Tony Stark Deserved Better

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.

On top of that a lot of the sweeteners, like monkfruit, are horribly extra sweet so it still fucks with insulin AND it tastes like shit and we'd be better off just titrating our threshold for sugar down to something more reasonable.

Extremely fucking stupid bc genuinely who cares. Walking sticks are literally for anyone. They help you when you walk around. Perfectly healthy and abled bodied people use them while hiking because they just work.

And what if it was just a fashion thing? It used to be trendy. It gives your outfit a different vibe. Experimenting with fashion is fun, there's literally zero things wrong with using a cane because you like the way it looks or how it makes you feel.

Every single person choosing to use a mobility aid in public normalises their use, and makes it less likely for me to get harassed out there. It just becomes a regular thing you see while out in public. And that's the exact thing ableist TERFs like Stock are actually against - Not even mentioning the absolutely obvious misogyny here.

@plasticfangtastic The potential physical harm of misusing mobility aids is WILDLY exaggerated to pressure people into not using them.

Hugh Laurie, as you said, never used it properly (or frankly in a way that would feel natural to most cane users imo), and he did so for many hours of filming over many years. There should have been a safety assesment, risk mitigation, a physical therapy consultant, etc. Because that was a professional environment and no one's job should injure them, ideally.

However in actual reality, most people who find mobility aids more damaging than helpful will simply stop using them way before any permanent damage is done.

Potential, hypothetical damage is not more important than the actual real damage many people are doing to their bodies right now, because they don't feel they can use a mobility aid without facing ridiculous scrutiny and judgement.

I actually did get injured because of mobility aid use. I was bedbound for several years, so when I got my rollator, I was desperate to go out to the park across our street and not be trapped at home, and I overdid it. I was out using it for too long, my posture and grip wasn't ideal, and I wasn't used to engaging those specific muscles - I ended up with costochondritis. Very scary because intense chest pain is terrifying when you don't know what's happening. It sucked, but I got through it, adjusted my rollator use slightly, and it is still an amazing mobility aid that greatly improves and enriches my life years later.

Avoiding that potential episode would not be worth it at all, if that meant not using it in the first place. I would be damaging my body in a different way every time I have to drag myself to a doctor's appointment, instead of supported and protected by my mobility aid, once the issues were sorted out.

For many disabled and chronically ill people, our reality is simply that we don't get to fully avoid negative consequences no matter what we do. A cane might put strain on your shoulder and make it hurt, but not using it would make your lower back hurt worse instead. For many of us, it's always choosing the best possibility out of a bad bunch.

Someone who doesn't need a mobility aid will simply stop using it eventually, because unless there's tangible benefits to your life, it is fucking annoying. Sometimes it's because there's another mobility aid which would fit the particular circumstances better, but if you have no issues not using one, you just won't. There are no perfectly physically healthy people fucking up their bodies through mobility aid usage. It's genuinely just a right wing boogieman.

We can reduce injuries due to mobility aid usage by making doctors and physical therapists both more accessible and more accepting of a patient's choice to use one. By destigmatising their use, promoting safety tips, and having information more widespread and freely available. Not by trying to make the stigma worse and making up this whole 'social contagion' bullshit, while doubling down on medical misogyny.

You can genuinely just read up on how to size a mobility aid correctly for your body, and you'll be fine. The people working at mobility aid stores can help you with it. Look up "how to properly use X" and read content written by other mobility aid users.

My wheelchair, however, while it does cause some hassle, I never feel upset about the hassle (unless the hassle is due to abled society being inaccessible, then I'm pissed) as the benefits far FAR outweigh the downsides. I never leave the house without my wheelchair anymore, I used to leave my knee braces and even my rollator at home all the time. The body is remarkably good at knowing what it needs and what it doesn't, trust me, if a mobility aid isn't helpful your body will let you know.

And tbh the only way my body has been damaged by mobility aids is from, uh, me spending a decade without adequate support. Bouncing between mobility aid to mobility aid that didn't help for years meant I was damaging my joints the entire time and there's no way to reverse damage from EDS, but you can prevent it. I would not be as profoundly disabled as I am now if I'd gotten the help I needed at least ten years earlier when the problem actually started instead of literally LAST YEAR. I'm fucking 31 now, these issues started when I was seventeen.