So angry at all these threads on useless and selfish men

[Winterday1991]

Off the back of the thread where the H refuses to care for his sick child so the OP can get some much needed rest as he is on annual leave from work 😡. I am seriously fed up of reading threads like this, why are so many men so selfish?

Why is it always women who have to do the lions share of caring, pulling themselves in all direction whilst their male counterparts glide through life uninterrupted? Why is it always women who carry the mental load for family life and the men just show up. Why is always women responsible for maintaining the household?

Even in the 21st century, why do so many men get such a bloody easy ride, whilst often their poor wives/partners are running around like headless chickens keeping on top of everything.

@Mark19735

Externalising it and laying the blame for everything at the foot of men is spectacularly missing this point.

I can empathise with that. I do understand the sense of exhaustion and confusion that men must feel and their sense of never being able to do anything right.

But I don’t think women usually are blaming individual men for everything. I don’t. I blame patriarchy. But women do want men who they are intimately involved with to try to put themselves in their shoes and see what it feels like and to understand the effect it has on the household and the relationship when this sort of work is constantly downplayed and undervalued.

You actually haven't made any points at all.

The whole op is subjective nonsense-coulda-shoulda-woulda.
Scapegoating.

@PrincessConstance

I didn't write the op

Expecting 2 partners to share the load their joint life creates equally is not scapegoating

It's just common sense

Best thing for a man is to seperate and they have to do it all 50/50. Pickups, bedtimes, housework. It makes men of them and makes them appreciate what we do.

Not saying all men!

Still doesn’t always work, DD’s dad has only bought 2 school jumpers in 11 years and they were the wrong colour. (Obviously there are 100s of other examples but that’s one of the ones that makes me laugh rather than pull my hair out)

@QueefQueen80s

Excelt they don't and most often won't do 50/50

If they haven't don't it pre split they won't do it post

Most women don't even want 50/50 anyway

You can quantify and manage the physical tasks.
How do you quantify the strategy and thought processes?
You cannot, it's not possible.

Should Dp insist on me vacuuming the carpet twice a day because it's important to him?
This idea was initially called unpaid labour, but now that is being resolved, women have moved to the invisible mental load.

What does your dh hoovering twice a day have to do with anything?

How has unpaid labour been resolved?

Yes! I waited 6 years before having a baby with my partner so I could be sure he was a good un.I also had numerous conversations pre baby about dividing housework and childcare. 15 months after baby is born he does his share because he has to as it was all planned out before baby, but he resents me so much for it that he now actually hates me and we are going to have to separate if he doesn't stop being nasty to me ( couples therapy fingers crossed) . It is a shock how deeply entrenched patriarchy is.

Every man is responsible for upholding the patriarchy, even the so called ‘decent’ ones. You cannot start separating them into categories of innocent and problematic when their entire identity is tied to the very system that is oppressing us. You wouldn’t tell a white person that just because they are homeless and destitute that they are no longer a threat to black people.

Regarding the different presence of the sexes in various occupations - one thing that drives this is different subject choices at school and therefore different degree choices. The rates at which girls take e.g. Physics and Economics are noticeably higher at girls' schools than at mixed schools (research by Institute of Physics - I have a link if anyone wants it).

There is also significant evidence that women entering professions in large numbers drives down wages (teaching, medicine, nursing). As a poster memorably said earlier in the thread "low value people do low value work". Of course women are over-represented in public sector occupations too where wages are held down by the monopsony (single dominant) employer.

Interestingly, we do not see these trends to the same extent in other developed countries.

Anecdotally, when you meet or hear from an impressive young female economist, scientist, mathematician, engineer etc they're often not British.

Teaching is not all compatible with family life! So much better to be e g. an accountant...

That is shocking, this country really is an embarrassment to the world.

Dp believes the only real way of making money is by having a business.
Complete autonomy and control. Flexibility for family and relationships.
He doesn't mind my career but feels I'd make more money and be freer with a business.

Most women I know want that and have that, share the load and equal parenting, it works great for us. But thats when the man pulls his finger out and steps up which they have done.

Before that the men know theres a woman round to do it all.

Then once you are married (to a wealthier man) with children the “I didn’t make sense for me to work” argument comes into play and any imperative to work harder and get paid more slowly gets eroded. You lose financial power and then you lose agency over own life.

It’s not a “conspiracy” by the patriarchy. No one is plotting to trap women as a class in an economically weaker situation. But the current social structure massively benefits men at the expense of women. I don’t think anyone is asking men to become radical feminists and seek to overthrow the patriarchy but many women just want acknowledgment from men that we are still operating at a considerable structural disadvantage.

The elephant in the room is the fact that a lot of women don't actually seem to want to push the career once the money going into joint account is 'enough'. Many won't admit this but it's pretty obvious.

@Mark19735
And here I do think there are possibly some evolutionary factors that might explain why men seem to be more able to load-shed and say "this is good enough for today". Their assessments tend to be based more on their capacity to physically continue to do that work - whereas a woman making that assessment is perhaps more likely to be influenced by how they think others ("the village") might feel about them - a worry that doesn't take their capacity to do more work into account.

I broadly agree, except I don't think women these days are that bothered about what "the village" or other people think - they are concerned about the effect on the child if stuff isn't done.
For example, the poster whose DH bought the wrong colour school jumper, and generally didn't do his share of buying uniform - he didn't care about getting it right because he didn't care about the effect on his child.

Likewise a man might think 'this is good enough for today', leaving the children with no clean shirts, or no packed lunch, or leaving the baby to crawl on a dirty floor, with only two nappies in the house. The woman is more likely to keep going at these tasks until late at night, feeling ever more resentful that the man has stopped and put his feet up.

Yes some women make a rod for their own back by being too perfectionist, but equally some men fall woefully short of acceptable standards of childcare, including all the planning and anticipating involved.

@PrincessConstance
You can quantify and manage the physical tasks.
How do you quantify the strategy and thought processes?
You cannot, it's not possible.

You can't easily keep tally of how much work each has done - it is much easier and more straightforward to count how much 'time off' or relaxation each person has. e.g. you will sit down for half an hour when you get in from work, and I will sit down for half an hour later whilst you clean the kitchen. I will have four hours on Saturday morning, and you will have four hours on Sunday afternoon.

If someone continues to take on mental load during their time-off, such as thinking about shopping lists whilst at the gym, that is something only that individual can address.

A great many women who enter the teaching profession, for example, do so explicitly in the belief that it is more compatible with their ideal of family life

It's not sexist if the choice is genuinely a free one

Where the sexism or patriarchy comes in is that the 'free' choice to become a teacher was made with childcare and school holidays in mind - because the woman had taken on the idea, instilled by society, that the childcare would be her problem to solve.
How many men select their profession based on considerations of childcare, before they even have any children?

It is also a symptom of patriarchy that childcare is an issue - if we had a more equal society then childcare would be far cheaper, far more available, higher-status as a career choice, and far more state subsidised to achieve this.

Anecdotally, when you meet or hear from an impressive young female economist, scientist, mathematician, engineer etc they're often not British.

Definitely not. It's true that other countries have better attitudes towards engineering but there's one fundamental error in your post.

Engineering isn't popular in the UK full stop. More men do it but the UK has such an issue with engineers that it's lowly paid, even for men. There are quite a lot of female British engineers. Lots more elsewhere in the world but we have many talented British women, who are just as badly paid as the men they work with (equally badly I should say).

Sadly in other parts of the world, engineers (in certain industries) are viewed with the same esteem as doctors (quite rightly) but not in the UK where the title has been bastardised and minimised to mean nothing at all.

My commute means my working day is at least 20 hrs per week longer than Dp's. Although he says that's my choice, which is true.
Although I lie in Saturday and Sunday.
He always rises at 6 pm regardless.
Anyhow, I think we have it just right.

Fgs 6 am.

Where the sexism or patriarchy comes in is that the 'free' choice to become a teacher was made with childcare and school holidays in mind - because the woman had taken on the idea, instilled by society, that the childcare would be her problem to solve.
How many men select their profession based on considerations of childcare, before they even have any children?

Exactly this.

You see similar issues in other industries as well. In a lot of really highly paid jobs (banking, consulting, accounting), it’s very difficult to rise to senior positions without a lot of out of hours networking which is always in child unfriendly hours and usually at very short notice. Managing this requires you to have either a hands on spouse or a nanny.

The culture in these industries is designed for and around men and their needs and takes as a given that there is always someone at home looking after children. In fact sometimes it feels as if it is consciously designed to exclude women with children. In my early years as a working single mother I was frequently taken to task my bosses for not being able to do more “spontaneous networking”. But it was literally impossible for me to find childcare at an hour’s notice.

Breakfast meetings, for example. It’s more or less impossible to do a breakfast meeting if you have school age children unless you have a nanny or a spouse who is happy to pick up some drop offs. I can’t for the life of me see why it’s necessary to arrange a business meeting that’s slap bang in the middle of the school commute. But no man ever has to second guess taking a job because there might be a need for early morning meetings.

My commute means my working day is at least 20 hrs per week longer than Dp's. Although he says that's my choice, which is true.
Although I lie in Saturday and Sunday.
He always rises at 6 pm regardless.
Anyhow, I think we have it just right.

All perfectly manageable any easy because as you stated yourself earlier in the thread you are not a parent. And your DP only has his children to stay with him 50% of the time. So how is this remotely relevant?

We don't have the issues others have despite managing a business and a 50-70 hrs a week career role because.
Household tasks/parenting are not full-time roles (Daily living is innate to being an independent adult).
We're organized.
Conscientious.
Delegate.
Don't overschedule (This is the key).
Allow for variable attitudes surrounding what is important to each other and timescales.

Then finally mindset, neither of us views the world of being a fully functioning adult via the prism of feminism with its wacky academic theories of unpaid labour or mental load.