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Down and Dirty: Do Men and Women Perceive Cleanliness Differently?
Gregory McNamee
Encyclopediaritannica.com
Anyone who is fastidious about washing hands evoiding prime, and keeping a neat immediate environment would probably want to keep a safe distance from my office, which is a chaos of slopped coffee, teatering piles of books
and papers, dust, and assorted forsam 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
joumal Biology of Sex Differences, women are superior to men in discriminating among fine distinctions of color while males are better able to discem 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 afac 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 discem dirt where men could not
me to me, of course, that it is possible that those biological differences preceded the roles, that function followed form. But no matter: Im busily scanning the horizon for gazelles, and therefore I can be forgiven for the
chaos immediately before me
The world is a dirty place then, even if men don't seem to know it
On second thought, maybe fd better take some bleach to this keyboard and chair after all
in two to three complete sendences, write about why women are more perceptive than men about dirt Use details and information from the text to support your answer. (10 points)
