Unless you’ve been living under a rock and asked a genie to cast a denial spell upon you, you know that women do significantly more childrearing work, household labor, mental labor, and planning than their male partners. Even when women work outside of the home and men don’t, even when a woman is disabled and her partner isn’t, even when she earns more, or earns it all, or is more educated. No matter what marital arrangement women find themselves in, they’re stuck doing more labor. They get less free time, less sleep, and of course less gratitude. Because we’ve collectively decided that this is just women’s lot in life. We’re meant to be servants and workhorses. Our needs are just less important than men’s.
And what does society offer us in response to this?
Mostly jokes. Lol so funny that he can’t figure out how to feed the kids! Lol so funny to contemplate murdering him when you’re up 15 times a night feeding the baby while he sleeps!
We think it’s funny because, collectively, we think it doesn’t matter.
We think it’s funny because we think we can’t possibly dare ask men to give anything up. Better for women to give up every spare moment of free time and joy and self-care and sleep in the service of men getting and doing whatever they damn well please.
In the rare event we do take the concern seriously, we tell women they just need to communicate better. As if the problem is that women have to use the right combination of words to convince men that children need food and women deserve sleep.
Come the fuck on.
This isn’t about communication. No one has to communicate with women to remind them to take care of the house.
This is about oppressing women. Household chore inequality is a key driver of women’s equality. It props up virtually every form of oppression, from the wage gap to domestic violence.
It works like this:
We spend a lifetime telling women that their needs are not important, and that they should be grateful to have a man. So they enter relationships willing to do more and demand less. And that’s exactly what they do.
The result? In return for their labor, they get an ungrateful, entitled partner who maintains the status quo with anger. If she asks for something different, he gets angry. If she threatens to leave, he may become violent. Anger is the cornerstone upon which household labor is built. It’s the hidden threat lurking in every corner of the typical heterosexual marriage. And it’s also the reason so many women are getting raped, hit, and killed by their partners.
When women leave these marriages, their partners may refuse to pay child support, spend years fighting them in the legal system, make false accusations of abuse, or abuse their children.
No wonder so many end up trapped in these horrible marriages.
And what is the effect?
When women have no free time, they can’t gain new skills.
When they have to go home to an angry partner, they can’t give their all at work. They might not even be able to work at all.
They can’t take care of themselves or their health.
They can’t enjoy the fun aspects of motherhood.
They can’t realize their full potential.
Men are stealing their opportunities from women and calling it love.
While society laughs, calls it a joke, or gaslights women about how they need to communicate better.
Don’t buy this bullshit.
It’s no longer legal to pay women less, or to deliberately oppress them. We can’t forbid them from working. Husbands are no longer able to rape their wives.
So instead, household labor inequality steps in to fill the gap, to give men more, to take from women.
It’s not an accident.
Your partner knows exactly what he is doing. That’s why he’s so resistant to giving it up.
