Read the article for detail and answer the following questions
UNIT 1 HOURS OF LEISURE
Lead-in Points to Ponder
1. Hobbies are often thought of as free-time activities for people who lead quiet, relaxed lives. Do you share this point of view? Why?
2. What are your free-time interests? What are the advantages of maintaining these hobbies? What do hobbies generally incorporate into our life?
3. What leisure activities are good for stress relief, wellness promotion, plain fun?
4. What is the genuine meaning of leisure for you:
- time off studies;
- a moment to unwind or recharge before the next round of work;
- idling away;
- free-time activity done freely, for its own sake;
- soul-refreshing uptime;
- something that fills you with dread?
Reading 1. Why Women Don’t Relax
Men fish, play golf, watch football, play computer games. Women shop. But don’t confuse that with having fun - men may spend their free time relaxing, but for women it’s just another form of work
Leisure today is thought of as a mere interlude in the productive process, a moment to unwind or recharge before the next bout of work. Indeed, a good deal of modern leisure is indistinguishable from work. We play squash in order to stay fit, party in order to network, invest quality time in our children in order to keep them sweet. No wonder a life of leisure fills both men and women with dread.
Women either don’t do leisure, or they do free leisure, or at best cheap leisure, or they fail to perceive any difference between work and leisure. Ask what a woman’s leisure activity is and you’re apt to be told, “Shopping”. Shopping is grinding toil that women mistake for play. Men stand bemused as women trudge from shop to shop looking for something better or cheaper than another thing that is virtually identical, wondering why they didn’t buy what they wanted at the first shop that had it in stock. Men don’t understand that if you haven’t come close to dropping, then you haven’t shopped. Men buy; women shop.
Most women would say that they have very little time to themselves. The time they don’t spend working for the employer and the taxman they spend doing something called “housework”, to which, for most women between the ages of 25 and 50, may be added “childcare”.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development study found that British women, like most women around the world, are still doing about twice the housework and childcare as men. Women are also doing what psychologists call the heavy “mental labour” of keeping track of it all. All this crashing around in a brain that can only hold seven pieces of information in the working memory means that women’s timeisoften contaminated: lost in worry and never fully present in the moment. You may be on a picnic with your family and it may look like leisure, but on the inside it feels like mission control: you’re taking everyone’s emotional temperature, serving the food, cleaning up, while the tape loop of all the other stuff that needs to get done plays over and over in your head.
|
|
|
All this labour is exhausting. So what do we do? We turn on the television because we lack the energy for much else. The OECD and other organisations have found television is most people’s main leisure activity. But don’t let that fool you. Women typically multitask in front of the box, folding laundry and paying bills.
There are powerful historical reasons for women’s imperviousness to the demands of leisure. The typical world citizen - who is still female, illiterate and an unpaid family worker - knows only too well that if she is ever to be seen with her hands in her lap, a job will be found for her. In traditional societies, the high days and holidays on which menfolk are permitted to straighten their backs and put on clean clothes are the days on which the women have to work the hardest, smartening up the house and putting together giant meals. It is not so long ago that on Sundays, while rest of the family frolicked, the woman of the house had to cook and serve a three-course Sunday lunch and clean up after it.
Many women these days would like nothing better than the chance to serve soup, roast and pudding to the assembled family once a week. If they don’t do it any more, it is less because they rebelled against such hard labour on everybody else’s day of rest than because nowadays there isn’t anybody around to eat the food they cook. Everybody else is out doing leisure. Has the woman of the house grabbed a kitbag and followed their example? Apparently not. Women don’t go fishing. Women do play golf, but not many and not much. Women don’t buy sports equipment or season tickets. Women don’t buy sports cars, boats, jetskis, trailbikes, guns, crossbows ... Women don’t collect stamps, spot trains, buy music products. Women do use gyms, but not for fun.
|
|
|
If leisure is what you do when you are not working for a livelihood, then the women who were excluded from the paid workforce never had anything but leisure, but their leisure was vicarious leisure, its purpose to display for all to see the status of the man who owned them and could afford to let them sit about all day every day. Ladies of leisure were not permitted to enjoy their leisure. They couldn’t go rambling about or fishing or playing cricket on the green or burying themselves in books. Instead, they had to fill their hours with useless, pointless, unproductive, repetitive work: beadwork, shellwork, tatting, making cut-paper patterns and silhouettes, japanning, plus what George Eliot called “a little ladylike tinkling and smearing”. For the affluent, housework used to be done by servants. Boiling up shirts and sheets, ironing, polishing floors and furniture, blacking grates and shining silver used to be heavy work. The lady of the middle-class house wasn’t expected to break into a sweat. It was only when machines replaced maids that vicarious leisure could take the form of housework.
Occasionally some foolhardy academic tries to suggest that housework is a leisure pursuit, the paradigmatic “leisure industry”, which is one way of saying “keeping very busy doing nothing”. Women will not accept this version of their reality; they want us to believe that they hate and resent housework, but that “someone has to do it”. The people who make money out of this kind of leisure industry are multinationals like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and by manipulating women’s insecurities they make unimaginably huge amounts of it. Currently, women are fighting a war on bacteria, nasty, deformed aliens who hide on work surfaces. Where lazy boys play murderous videogames, diligent housewives deal out death and destruction to an equally fictitious enemy. The boys know they are playing; the women think they are working.
|
|
|
The men’s leisure industry covets the trillions of dollars’ profit made by Unilever and Procter & Gamble. If it has seriously tried to entice women away from the housework and win back the money they splurge on home-care, there is no sign of its succeeding. Half of the population remains inaccessible to the leisure industry because of the fantasy war against filth, which requires the cleaning of a house already too clean.
Women are not listening to the siren call of leisure. But it is also true that the leisure industry does not address itself to women. This may be simply because no female market exists, but an elderly market certainly exists and the leisure industry ignores that too, even though older people have more disposable income than younger people. The goods and services older people use are never characterised as such. The explanation is not simply that advertisers are ageist, but that senior citizens themselves are ageist. The greyest of nomads would not buy an RV that was advertised as ideal for grey nomads.
Older women, whether they play bingo or break out the camp stove, are heavily involved in leisure, but theirs is cut-price leisure. They are not in the market for recreational vehicles, or powerboats, or even motel accommodation. They are the people who make possible literary festivals and antique fairs, who support local art galleries and museums, who volunteer for every community chore, and happily raise money for what they believe to be good causes, giving, giving, giving of their time free. If we had a way of quantifying the output of the leisure industry of older women, we would probably see that it contributes vastly more to the GDP than the corporate leisure industry.
And that brings us to the most important point: women have never had a culture of leisure. Our time has always been fragmented. And women the world over feel they don’t deserve leisure; they must instead earn it by getting to the end of a To Do list – which of course never ends.
How can women reclaim leisure? Men have to share the load at home. To do that, workplace cultures stuck in the 1950s that expect 24/7 devotion have to change. And women have to pause in the swirling overwhelm, think about what would – like the Greeks said – refresh their souls and bring them joy. Leisure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. True leisure is something you choose. Not leftover or in-between time that happens to you. And then women have to give themselves the permission to have leisure time. We do, indeed, deserve it.
|
|
|
(based on 2014 - 2015 Guardian issues)
Reading Comprehension Check
Read the article for detail and answer the following questions
1. What stance do people take on present-day leisure?
2. What generalizations does the author make as to women doing leisure?
3. How do men tend to view women’s shopping?
4. What are the findings of the study conducted by the OECD as to women’s activities outside their work?
5. Where do women normally employ multitasking?
6. What historical reasons for women’s imperviousness to the demands of leisure does the author run through?
7. Why is the pastime of ladies of leisure characterized as ‘vicarious’?
8. Why do most women disagree that their housework is a leisure pursuit?
9. What are women’s insecurities in terms of home-care? What do multinationals benefit from them?
10. How is the leisure industry related to a female market?
11. What kind of leisure are older women involved in?
12. Why have women never had a culture of leisure?
13. How can women reclaim their free time?
14. Who do you think the author of the article is: a man or a woman? Find some evidence in the text to prove your viewpoint.
15. Comment on the author’s concluding statements on leisure: “Leisure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder”; “True leisure is something you choose. Not left-over or in-between time that happens to you.”
3 [A] Complete the chart below without after-reading reference to the article.
| Men | Women |
| fish, play golf, watch football, play computer games | shop |
| stay bemused | |
| housework and childcare | |
| straighten their backs | |
| to be out doing leisure | |
| use gyms | |
| work for a livelihood | |
| vicarious leisure | |
| fill their hours with useless, pointless, unproductive, repetitive work | |
| housework is a leisure pursuit | |
| cut-price leisure |
[B] Give a review of the article according to the chart. Remember to use the following linking words and phrases:
To begin with, on the one hand, on the other hand, for one’s part, when it comes to; by contrast (to, with), on the contrary, while, at the same time, however, moreover, to sum it all up
Text Vocabulary Boost
Дата добавления: 2019-02-22; просмотров: 705; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!