Say what, NPR?

These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t 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 can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.

Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.

I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.

It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s 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. 

He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s 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/

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 wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …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? 

I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:

“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m 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 he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”

→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.

“Yes, 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 I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”

→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s 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.

“I’m 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 wouldn’t 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.”

→ 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 — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s 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 “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s 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 — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”

It’s fucked up, is what it is.

“It’s literally the least he can do.”

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 can’t 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? That’s 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 don’t even tell you about that) or who just can’t be bothered to follow step by step instructions that were neatly laid out for them.

But it’s my clothes. And only my clothes. I don’t care if the colors run.

I would NEVER do that to my partner’s clothes. I don’t do that for my father’s clothes when I do his laundry (which is uncommon he usually does his own).

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 - “here I’ll show you, now you do it while I watch”

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) he’d realized that feigning incompetence would not get him out of housework, and he’d 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 “feigning incompetence” thing altogether and started asking for help if he couldn’t do something instead of just not doing it.

It just now occurred to me-- he never made MY lunch. Wouldn't my lunch taste better made with love?

“Officers were advised on November 21 of a man hiding in stalls and unscrewing lights around him to darken the area. When police arrived, the suspect was gone. But when police received a similar report a week later, they were able to locate the suspect and identify him. Sackett was arrested on December 4 and released on $750 unsecured bond.”

Misogyny means the hatred of women. 

See, at first, people’s reaction is to laugh about this. But women have to live around the men who hate us and these men don’t just hate us they went to hurt us. The hatred of women is no laughing matter because it results in real harm, real torture, real death.

This man is going to hurt women, if he hasn’t already.

so, this is our house. we’re on the corner, this is the most visible side. there are six of us, all variously queer, and shortly after we moved in my housemate julian put up the gay pride flag. not to let my dumb trans ass be outdone, i put up the trans pride flag a little while later*. today, julian found this note on our door

being visibly queer fuckin matters. don’t let anyone, esp. any straight people, but especially any queer ppl, tell you that you’re too visible, making a scene, that you shouldn’t wear your pride on your sleeve. this stuff matters; just about all of us are hurt one way or another, and you never know when your flag or your shirt or your pin is gonna be someone else’s lifeline. 

@biggest-gaudiest-patronuses​ has a spot on summary of the dada ideology; these artists reacted to the horrors and atrocities of WWI by embracing nonsense in a world that no longer seemed to make sense

but the period we’re in right now is decidedly not neo-dada! you know why? because neo-dada already happened, and not during WWII but during the 60s and 70s, through artists like robert rauschenberg, yves klein, yoko ono, and nam june paik.

what was going on in the 60s and 70s that might involve “terrifying” reality and “increasingly nonsensical” coping methods? the cold war! now the cold war is in much more recent memory,

but if you wanna talk about nonsensical coping methods among millennials? i would say “lol xD so random” culture is probably the best starting point, which is definitely post-cold war (knowyourmeme is giving me 2004 as a good benchmark date).

2004 is only three years after 2001 so this resurgence of dada thinking could easily be seen as initially a reaction to 9/11, and we can then trace the antics of the bush administration, the shift of the overton window, the rise of internet culture, the 2016 election, and the current political moment as developmental factors behind this current dada moment.

so since neo-dada already happened and this is definitely its own thing with its own factors, and since a big part of our dada is the influence of the internet on modernity, i posit that we start calling this e-dada or #dada

Suddenly, this man standing on the outskirts of our conversational circle piped up with “actually, I think men are more discriminated against than women these days.”

 All conversation died.

I turned to look at him and he had this smug, insufferable grin on his face, relishing this moment, expecting us to waste our time and energy refuting this ridiculous thing he had just said.

The Devil’s Advocate was among us.

And, in my mind, I saw the next 15+ minutes playing out. The parade of facts and statistics in a vain attempt to defend ourselves, our gender, and to prove that misogyny is real. The glib, snide denials from some shithead who is getting off on our pain and frustration. The Gish Gallop of bullshit that would take a whole evening to properly dismantle. It was depressing and overwhelming. I hated it. I had to kill it before it began.

So I looked him dead in the eye and I said “OK,“ shrugged, and just walked away. 

Nothing I have ever said to another human being has ever been so crushing. As I walked away, I watched the smug grin vanish and confusion and anxiety set in. The rest of the group turned their backs to him and carried on as if he had never spoken - as if he was invisible. He was still staring at me when I walked over to another friend and told her what he had said. I pointed him out for her and made direct eye contact with him while we both laughed.

The city of San Francisco currently has the worst air quality of anywhere in the world because of the wildfires. (This level of air quality, incidentally, is bad for people and kills them.) These once-in-a-lifetime wildfires will become more common in our lifetimes.