Is This the Real Reason the Patriarchy Exists? Men May Have to Grow Up

Repopulating America may be in trouble if we can't locate the adults

Photo by Chris Lynch on Unsplash

Anyone else lining up to marry a man who can’t hold a broom?

Dear Reader: cursing ahead. I was annoyed at this.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the breaking point was. It hadn’t been that long that the beloved of my life had moved into my basement. The burden on me had tripled.

The general condition of my once-pristine house had deteriorated. As a military vet, everything in my house has its place, and I keep a clean home.

I had a fully grown man and an aging dog in the house. That, and working eighty hours a week AND keeping up a heavy workout schedule.

Suddenly I was picking up dog shit full time. Not my dog. Not my job. Suddenly it WAS my job, as the neighbors periodically complained, rightfully, about the smell. The entire basement was a blast zone.

This was a man in his fifties who had been living alone for many years. He knew how to do laundry, cook for himself, clean house and walk the damned dog. And pick up after the damned dog.

Now that he was living with me, guess who took on the additional chore of dog shit pickup, as well as general cleanup?

Not what I’d signed up for. I can’t cook worth a damn, so at least that was out of the question. Now I was living with Dead Pool on 24-hour a day loop upstairs, piles of bulldog shit in my back yard, and a petulant child in the house.

Some time later after he moved out I cleaned the bathroom that he’d used. There was a post-it on the back of the door that said “pick up dog shit.” That’s as far as it ever got.

After he’d moved out in a hurry, I found a very expensive suit, a nice coat and the gorgeous, high-end leather aviator jacket I’d given him for Christmas still in his closet.

I burned them.

Five years after I moved out of state, he still wants back in my life. I seriously doubt it’s me he wants. I suspect he wants free services. He’s nearly sixty, never married. That’s a growing community men who can hardly get laid, much less get married.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

As I get ready to head to a conference this morning I stumbled on a story that inspired me to take another side step from my primary topics. This article about “weaponized incompetence” brought me up short.

Weaponized incompetence.

Read it. It’s an eye-opener.

It made me wonder if much of the intense effort to push back all the gains made by women, especially Black women, isn’t a plot by a certain contingent of men to do anything possible to avoid having to grow the fuck up.

As in: do your own chores, fold your own laundry, cook your own meals, make a list and purchase groceries, etc. The inability of such certain men to actually grow beyond puberty is astounding.

You’ve got a wife who’s a PhD, she’s got a full work load, she’s given you two kids, she makes four times what you do, works twice the hours, and you STILL expect her to scrub the toilets, do all the shopping, wipe noses, calm the baby at night.

Jerk. Asshole. LOSER.

And you wonder why she’s divorcing you.

From the article above, these two paragraphs caught my eye:

Data shows the average woman is outpacing the average man. As single women continue to gain power and prominence in society — earning more bachelor's degrees, buying more homes, dominating healthy sectors of the workforce, and even living longer than their married counterparts — pushback has manifested in the form of "trad wives" and "manosphere" influencers, most of whom label themselves as anti-feminists and boast about their return to "traditional" gender roles.

This kind of content romanticizes and fortifies the conservative ideals that a woman's domain is the home, while men are responsible for bringing home the bacon. Poll after poll shows that Gen Z men are particularly receptive to these ideals, while women of the same age are increasingly resistant, overwhelmingly expressing support for female leaders in politics, preference for female bosses in the workplace, and interest in advancing social causes. As the ideological gap widens between men and women, expectations for the division of relationship admin fall further out of alignment. (author bolded)

Young men who find the “trad wife” bullshit attractive are going to have one hell of a hard time finding and keeping a partner, at least if they expect smart, competent, able women who bring in at least half or more of the bacon.

These women aren’t in the market for more lard.

It strikes me, at this advanced age of 72, that after an entire lifetime of having men make inane assumptions about my abilities and try to make the argument about female incompetence that it’s just one more perfect example of projection.

Those men largely didn’t join the Army, win medals, skydive, scuba dive, raft, kayak, ride horses all over the world, climb Kilimanjaro or Everest Base Camp or Mt. Kenya or any of the other things I’ve done, still do, mostly starting at a time when those men could barely heft their lard away from the larder.

Of course I’m incompetent. I’m female. Don’t get me started when you start adding skin color to the equation.

Men who show incredible competence when it comes to fantasy football suddenly regress to thumb-sucking when it comes to basic household chores. The resentment towards being asked in the first place is classic.

To my mind, that’s what informs the utter disregard and disgust expressed when women rightfully point out that such activity is hard damned work.

And worth payment.

To that please see this article which notes that such work is worth, wait for it….$3.8 trillion.

Screw you, baby men.

Which of course is why the Far Right would love to bring slavery back, after all. Anything to avoid the real work of running a household and bringing up children.

Royalty has slaves.

We are not now and have never been an egalitarian society. We envy the rich, we deeply envy the titled rich, and we desperately want the privileges which come with real royalty.

Like owning people who do the (extremely valuable and essential) shit work in life.

Some of this is on mothers. If you’re a mother, please consider:

Women who bring the baby boys up like privileged princes teach them to continue to expect such treatment.

The men and women who bring their boys up to know how to run a household are the real royalty.

In this regard my folks rocked. My big brother and I traded off weeks: one of us had KP or household chores while the other had farm duty.

Farm duty was tossing out the hay, sweeping the garage, packing heavy egg cartons, shoveling chicken shit, mowing the lawn and lots of other hard, dirty labor. Backbreaking, character-building, muscle-pumping labor in the Central Florida sun. I loved it.

The household, of course, was making beds, cleaning out the dishwasher when we had one, sweeping, vacuuming, washing the jalousie windows, cleaning screens, everything household. That was also hard, dirty labor.

We got paid for both. Equal work, equal salaries.

That was in the sixties and seventies when such things were radical. All credit to my folks for that.

This of course set me up for disappointment when such childhood training met real life in my relationships. It’s probably why I’ve been single but for very brief moments.

I never did meet anyone who was equal to the task of equal responsibility. There was always something, be it dog shit or empty toilet paper rolls or dirty dishes or forgotten groceries or, well…name the chore.

As the article points out, as Gen Z men are increasingly lured to the idea of the girl who will do her own job to pay the bills, then all the housework, then all the work of bringing up bab(ies), while also remaining slim, gorgeous, gracious, perfectly-coiffed and with a 22-inch waist, and grateful for her lot in life, well honey, there are going to likely be a lot more incels in the future.

Most of us aren’t having it. Nor should we have ever put up with this shit.

I can’t recall when the word “adulting” wormed its way into the vernacular. When I read the above article that’s what came up.

Real adults do all aspects of life. All of them. All aspects of life are important, no matter how menial.

The world is full of baby men who can’t be bothered to scrub the shit out of their own tighty-whiteys. Frankly, more of us partners can’t be bothered to baby them any more, either. No wonder Melania is nowhere to be found when it comes to Diaper Donny’s changing times.

I may be wrong; I often am. But I have to wonder if the rush to push women back into the kitchen is because that particular cohort simply cannot be bothered to grow the fuck up.

Real men - and real women- do the real work of life. But that’s just me. And just saying, if you are well off enough to be able to afford household help, pay them what it’s worth. Adults do that, too.

This is what baby men do:

They offer the ridiculous bonus of five grand to women to have more babies. White babies, kindly, let’s be clear. Somehow we’re missing the overwhelming response to this idiot offer. Five grand?

Too many women already have to work multiple jobs to survive today’s economy. Add kids and a husband (who is effectively another child), five grand is a joke.

Boys, might want to learn how to push a damned broom.

Chores, which have to be done no matter what, when done together with a sense of purpose and humor, can be fun instead of a reason for gender wars.

Adults find ways to make work into play. That’s why it’s called adulting. But that’s just me.

I’m gonna go play.

Photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash

Thanks for reading. I hope you got a laugh out of this if you’re old enough to have had chores, had the chore of being a partner, and had the double chore of being partnered with someone too lazy to do their chores. You get it.

Please consider

Shari Dunn

PS If you really want to be entertained, read the comments. This hit not only a responsive chord, but also some excellent men showed up with their stories, and so did some assholes. Of course they did. If this article hadn’t hit some hard truths nobody would have cared. Oh, and those guys who reposted it for mockery? THANK YOU for the visibility. Helps me pay the light bills.