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Rush Limbo posted:This was a while back, but one of the literal problems with this approach, as articulated by those articles, is that the perception of what is fair is vastly different between the man and the woman in the cohabiting situation. Men overestimate a lot the amount of work they do, or the difficulty of the work they do, so when asked to come up with what is "fair", will inevitably decide to do less work, but do work that they value as more important, and this is "fair". It's not. I'd like to think this whole topic is a case of people talking past one another. Better communication isn't a magic bullet, but incidents of bad or dishonest communication are no reason to just shrug and blame some formless spectre of toxic masculinity. Giving "gutter-cleaning" and "weekly vacuuming" equal weighting is stupid in its own right; "Let's split housework equally" "Yeah sounds good" is a non-conversation that resolves nothing - of course the arrangement went sour, it didn't exist in the first place!
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Dec 29, 2016 13:31
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Agreed, and a good solution to the warped and stunted male understanding of housework is, at the start of cohabiting, to have a direct and comprehensive conversation about household responsibilities, ideally with some kind of rota or chore list or something that people can point to when they see their partner is shirking.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:02
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FactsAreUseless posted:You can't just do it at the start. It has to be an ongoing conversation. Otherwise you're just asking her to be able to lay out what needs to be done ahead of time, and do the work of organizing it. It's an everyday problem. So you have to tackle it every day. I don't think anyone was proposing it be written in blood Tesseraction posted:The article/blogpost Tiny Bront linked before even specified that by creating such a rota you're asking the woman to be your mother, once again demanding a burden on her time and effort to spare the man one. While I agree there needs to be learned responsibility, it should not fall down to individual women to do this, and for the adults already showing learned helplessness it's not the place to start - if you're in your late teens or older, I'm afraid the burden is on the dude to learn of their own accord. Beginning with young kids and seeing that they are not reinforced with gender roles, in housework and other areas, is where effort is better served. Maybe I missed it but I understood the blogpost to be talking about men using the excuse of "just tell me what to do and I'll do it" - demanding weekly nagging to do basic chores. The point of a written rota is that one partner doesn't have to tell the other what to do, because it's all already written down and agreed to by both partners. In essence, the man has already told himself what to do and has no cause to whine about not knowing or not remembering. I think one of the reasons people are suggesting this honest convo + rota strategy is that it brings all this baggage out into the light. The man can't say "I don't know how to do the ironing" if he sat down and wrote "I do ironing on Week B". He can't say "I don't need to vacuum this week" if it's written down for him to do. He can't fob it off as "women's work" if he's already agreed to it. And if he does, you've got something concrete to point at and dump him over if necessary. BarbarianElephant posted:I don't think you understand that "chore rota" is a document of fiction in most households that argue about housework. The shirking partner will be happy to sign up to a fair rota, but then when it comes to their task, they are "tired" or "had a bad day at work" or "just got a new game" or "went to the pub with friends." Then the put-upon partner gets the joy of nagging - Yes, I suppose if you don't communicate honestly then a strategy of honest communication won't work! This is a separate problem to cultural male incompetence at managing a household and specific to this dysfunctional relationship.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:29
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BarbarianElephant posted:So, how could the put-upon partner communicate honestly in this scenario? She/he already drew up a rota and did his/her part of it. The shirking partner agrees to do his/her share but does not. The shirking partner is the one not communicating honestly - agreeing to a division of chores and then not doing it. If this partner is not able to commit to a basic arrangement that's been explicitly spelled out for them in writing, then maybe they are not capable of an equal relationship? Regardless, it has nothing to do with the efficacy of honest communication.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:41
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Separation is always a viable end-state.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:51
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I can't believe a lovely relationship is poo poo and awful.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:58
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*a selfish idiot ignores his partner and his responsibilities to goof off on leisure pursuits* The real problem is housework rotas
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Dec 29, 2016 16:01
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Tesseraction posted:I think he's just more surprised by the puppy-training strategy. Rubbing his nose in it might actually be better than a housework rota after all
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Dec 29, 2016 16:11
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:You are assuming that if a problem exist it must be the woman's fault for not solving the problem well enough. If a man isn't doing his fair share it's the woman's fault for not communicating well. Why is it not the man's fault for not asking what chores need to be done and checking that he's doing a fair amount of them? It is? People in general are bad at communication and need strategies to help them, especially when it comes to something that's unpleasant or boring like housework. quote:So it's the woman's fault for choosing a bad partner. I didn't say this?
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Dec 29, 2016 17:13
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:If you were the communication expert you think you are you wouldn't need me to repeat myself so often, would you. If a man is supposed to be doing something and isn't, the problem isn't communication. It is bullshit sexism making you assume that women didn't communicate the problem, that they don't do that constantly, with varying strategies. It is bullshit sexism making you think that a man not doing his share of the work can blame his SO for not asking him clearly enough. Adults don't need to be asked to do their responsibilities, they just do them. Wives and girlfriends are not their SO's mommies. Tiny Brontosaurus, as far as I remember this is the first time we've ever spoken. Where is this coming from? I agree that sexist ideology is at fault here, and men should know better and they should do more. To borrow your phrase, what are we supposed to do with this, though? I think concrete communication strategies like, yes, rotas and structured relationship talks are useful and I don't think people do employ them enough - in part because communication skills are loaded with (often sexist) baggage. I could be wrong about this and they might be more common and less effective than I think. If not, though, then I don't think we should pooh-pooh them on the basis that the problem shouldn't exist in the first place. Isn't that what we're trying to solve? "Better communication" certainly isn't the only thing we should do, of course - what other strategies alongside self-reflection would you suggest men can do to address this? Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Saying a behavior that most men do is something that makes men unfit for relationships is saying women can't be in relationships with men. So, hey, look at this neat trick! If a woman is in a relationship with a man who acts like that, it's her fault for putting up with it! Because men can't learn and change. They're much too smart for that. So the specific post there was made in response to a hypothetical scenario in which a man does not respect or care enough about his partner to do his assigned chores and is generally acting in bad faith (i.e. agreeing to a system and then ignoring it). Matthew Fray's wife made the same decision. I don't think that's unreasonable.
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Dec 29, 2016 18:27
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In fairnessGlyphGryph posted:It does make me feel bad for the girls though, who I suspect were largely socialized to believe that pain is inherently bad or some sort of weird stuff like that. isn't quite the same as "it's okay to get a bit hurt in pursuit of competitive physical activity" or "sometimes you have to do something physically unpleasant to get something you want".
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Jan 2, 2017 18:56
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:32 |
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GlyphGryph, I think there's a couple of problems here: I don't think you're correct that anyone is socialised to think pain is inherently bad, because pain is inherently bad - it feels bad, it hurts, that's the point of pain. If anything it's the other way around - people are socialised to think pain is good or acceptable, because it's the cost of something worthwhile, or the physical emanation of spiritual wrongs, or proves that you are alive or whatever. There's nothing necessarily wrong with these ideas but they're not as rare as you seem to think. Also, I don't think girls are taught to especially avoid or dislike pain more than boys. There are lots of kinds of pain only women go through on a regular basis (e.g. body hair removal) and they seem to put up with it pretty okay! I think it's more likely girls engage in less rough play than boys because girls are taught not to be physical creatures, which probably has its roots in a whole mess of grown-up misogyny that's not relevant to how children play. When you suggest that people should be more accepting of rough play and the pain involved in that, I think this gets people's hackles up because you are prescribing pain for others in order to improve them (which as mentioned sounds very similar to "bullying is actually good" nonsense). I'm sure it's all very well and good for two close friends to physically hurt one another in a bit of horseplay and thereby become more sensitive to other people's pain tolerances, but you must know that's not going to describe all or even most incidents of rough play between children. Children are already bad at understanding and judging consent, so I personally was alarmed to see you say that we should encourage less communication and less explicit consent between children playing because it might "ruin the game" (jesus christ). This doesn't seem like a good way to teach children to understand boundaries! More importantly, it doesn't sound like a good way to protect vulnerable or otherwise marginalised children from harm.
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Jan 2, 2017 19:47
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