I am so sick of this idea that men are incompetent.
It’s the basis of every sitcom: oh look, useless man who can’t even put his own kid to sleep. Enter the poor wife who spends all day complaining about how her husband is like an extra kid who just lounges around and doesn’t appreciate her. Throw in a teenage daughter who gets whatever she wants because she’s daddy’s little girl and he’s oblivious. Bonus points for a tween son the father can’t understand.
Or, if you want a twist, husband stays home while the wife works. He can’t change a diaper, has a panic attack when the 12 year old daughter gets her first period, and makes the eight year old son cry at Little League.
Fuck that. What the hell are women winning by insisting men can’t raise families? That we wouldn’t know how to take care of ourselves if it weren’t for women? You’re the ones who keep marrying us, if anything it just shows you have shitty standards.
Men can change diapers. Women can fix cars. Men can buy tampons. Women can buy jock straps. Anything men can do women can do equally well. Anything women can do men can do equally well. Barring certain biological processes that aren’t tied to gender anyway, men and women are equally capable. Insisting that women are so great you can do everything men can do and all of these Super Special Woman Things isn’t feminist, it’s just as gender essentialist as everything that came before it. After all, what use is it in saying you’re better than men if we’re as immature and incapable as these ideas say? Oh great, you beat out the stupid guys. Good for you. Suppose you’ll go challenge a four year old to an oratory contest next.
lol do you think those sitcoms are written by women, produced by women, approved for the network by women, etc.? the perpetuators of this stereotype are men, and they do have something to gain from it. they get an excuse to point to when they want a woman to do that for them - “oh, I would do it, but I just can’t! I don’t know how like women do! why don’t you do it for me, sweetie?”
furthermore, ask any woman and she’ll tell you there is truth behind this stereotype. not because men are naturally incompetent at “women’s work,” but because they don’t have to do those things. women are socialized to essentially take care of men, to be the silent workers behind them that enable them to focus all of their attention on pursuits outside of the home. and so we do, because that kind of socialization can’t be entirely shrugged off in three seconds, even if you know what it is and know that you should. compounding that, men and boys aren’t pressured into doing a lot of the admittedly un-fun activities that make up housework and childcare, so they don’t do it or even bother to learn. someone else has always been doing it for them, and no one has ever looked at their incompetence and told them it makes them less adult or less of a man. in fact, the shameless depiction of men in the media as incompetent buffoons when it comes to housework sometimes even fosters a sense of masculine pride in certain men when they can’t accomplish “women’s work.” they’re just so god damn manly!
and before you come back to this whining that these are unfounded generalization, think a minute. if men are so capable and so great, why do women still have to contend with the second shift? why doesn’t it disappear when, in a str8 relationship, the man is unemployed and the woman is the sole breadwinner? or when the woman is earning more than the man?
why is that women still report in overwhelming numbers that, when it comes time to consider having children in their str8 relationship, their male partners don’t volunteer to be the ones to take less hours or stay at home altogether? in fact, many women report that their husbands, pretending to be egalitarian, do little more than give them “permission” to leave their jobs, under the guise of “leaving it up to them.”
if men are competent (and yes, part of competence is just doing it, not just being able to), why aren’t they proving it?
and finally, this post of yours is painfully evident of some mixed-up priorities on your behalf. you’re worried about how this hurts men? this doesn’t hurt them, except in the sense that everyone is harmed by rigid gender roles. this harms women - we have to pick up the slack for the socially-approved laziness and incompetence of the men in our lives. we have statistically significantly less leisure time; our earning potentials are lower; we have higher rates of anxiety and depression. and you don’t think that might have something to do with being expected to “have it all”? women don’t want to “[insist] that women are so great [they] can do everything men can do and all of these Super Special Woman Things.” patriarchy does; it’s its way of bastardizing feminist progress in order to continue to trap women in an over-worked, under-appreciated prison of ridiculous expectations.
and if some of us like to complain about how the men in our lives or men in general are willingly and deliberately lazy and incompetent when it comes to housework and childcare, leave us alone, dude. we are doing this as a coping mechanism, because we have to deal with the consequences of this stereotype/archetype/whatever, not you. and it’s exhausting and frustrating to have to constantly try to force men to do something around the house, only to see they did a shitty job because they didn’t feel like putting in the effort or no one ever taught them or they were resentful of being made to do it, so then you’re left wondering if maybe you should just cave to centuries of pressure and do it yourself next time. so excuse me for sometimes coping by going “lol men suck at life, those manbabies.”
reblogging for perfect commentary
(Source: ndelphinus)
