Men are just big children.

The other day at work, a woman said “I have three children. And a husband, so I guess there and a half children.”

Don’t usually see that stereotype in the wild.

I don’t want people to give up joy and fun things, but the idea that men are just irresponsible and their wife has to also be their responsible mother is sad.

Unfortunately that’s a stereotype that holds up way more often than it should. Women often end up taking on a huge domestic load and/or caretaker load in a household, even if both she and her husband are working outside the home.

There are couples that never fall into this or that actively try to balance domestic and caretaking activities. One set of tools I know about is “Fair Play”.

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…

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).

pewresearch.org/…/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marri…

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.

econweb.ucsd.edu/…/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

The thing i don’t get is why do women put up with it?

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.)

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

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.