cakeisnotpie:

hornqvist-patric:

twodotsknowwhy:

lola1b:

manthedog:

dlasta:

lierdumoa:

curseworm:

bobavader:

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.

oh yeah my brother used to do this. his only chores were to take out the dishes and vacuum. He always did such a shitty and slow job, that my mom had to redo it and waste more time and delay washing the floors. So eventually she made me do it instead and he got off scott free. And her reasoning was just this “he’s a man, I shouldn’t have even asked, men can’t do housework, he’s incompetent, he can’t do this!” And I resisted and even attempted to mimic (unsuccessfully) his strategy as a 14 year old because I KNEW he was just doing it to be an ass. Because what’s so fucking hard about vacuuming? Just put the thing that sucks shit in all the corners and ur good. But he somehow couldnt do that? Bullshit.

The thing about this though is, if he had just SAID “I know how to make deviled eggs, but yours always turn out so much better, could you please make them because they are so delicious?” I’m willing to bet most women would have been flattered and considered it a reasonable request. There was literally no reason to lie if you have good intentions. Especially if, as most good, non-lying spouses would, he had offered to help her in some way (even if it was just peeling the eggs or cleaning up). Same result, no deception and you actually contribute to the household!

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned in life is to LET OTHER PEOPLE DO SHIT JOBS AND NOT FIX THEM.  Notice how she accepts the justification that they have different levels of cleanliness?  That’s years of society training women to be perfect;  if it’s not perfect, we get the blame, should be ashamed.  My mother used to go behind me, complaining the whole time how I didn’t dust right, didn’t load the dishwasher the right way, didn’t vacuum correctly.  She bitched about having to do all the extra work, never getting any help from us kids. Flash forward 30 years and I found myself doing the same thing.  Hubs didn’t fold the laundry right, the girls didn’t move things when they dusted, so it was easier if I just did it myself.  

THIS IS SOCIETY’S WAY OF KEEPING WOMEN BUSY DOING THE SHIT WORK INSTEAD OF WRITING THE NOVEL THEY’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO, THE ONE THAT WOULD BE BETTER THAN MOST OF THE CRAP OUT THERE. 

(sorry, got a little personal there)

Now, I happen to have a great hubs who called me on it, who asked, in all honestly, why my way of folding the laundry was the only way. Wouldn’t I rather he did half of it than me do all of it? Was the perfect fold all that important?  See, he grew up with a father who disappeared in his office with the door closed and left his wife to cook, clean, and raise the kids.  He’d made a vow not to be like that because, despite being a nice guy, his Dad hadn’t been involved in his kids’ lives. 

So here’s the take away … sorry in advance for the shouting but I’m super passionate about this. 

LET THEM DO IT THEIR OWN SHITTY WAY. DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT DO IT FOR THEM.

They leave a sink full of dirty dishes?  Don’t wash them. 

Can’t stand the piles of dirty clothes on the floor in the kids’ rooms? Give them a week warning then bag them up, toss them out and don’t replace them. 

Forget the perfect fold of laundry, the spotless kitchen floor. 

Go write that damn novel. When they’re hungry, they’ll go make themselves something. Trust me, they won’t starve. 

Stop doing it for them and make them grow up. 

You might lose them, sure. 

Or you may find a person who tries to get better. 

Either one, you’ll feel better about yourself. 

livinginthequestion:

endangered-justice-seeker:

During World War II, 600,000 African-American women entered the wartime
workforce. Previously, black women’s work in the United States was
largely limited to domestic service and agricultural work, and wartime
industries meant new and better-paying opportunities – if they made it
through the hiring process, that is. White women were the targets of the
U.S. government’s propaganda efforts, as embodied in the lasting and
lauded image of Rosie the Riveter.Though largely ignored in America’s
popular history of World War II, black women’s important contributions
in World War II factories, which weren’t always so welcoming, are
stunningly captured in these comparably rare snapshots of black Rosie
the Riveters.

Reblogging because I’ve never seen these before, and I bet a lot of people haven’t.