One that always annoyed me is when it is around the holidays, when stores advertise gifts for men. They always assume a guy is into toilet humor, beer humor, assuming they’re a lumberjack who needs to survive out in the wilderness, are into bbq-ing all of the time so gotta have those available all year around for some reason.
Even when I used to have identified myself as a guy, I never once fit into any of those traits. Just because guys grow beards, doesn’t always mean they’re chopping wood somewhere and always wearing plaid.
Only because the far right wing conservative shitlords like Shapiro,
Kirk, Chowderhead, and Walsh et. al. have been brainwashing guys into taking pride in having no idea how to take care of themselves. They literally take pride in not knowing how to do laundry, cook, or many other domestic tasks…That definitely amplifies the problem, but this isn’t a new problem.
Here’s a study by Pew Research that shows this (data collected from 2016 to 2021).
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/#time-allocation-across-marriage-types
Here’s a paper that attempts to estimate how much time women have historically spent on “home production” (unpaid work that benefits the household, like cleaning, caretaking, etc). The estimates are based on data from 1900 to the 2000s.
On page 27, Table 6A shows employed, married women haven’t seen a significant reduction in domestic work.
Table 7 shows data for men, but it’s not clear which are married (or sharing household tasks with a woman in some other way). That table shows employed men are taking on much more domestic work than a hundred years ago, but single employed women spend 3 hours more a week while married employed women spent 10+ hours more per week.
https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Home_Production_published.pdf
The thing i don’t get is why do women put up with it?
I think some of it boils down to different standards, generally the neater/cleaner person will expect the other person to change their behaviour. When I hear people moaning about significant others doing nothing I do think that it takes both people to allow it. Most people will live together for a while before marriage/kids so you have no excuse to complain if you know what they’re like and still marry etc
Many reasons.
Some people are taught gender essentialism from a young age. Women are like this, men are like that, and there’s no way to change it. It’s just nature (or God) that women clean and take care of the house, and men go out and hunt.
Many boys are socialized from a young age not to cook or clean. Many girls are taught that that’s what they do. Have you seen this in your life? A family gathering, where the boys run off to play and the women and girls stick around to clean up? Children learn from what they see and what they’re taught.
It’s only recently that women had any shot at financial independence. Women weren’t guaranteed the right to open a bank account until 1974, in the US. Sexual discrimination is a problem with finding a career to pay one’s own way. From that, one can infer that some women “put up with” shitty men, because the alternative is destitution.
Some women may believe that changing it is just too much work- it’s not an immutable nor innate property of men that they don’t cook or clean or know anything about the children, but changing that would be an overwhelming amount of work. If the man’s not interested in changing anything, it’s even more daunting, and may damage the relationship.
Also some men get violent if they feel threatened, insulted, or hungry.
These are just some things I’ve read or women have talked to me about. I’m a dude doing the best I can. Talk to the women in your life (but don’t make them teach you a whole seminar for free, heh.)
That’s what I mean though. Why stay or care about damaging the relationship? Sunk cost fallacy. Some times a hard choice needs to be made. This choice should be made before children/mortgages etc. There’s the old stereotype of men enter a relationship thinking the women wont change and women enter a relationship hoping the man will.
Well, sunk cost fallacy is extremely common.
But also people don’t have perfect knowledge. And people change, and change at different rates.
Imagine a couple that meets when they’re both pretty immature in their 20s. They have fun and fall in love. Then they buy a home together, and the woman slowly realizes she’s matured into an adult role while the husband is still basically the 20 year old bro. Would you casually suggest burning the whole thing down? Finding a new relationship in your mid 30s, especially if you want kids, when there’s no guarantee the new person will be any better, is daunting.
What if they’re not financially independent?
It’s easy to sit back and tell people how to behave in the abstract, but real situations aren’t always so obvious.
When women don’t put up with it en masse you get massive waves of men threatening women. That’s a big part of the whole gen Z gender war thing.
Threaten to do what?
If women don’t put up with it en masse then there is fuck all men can do about it. Mass action is how things change
Mass violence. The tate bs comes from this. The incel mass shootings come from this. Hell the polytechnique shooting was in conversation with this. Men who can’t get laid because women decide men aren’t worth the effort sometimes loudly talk online about how they’re considering rape about it. And that’s not talking about the pushes towards misogynistic politicians, like how young American men who can’t get laid are increasingly opposing women’s suffrage.
For a good example of all of it look at the epidemic of gendered violence in South Korea.
Im not American so i simply cant relate to the shooting aspect of it although from ive seen are mostly politcal/racial rather than misogynistic. I dont have a great deal of knowledge of it though so happy to admit i could be wrong with it. There are a lot of garbage men out there, no doubt about it. There are also a lot of lost men that fall for the tate type crap. What i really dont get are the conservative women who support it all. Why?
This has drifted a bit from the original subject and i dont want to end up inadvertantly linking lack of housework to domestic violence! My point is that I think far too many people tolerate but complain about a situation without doing anything to fix it. Obv when it comes to violence it needs ti be viewed through a different lense