DIVORCE HIM
Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because they’re 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 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/
Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.
I went and checked the original source and it’s 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.
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?
She can’t trust a word he says and he doesn’t give a shit about her needs. It’s not about the *eggs*.
Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that “a loving person is not capable of doing this.” That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages — the words feel good in my mouth. How you’ve said it is just so right.
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.
…deviled egg lady, if you’re truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. It’s literally the least he can do.
@manthedog
“It’s literally the least he can do.”
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 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.
Your time is too precious to waste it on constantly babysitting your partner. A relationship should never be unilateral. It’s a team effort. And within a team, everyone has to pull their weight. If they can’t 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 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).
Weaponized ignorance/the bumbling man trope needs to fucking die. This shit is EASY. They just don’t want to do the work so they dump the effort onto their partners. It’s 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: don’t let your partner get away with not doing basic housework just because they’re “bad” at it. All you’re 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 - “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.
(of course, I completely understand if someone doesn’t want to go through this process and just dumps their partner’s ass for being an asshole, and it’s not always going to work if they’re determined/malicious about it rather than just doing what they’ve always done, but this is one way to deal with it)
I mean ideally if someone is really bad at something or hates doing something, maybe one partner keeps doing it and the other partner does something else in turn. But the problem with these bumbling “I’m just bad at any inconvenient chores” dudes is that they do this across the board. They’re not going to go out of their way to do something nice because one partner is lifting the devilled egg reponsibility on their own. My ex boyfriend told me for fucking MONTHS he was going to paint a section of the kitchen wall. FUCKING MONTHS. When he finally did it (cause I was suuuuuch a naggy bitch) it took 20 minutes. If someone universally can not make an effort for their partner, whether it be laundry or remembering their preferences or common courtesy, it’s a sign that they don’t care. And yes, I am fully aware that there are mental health issues to make that harder, I have plenty of them. So I will probably forget important names and dates, and that sucks, and I won’t enjoy getting up early with you either, but I’m very happy to do all the dishes or set out tea things the night before when I am still awake and you’re sleeping, even if I don’t wake up when you do. Affection really is in the little things, and it’s so disgusting how women are constantly berated for being “over emotional” or “blowing things out of proportion if they point out a small thing that is a symptom of a much bigger problem.
Women should not have to train their partners to do basic shit. There is a pervasive expectation that it’s a woman’s job to either a) do ALL the housework/emotional work/kinship work and/or b) train the men in their lives to do it, often while the men purposefully refuse to pay attention or retain the information. And it’s misogyny.
Men are capable of figuring shit out on their own, especially in the era of YouTube tutorials and wikihow shit. Their incompetence in the face of these resources is deliberate. They are deliberately choosing not to learn to do work that they know they can get the women in their lives to do.
That’s not women’s responsibility. Women should not be expected to keep track of all the household chores and assign some to their partner in the first place – men are capable of noticing when dishes need to be done or floors need to be swept. And women should especially not be expected to train the men in their lives in the details of how to do that work.
Men need to step the fuck up and take classes or do some googling to make sure they know how to do their share of household work. If they don’t, they’re choosing not to.
