Foggy Bottom Station

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.

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

On the funnier side, ignorance about anything closer to nature than a supermarket shelf can result in gems like this one:

Regular yogurt for me.  Thanks.

(As for ignorance, this post is epic and getting more so every time I see it.)

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Back on topic.

Shearing’s not skinning and it’s not painful, unless some guy getting busy with a manscaping clipper means he’s flaying himself alive.

Shearing is an all-over haircut, call it sheepscaping if need be though expect some odd looks, and good shearers - as @ruusverd​ said, bad shearers earn a bad rep and soon earn no more money - will leave less nicks on an entire sheep than I might inflict on my face if I forget to change my razor-blade. 

That’s pretty impressive when dealing with a notoriously dimwit animal that doesn’t understand “now just sit still for a minute” and finds “see that open gate, go through it” a difficult concept. (Going through an unexpected hole in the hedge, however, is something sheep do with great ease and willingness, especially if there’s a soon-to-be-ex herb garden on the far side…)

“All warm and snuggly in their woolly jumpers…” Oh puh-leeze. A jumper is a garment which can be taken off and put on as required. A sheep’s fleece is nothing of the sort. Ireland’s just had a heatwave, so which of these two would have been more comfortable the other day when it was 30°C / 90°F in the shade?

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But look at the blood! goes the outcry about sheep with red stains. Here’s what that “blood” is. Unless the outcriers believe the front half is royal and bleeds blue, it’s just dye.

Why dye? There are various reasons: to show who owns which sheep in a mixed flock of the same breed, or to indicate if one has been dosed with something, or to mark if a ewe has mated with a ram.

The ram wears a harness - AFAIK not black leather with chrome studs, at least not on any farm near here - which holds a dye-pad on his chest. After he’s done his business, the hopefully-preggers ewe will have a patch of that dye on her rump as in the photo.

Different colours let the farmer know which ram’s been busy if there’s more than one, or with one ram, on what day the mating occurred so they can calculate when to expect lambs. That kit suggests rams get one day a week off…

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Besides shearing sheep to stop them overheating, if the weather is rainy rather than sunny they’ll still need sheared to stop them getting waterlogged.

A waterlogged sheep is a top-heavy sheep, and since rainy weather will have made the ground slippery, a top-heavy sheep can all too easily become a sheep on its back - a broad, flat back that won’t roll - unable to get upright.

Sheep internal organs aren’t meant to be upside down and inversion will eventually kill them, if they’re not gutted by a fox first. Crows will have had their eyes long before then.

Forget deceitful propaganda about fake wool, here’s some REAL advice about how to do a sheep a (literal) good turn.

I’ve done it myself, and though she’d already lost one eye - hoodie crows don’t miss a chance - that ewe survived and next spring produced what I was told were two fine lambs. I felt pretty good about that.

I still do.

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This is what shearing really looks like, and that’s not the behaviour of an animal in distress or pain. Baffled, maybe, but any human whose haircut started with a judo throw would be baffled too..

The end result is a 12lb / 5.5kg load of insulation which the sheep no longer has to carry about. How’d you like being stuck inside that lot on a hot day?

The “shearing is cruel” fruitloops rely on deliberate lies, gullibility and lack of knowledge. Be aware.

 Or maybe…

do not taste plants if you don't know what they are

do not identify a fruit as edible just because it tastes sweet

hope you didn't eat any fucking seeds, bro

I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...

In comments, they continue:

and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:

I've been thinking about adding another color combo to this pip style, but can't think of anything else that gives off that good 70's vibe.