DIVORCE HIM
Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because theyāre funny. They might be rubbish at most things but as long as their banter is flowing, we put up with it.
These types are almost exclusively men. You donāt get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.
Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?
If you labour the point that you canāt cook, then chances are that you wonāt be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, youāre forcing someone else to take over.
Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, theyāll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when youāve got an incompetent clown on your hands.
I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.
Itās about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that sheās spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.
Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip.Ā
He doesnāt even try to do a good job because he fears that if heās too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.
https://metro.co.uk/2017/11/01/male-incompetence-is-a-subtle-form-of-misogyny-7046248/
Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.
I went and checked the original source and itās worse. While most of the comments get the problem (the lying, not the eggs) some of them just cannot see that this shit is actually a big honking warning sign for bigger shit. A loving person is not capable of doing this.Ā
He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasnāt just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. ā¦now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it?Ā
She canāt trust a word he says and he doesnāt give a shit about her needs. Itās not about the *eggs*.
Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that āa loving person is not capable of doing this.ā That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages ā the words feel good in my mouth. How youāve said it is just so right.
I want to add some of OPās further comments on the thread she made:
āTo be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, thatās okay! But now Iām starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming heāll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, Iāll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, Iām seeing it as malicious.ā
ā The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesnāt even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.
āYes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point Iāve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.ā
ā The husband is inconsiderate of his wifeās property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.
āIām starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldnāt open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.ā
ā The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.
Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt ā we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. Thatās not a concern for me, though. Like I donāt care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the posterās husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. Heās manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that āhe likes her eggs betterā isnāt cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; itās just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.
The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value ā lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someoneās favorite food ā extends an air of the absurd to the wifeās concerns, and to othersā warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, āThese people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. Thatās just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.ā
Itās fucked up, is what it is.
ā¦deviled egg lady, if youāre truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. Itās literally the least he can do.
@manthedog
āItās literally the least he can do.ā
we all just witnessed a fucking murder and it was beautiful.
Real talk time, folks:
If your partner (I am deliberately not using gendered words here), frequently and unashamedly feigns ignorance or incompetence to get out of tasks that affect both of you, warn the asshole once, warn them twice, and then dump the lazy freeloader.
Even someone who is legitimately bad at something can become moderately good at it, if they put some effort in, especially if it is important daily life tasks like cooking, cleaning and laundry.
For example: say your partner canāt cook. Not even something simple like pasta with tomato sauce. They never remember how much salt and pepper to put in that tomato sauce and they always forget that they have the pasta on the stove and then the entire thing burns. Well guess what? Thatās what we invented cook books and recipes and egg timers for. Write that shit down (which ingredients, how much, how long, which temperature, etc.), then show them how it is done, and show them how to set the timer on their fucking phone, because I guaran-goddamn-tee you that every modern phone comes with a timer function. Show them how to do it once. Show them how to do it twice. If they still fuck it up the third time, you either have someone on your hands who cannot read (in which case, wow, great trust they have in you, their partner, that they donāt even tell you about that) or who just canāt be bothered to follow step by step instructions that were neatly laid out for them.
Your time is too precious to waste it on constantly babysitting your partner. A relationship should never be unilateral. Itās a team effort. And within a team, everyone has to pull their weight. If they canāt work with you, they are working against you.
Like, I know how to do laundry, I know about separating things out, how different settings should be used etc. but I dump my load into the washer and ignore all that.
But itās my clothes. And only my clothes. I donāt care if the colors run.
I would NEVER do that to my partnerās clothes. I donāt do that for my fatherās clothes when I do his laundry (which is uncommon he usually does his own).
Weaponized ignorance/the bumbling man trope needs to fucking die. This shit is EASY. They just donāt want to do the work so they dump the effort onto their partners. Itās horrid.
One of my psychology professors actually talked about this in the context of her own husband and how she dealt with it, which was namely: donāt let your partner get away with not doing basic housework just because theyāre ābadā at it. All youāre doing is teaching them that incompetence (genuine or not) is rewarded, and reinforcing that behaviour.
When she saw that he (genuinely or not) had no idea how to properly wash dishes, she showed him how to do it, then she stood beside him and talked him through doing it, then she watched him do it on his own.
When he fucked up the dishes again while unsupervised, she went through the whole process again - āhere Iāll show you, now you do it while I watchā
She never got mad at him, or yelled, or did anything where she could be accused of overreacting or being dramatic, just acted every time like she was teaching a child how to do these things for the first time. And after two or three rounds of this, he would start doing chores properly while unsupervised, either because (a) he now actually knew how to do them properly, or (b) (more likely) heād realized that feigning incompetence would not get him out of housework, and heād have to go through the humiliating experience of being taught how to do it again every time he fucked it up. And eventually he stopped the āfeigning incompetenceā thing altogether and started asking for help if he couldnāt do something instead of just not doing it.
(of course, I completely understand if someone doesnāt want to go through this process and just dumps their partnerās ass for being an asshole, and itās not always going to work if theyāre determined/malicious about it rather than just doing what theyāve always done, but this is one way to deal with it)
As a note! All of this is for when people are deliberately trying to get out of work. People who are forgetful can and do make conscious efforts (I would know, Iām super forgerful). However this stuff has nothing to do with people who are actually physically unable to do things so please donāt look at people with disabilities and think theyāre being lazy, especially if they are trying. Being physically incapable is very different from being lazy and inconsiderate.
That aside, this post is so accurate and you need to know that itās not just partners of a romantic or queerplatonic relationships who do this. If your friends also can never put in the effort theyāre not your friends. Donāt see these actions and give anyone slack. No one should have to suffer other people feigning incompetence to get out of work.
I just realized my ex partner would do this. He would ask me to make his lunch for work because "It tastes better made with love" which was bullshit because I was always resentful about it and more likely to put arsenic than love in his sandwich.
It just now occurred to me-- he never made MY lunch. Wouldn't my lunch taste better made with love?
Or maybe it wasn't about love. Maybe he just found a way to get me to do a chore he didn't want to do with some nice emotional blackmail
