earlgraytay:

cruellesummer:

also society will never move forward if straight women don’t stop babying men like “he’s a man of course he can’t remember our anniversary” “men simply aren’t able clean the way women do” “i would never expect my boyfriend to know what type of products i like” do you even want a partner or do you want a giant grown up child

Yup, but at the same time- straight women have got to stop treating housekeeping and caregiving as the source of their self-worth and have got to start teaching their sons and husbands how to help.

A lot of straight women pull this malarkey, NOT because they’re kind and being exploited, but because they find most of their self-worth in being A Good Housekeeper and A Good Caregiver. Having family help you clean, to a person like this, is an admission of defeat. They might allow their daughters to help, because daughters need to learn that being A Good Woman means finding all your value in Keeping House- but they’d never let their sons or husbands help, because that means they’re not Good Enough.

This kind of complaining is often performative homosocial bonding that helps cement a cishet woman’s status in her group. By complaining about how useless men are at housekeeping and caregiving- oh, he NEVER remembers birthdays, he ALWAYS makes me do the cleaning, he could NEVER keep track of what products I use- a cishet woman implicitly sets herself up as the opposite. She reinforces to her social group that she is Good At Being A Woman… and that she is Better At Being A Woman than someone whose husband is helpful and kind, because She Does Everything Herself.

And yes, people do try to make being More Exploited Than Thou a virtue. It’s sick and sad. It means women who are being abused can’t get help qnd women who aren’t feel guilty about it. But them’s the breaks.

You can’t just yell “straight men, shape up!” The dysfunction goes much, much deeper than that… and some of it is on cishet women.