In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)