Down and dirty: do men and women perceive cleanliness differently?
© 2012 gregory mcnamee—december 5, 2012

anyone who is fastidious about washing hands, avoiding grime, and keeping a neat immediate environment would probably want to keep a safe distance from my office, which is a chaos of slopped coffee, teetering piles of books and papers, dust, and assorted flotsam and jetsam.

i now have a defense for this studied disorder: namely, my chromosome count. in a study published in the online scientific journal plos one, researchers from san diego state university and the university of arizona examined 450 samples of bacteria taken from offices in new york city, san francisco, and tucson. these bacteria—and forgive the ickiness—came mostly from the skin, nose and mouth, and the digestive tract, and they were found mostly on chairs and telephones, with lower concentrations on computer keyboards and mice and on [physical] desktops.

the researchers' findings were various, but one of them was this: in the workspaces of men, the bacteria count was significantly higher than in those of women. the implications are immediately obvious: men are, well, just not as tidy as women. remarks an authority cited in the study, "humans move through a sea of microbial life that is seldom perceived except in the context of potential disease and decay." if that is so, then men, it would appear, are enthusiastic body surfers while women barely dip their toes into the mess.

it is dangerous, always, to generalize on grounds of gender and sex. yet there does appear to be significant variation between men and women in some categories of perception; reports a recent paper in the suggestively titled journal biology of sex differences, women are superior to men in discriminating among fine distinctions of color, while males are better able to discern details in any given viewscape from a distance. this finding supports the so-called hunter-gatherer hypothesis, which proposes that certain biological adaptations occurred as a result of different divided-labor roles in human prehistory. since men were better at spotting things from afar, they hunted, and since women were better at distinguishing colors, they chose which mushrooms to eat—they gathered, in other words, and apparently they developed the ability to discern dirt where men could not.

it seems to me, of course, that it is possible that those biological differences preceded the roles, that function followed form. but no matter: i'm busily scanning the horizon for gazelles, and therefore i can be forgiven for the chaos immediately before me.

which line from the text most clearly presents ethos?

a. in a study published in the online scientific journal plos one

b. in the workspaces of men, the bacteria count was significantly higher

c. men are, well, just not as tidy as women

d. it is dangerous, always, to generalize on grounds of gender and sex