'But I don't care about that task!' The weapons sexist men use

Men undermine the value of the work their partners do as a way of getting out of household labor.

“But I don’t care if the bed is made!”

“It doesn’t matter to me if we get the kids Christmas gifts. They have too much stuff already!”

“Not every vacation has to be perfect.”

“We just have different standards!”

Sound familiar?

In the popular imagination, women arbitrarily create household labor because our silly little woman-minds can’t think of anything else to do. After all, none of us work, and raising kids is easy, and being a woman is notoriously simple, so we fixate on all the little household tasks that no one else cares about. Then we have the gall to demand that our spouses participate in those tasks, too.

So men find a loophole: I don’t care about this, so I shouldn’t have to do it! And the list of things they allegedly don’t care about grows ever longer, enabling their free time to increase.

It’s not just men who weaponize this rejoinder, though. Friends, family, and even therapists may insist that if a man doesn’t care about something, he doesn’t have to do it. Even Fair Play, the supposed Bible of household equity, asserts that if only one partner cares about a particular task, only that partner should be responsible for it. It’s a collective gaslighting that makes women feel crazy, like perhaps their standards are too high or they’re too controlling.

Neither is true. This is a weapon sexist men use to escape responsibility, and to extract more free labor.

I cover these weapons in an ongoing series you can find here. I cover the ways society gaslights women into accepting inequity here.