it is totally caked in grime. Our bathroom is caked in grime and has no lock."
Senior Sue Bernstock reports similar conditions in her five-girl-house on Capen Street. "Our house it terrible," she said. "It might not pass a health code."
While Tufts students of both genders appear to have a hard time maintaining cleanliness between classes and Beirut tournaments, they often report distinct differences in the male and female approach to housecleaning.
"If the house gets really messy, someone gets fed up and thinks we need to talk about it. Then we call a house meeting," Chao said.
Meetings, or at least attempted meetings, revolving around house cleanliness appear to be common in all-girl houses. "We have called house-meetings, like, four times, [to discuss housecleaning], but none of them ever met," Humphreys said.
"Cleanliness is definitely the biggest source of arguments," said senior Claire Freierman, of her and her housemates.
Many girls try to talk out their differences in an attempt to alter unclean habits; it seems that guys tend to take a more direct approach. None of the males interviewed mentioned the institution of house meetings. They all described their housecleaning techniques as sporadic acts of desperation that doubled as extremely direct efforts at tackling the problem.
Most males interviewed reported either a "divide and conquer" approach towards cleaning - when they do it, everyone is involved - or an overall nonchalance towards the issue.
"There's a lot of getting on people to do stuff," senior Lionel Yarmon said. "It moves slowly, but it doesn't matter that much. It doesn't actually make a difference in our lives."
The males interviewed were more likely to hire cleaning services to do their dirty work than were the girls interviewed. At a cost of around $80 for a few hours of quality cleaning, it seems that some guys would rather pay out of their wallets than dig in themselves or sit around cross-legged expressing emotions in a house meeting.
"We opened the phone-book to see listings of cleaning services and saw a company called 'Dirty Damsels,' so we just had to call them," said Potskowski.
One approach favored by students of both genders is to maintain the cleanliness of their own rooms and give up on the rest of the house. "My room is a safe-haven from the disaster that is the rest of the house," Humphreys said. "I can walk around barefoot in my room; you can't do that in the rest of the house."
"Nobody violates anybody's room," said Sigal. "Mine is very neat."
Tufts Medical School alumnus Rob Dretler (M '78), advises students to keep their houses in line by levying strict penalties on students who do not treat the house with respect.
As a Tufts Medical School student living in a house with two men, Dretler convinced his housemates it was worth their while to clean up after themselves.
After weeks of annoyance, Dretler took a constructive approach: He began to move the food that one of his housemates consistently left out in the kitchen every night into this housemate's room.
"He couldn't be coming home at night with bimbos at two in the morning with food on the floor," Dretler said.
Later, Dretler lived with five other Tufts Medical School students, and they all agreed to a penalty of $25 for anyone who failed to accomplish their assigned chore.
"A fine terrorized us," Dretler said. "We were all poor students."
