AI is making it easier for men to lie about having different brains. Don't believe them.
Men and women are not different species and do not have different types of brains. But men will happily admit to inferior brains if it means they don't have to do the dishes.
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Misogynist men are desperate to get out of any labor they don’t want to do. Their desperation is so great that they’ll happily tell you they are inferior to women if it allows them to continue to dominate us.
This has been the message of 100 years of gender essentialist science, and now it’s getting a major push from the AI slop that fills social media.
Only one of two things can be true:
Men are uniquely incapable of doing the basic tasks relationships tend to require: parenting, pet care, tending to the home, self-care, hygiene, talking about emotions, not melting into an emotional puddle and then raging, etc.
Men are perfectly capable of the above tasks, and choose not to do them.
For decades, men have been trying to convince women that they’re just uniquely incapable. In Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, the writer defends his extreme postpartum abuse of his wife by claiming that women are more emotional than men. So somehow, his emotional and aggressive outbursts are logical responses to her unreasonable emotions.
In Red Pill circles, men claim to naturally be protectors and providers. Therefore their abuse and violence against women is natural, and they can’t be expected to “provide” unless a woman is totally compliant and subservient.
Modern pseudo spiritual movements prattle on about “masculine” and “feminine” energy while being unable to clearly define either, but remaining absolutely insistent that women must remain “in their feminine,” lest they cause men’s dicks to fall off by having a job, a personality, or human needs.
This is nothing new.
They tell us they can’t multi-task.
They can’t communicate.
They can’t remember to do things.
They can’t figure out how to solve problems.
They can’t relate to children.
They can’t see mess.
Men want us to believe that they have inferior brains. They also want us to believe that these inferior brains somehow entitle them to more resources, more free time, and more power.
This seems illogical, but patriarchy’s logic is clear: Its goal is to gain access to more resources and opportunities for men, no matter the cost to women. Patriarchy and the men who uphold it don’t care how they achieve this end.
That’s why they’ll use any argument at all, including those that don’t make sense:
I can’t see mess but I also can’t stop staring at stranger’s breasts because I’m a visual creature!
Men can’t feel loved without sex, which is why you need to give them sex, but also why you should expect them to treat you badly after you give them sex!
Men can’t multi-task, know what needs to be done, or solve complex emotional problems, which is why they are uniquely suited to lead people!
Men are naturally dominant, which is why they will shrivel up and die if they have to do the dishes.
Men love having sex, which is why they would rather go without sex than learn how to please their partners.
Men need a woman to help them with most basic life tasks, but they are also uniquely suited for leadership roles!
The goal here isn’t logical consistency, and it’s certainly not truth. The goal is more power.
These arguments often work because women, too, were socialized in patriarchy. We’re keen to believe an explanation that doesn’t mean our partners just don’t love us. And sometimes, we’re eager to accept an explanation that elevates women as innately good. Here are some examples of essentialist arguments I’ve seen in feminist circles lately:
Men’s libido is consistent and constant, while women’s libido is seasonal and contextual.
Women are intended to live together, not with men, because men are naturally unsuited for community building.
Women are innately called to parenting. It’s unnatural to parent with men, or to try to do the things men do.
This garbage is everywhere, and it is likely influencing your expectations even if you don’t notice. We are constantly and chronically exposed to completely false stereotypes. No one has the energy to seek a counter-example every time there is an exposure, which means these stereotypes subtly shift our perceptions of ourselves and others.
And now, men are using AI to bolster this nonsense. Here’s an example I found today, but it’s virtually identical to thousands of other AI-generated posts defending the status quo:
The article is about why men just can’t “see” laundry. I want to really dig into what’s wrong with this post, and why it’s potentially so effective:
It does what most AI posts do. It repeats the same thing over and over, but in different ways using different, but emotionally charged and highly metaphorical, language. This creates the illusion that there’s lots of evidence for the obviously false central thesis (men literally cannot see laundry). In reality, there are just a lot of words.
This pile of words is crucial to the project of convincing you: It hypnotizes you, repeating the same core theme over and over again, making it seem more believable.
It makes vague references to science by asserting that this is “evolutionarily” true, and that this is “biology.” There’s no actual science here, though. Just a just-so story that, again, is obviously false. Men can indeed see laundry.
And then, the merciful end to this pile of shit: the narrator sympathizes with women, and then shifts to the “we” pronoun, pretending this is a collective problem rather than a problem women face alone. Then he tells us that it’s nothing personal, and it’s not an attack. It’s just a “hardware limitation.”
He just can’t do it, you see. Just accept that. Sure, the narrator says not to “let him off the hook,” and in asserting this makes it seem like he agrees with women. But the advice is precisely to let him off the hook.
The entire purpose of this post is summed up at its end: Men can’t do it. Everything else is filler designed to manufacture consent.
Perhaps women should start taking these messages at face value, rather than interpreting them the way patriarchy wants us to.
Instead of agreeing that, sure, he just can’t do it and therefore he should maintain all the power and money while she does all the work, we could take a different tack:
Ok, you’re right. Men have inferior brains. They can’t do the things women do. And that is why they are unworthy of relationships with us. After all, they’re an entirely different species and therefore can’t possibly meet our expectations.
Why I have no interest in ever sharing a household with a man ever again. I have a (very) few good male friends who are capable of these things and we do mutual aid/information swapping in areas where our skills don’t overlap, which is great. If men are going to plead this level of incompetence en masse then they are basically just building a strong case that they should not be in charge of anything important ever.
So men tell us their brains are inferior to women’s when it comes to the domestic sphere. But then they tell us they have superior brains in the paid work sphere? We need to point out this hypocrisy at every opportunity.
My late husband always said he “didn’t see mess” and his ability to do just one thing was astonishing. He would go and make a cup tea for us both. And that was what he did - much like your example of the glass of water. Kettle filled, kettle boiled, water in teapot, milk in mugs, pour tea. If I made the tea, I’d be putting any crockery from the draining board away, wiping down the kitchen surfaces, looking to see if we had enough bread for our sons’ packed lunches the next day….
Sometimes I would ask him to do a simple job when he was off work and I wasn’t. I’d get home and he wouldn’t have done it. The amount of times I would say “One job! I asked you to do one job and you didn’t do it”. “Oh, I forgot”, he would reply. It really pains me to think that this was deliberate. He would, if he were still here, probably insist that it wasn’t. But he was a mental health nurse. He ran a whole hospital at one point. He could have done it if he really wanted to. He insisted I could have it all. What he really meant was I could do it all.
And I don’t miss him any less. It was just the way things were.