lobstah time

@batmanisagatewaydrug @utracjuszka

Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:

When it comes to worldbuilding advice, I do try to steer people away from the old flat tropes of making any singular people group "good", "bad", "more civil", or "primitive", or whatever. It's important that you, the writer of a fictional world, don't just rehash the same problems that have been present in the genre for decades and which are heavily tied to racism and other forms of bigotry. And no, just flipping the script on which group gets to be "good" and which group is now "evil" is not subversive and it does not solve the problem.

but also!!! attempting to write a shiny utopia of a world where all the inequality is just magically non-existent and everyone gets along without any issues will often get you the problems illustrated in this post. you still have to actually understand why the world is the way it is, and what it really takes to create peace and equality. People are people. there will always be some trouble between them. You can tackle that trouble in unique and interesting ways in your own fiction!

I've found in my own worldbuilding, that trying to just make things Fine And Good actually makes it a lot harder to build a coherent world with stories that feel alive and have believable conflicts. For example, the ttrpg setting described above here, where there is somehow a whole world of people who have fled to this perfect little utopia country where everyone is free of all bigotry ever... but also somehow there are still other people in the world beyond that are super mean and want to conquer the good country (for their resources. which... previously they seemed to be sharing just fine as a population built primarily of global refugees. why is it suddenly a problem that other people want their resources. is this the only place with bountiful resources? why? how? I don't want to make this post too much longer but man are my analytical gears spinning.)

• the board is in front of a classroom, and the Math is waaay too advanced for whatever level of pupil these kids are supposed to be; like having the calculus integral in front of kindergartners, or relativistic physics in front of high schoolers.

• the board is in front of Criminals, who are Planning Something, and by all rights there ought to be no Math there to begin with. Like. You’re planning a Heist why do you have the Full Lagrangian on there. Are we taking a rocket to the bank.

Plymouth Rock, reality: 121 years after a boat carrying a bunch of people, some seeking financial opportunity and some trying to find a place to practice their Anxiety Nightmare Religion where nobody would object to their being deeply annoying all the time, landed in a very much occupied area and the passengers declared said area 100% Free For the Stealing, they were going to build a wharf when a 94-year-old leader of the Anxiety Nightmare Religion said "NO! my father who came over on a totally different boat three years after the first boat said that's where the first boat docked! you can't bury it under a wharf!"

they first find him in the jungle, where an armadillo has no business being

they find the entrance to the city, while being followed by him

he is present when the volcano starts to erupt (previous concept art also showed him in the background actually stopping the eruption)

miguel and tulio sucked ass at the ball game, so they used Bibo as a ball. He ricocheted himself all over the place and defied physics to get into the hoop every time

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.

Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”

Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”

We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.

A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”

The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”

The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”

A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”

Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)

A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”

Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”

All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.

Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

My feminism is predicated on the idea that men are not irredeemably Other, and that means that this can be a fixable situation. My husband and I were in a similar situation a few years ago and really fixed it, I think, and I’m glad we did. If I have some tips about how you do it, they are:

Treat executive function like a task that takes up real time and really contributes. A pattern you see a lot of the time is only a woman in a straight relationship making lists, noticing things, keeping track of things. As another comment points out, that is exhausting. Personally, instead of trying to make my husband notice everything I did, it works for us to treat that noticing and planning like a major task. Because I do that, I do a lot less of everything else. I treat that like a real contribution and use it to silence the part of me that feels badly that I don’t ever do other things.

Be real about what your own strengths and weaknesses are, and don’t let your understanding of those strengths be surface level. I am bad at routines, I’m very good at planning, noticing, and setting systems up. My husband is terrible at noticing things, but better at doing stuff on a schedule no matter what. We lean WAY into that. It means he does all the laundry on a set schedule (we don’t rely on him noticing when it needs to be done, he does it every Sunday morning no matter what) and I make sure the kid has enough clothes for that schedule to work. He also does all dishes and kid lunches. I cook and plan meals, do things like reorganize a closet when it needs it, and keep track of the family calendar. That might sound uneven, but a lot more one-off stuff comes up than you think, and if you’re dividing the regular stuff equally but one person is also doing the ad hoc tasks, it won’t be equal at all. I am also good at things that take some sitting around and getting through them (like bedtime or sitting with a sick child on my lap all afternoon). He is good at going and doing tasks. I do bedtime, he does grocery shopping and school drop off/pickup. Which one of you is better at being interrupted? At falling back asleep vs getting to sleep the first time? At tolerating crying? At sticking to a schedule? Figure out a hundred of these, and divide work accordingly.

When you divide tasks, divide them completely. Do some introspection about what you actually require from a task to be done adequately, and get comfortable being annoying about that. Let everything else go. It took me a while to not feel like some horrible nag (lots of gendered stuff there) for wanting my clothes to be laundered the way I wanted if I wasn’t doing it myself. I had to get over that (and he had to get okay with hearing that.) He was out of town last weekend, so laundry didn’t get done. This morning, I said “hey, I am reaching a critical underwear situation, can you do laundry tonight?” There’s space in this for him to ask me to spot him, but I’m not just doing it and getting resentful. But there are also aspects of tasks that you can let go of. One of the few planning tasks that’s his is arranging summer camps. (This is an insane part of US parenting. Every household has to have a spreadsheet.) He does this completely. I don’t even know which camps our kid is in until he puts them on the shared calendar. Does he do this in a way I like? Absolutely he does not. Every year he books something in case or makes a mistake and has to cancel or find something at the last minute. I have to let that go if I want him to own this.

Each parent has an individual relationship with a child, you can’t funnel it all through one parent and expect it to work. Like in the original post, a dad says that he’ll do the laundry on his schedule, not one that’s dictated to him. If laundry is his job, that means that a child who’s angry there are no clean pants that fit *has to scream at him* and as the other parent, *you stay out of it.* That’s between them and has nothing to do with you. Sometimes , to make that work, you have to bundle dependent responsibilities. If a lack of clean clothes leads to being late for school, have the same person do both of those. AND have him be the only person who goes to the meeting with the principal about how often they’re late. This is not actually between the two parents, this is a contract of care between a parent and child. If your co-parent is actually so negligent that this will harm the child (not make you look bad or make a kid angry or inconvenienced or whatever, and you have to be real about this) you cannot pretend to co-parent with them.

You probably have to overcorrect. An equitable division of labor in a straight relationship probably feels like the man doing 60-75% of the work. Letting that happen will require a lot of self-work from most women.