Stop blaming women for household labor inequality

Women did not create household labor inequality. Stop telling women what to do, and start talking to men.

Here’s a simple truth society doesn’t want women to recognize:

Household and parenting labor inequality in relationships between men and women is the norm because men want it to be that way. When men don’t have to do an equitable share of household labor, they have more time to do what they want, more opportunities at work. They have more life, because time is what makes up a life, and women’s labor gives men more of it.

Your male partner knows things are unequal, no matter how many excuses they make. That’s why he freaks out if you suddenly stop doing dishes or cooking or giving him presents at the holidays or getting up with the baby. He knows this work is necessary. But he wants to pretend he doesn’t see it, so he can devalue your work. Devaluing your work means he can sit back and accept your exhaustion and suffering so he can get more free time.

If your male partner actually believed in equality, you’d have it.

But instead, we have an entire industry devoted to gaslighting victims.

We’ve got Suze Orman telling women to not get angry or blame their partners. Translation: There should never be actual consequences for labor inequality.

Eve Rodsky, the supposed feminist queen of ending household inequality, asserts that most women will be happy if their partners take on 21% of the domestic labor. Translation: Women’s time just doesn’t matter as much, and that’s just fucking fine.

We’ve got whoever this asshole is telling women that their rage about having their lives stolen is about childhood wounds, and summarily declaring that it is “perfectly ok” to have a division of labor in a relationship because apparently every woman in the world has died and made him president of feminism and arbiter of what is and is not sexist.

Dr. Becky has even joined the chorus. Here she is condescendingly gaslighting mothers about Mother’s Day, implying that the reason men fail to treat women with respect on this day is that women just don’t ask for anything. Yeah, okay. (BTW, I love Dr. Becky for all other things and you should definitely follow her in spite of this fuckup).

It seems everyone has learned that writing about labor inequality is a great way to get pageviews. But no one wants to acknowledge that the blame lies squarely and solely with the perpetrators, not the victims.

We tell women that they should relax their standards, as if the problem is silly women who make up pointless work to fill their trivial little heads. The implication is that household labor is not important, and that if someone stops fully parenting or cleaning, nothing bad will happen because that work doesn’t actually matter.

We tell women to just ask for that they want. Yes, because women are too stupid to know that men are not mindreaders. The average woman asks for more household equality nearly 30 times per year. Weird how we don’t have an entire industry devoted to telling more men to listen, isn’t it?

And when all other excuses fail, we tell women that they’re engaged in maternal gatekeeping. Funny how we don’t call it paternal gatekeeping when men prevent women from realizing their full potential because women are too busy acting as live-in servants, isn’t it?

Every excuse for labor inequality treats it as a trivial issue, and as women’s fault.

That’s because as a culture we don’t believe women’s time matters.

This is not an accident. There is a very specific reason that society gaslights women and attempts to convince us it’s all our fault:

It’s that women’s labor is incredibly valuable, and that it benefits men. In a patriarchal society, people will do anything to protect men. The notion of asking men to give anything up, especially for women, is absolutely preposterous.

We recommend to women that they communicate better or thank men more or relax their standards or whatever precisely because these interventions won’t work.

We teach women to blame themselves so they won’t notice who and what are really at fault: sexist men in a sexist society.

There is nothing you did, nothing you could have done, to deserve having your life stolen by a man who takes your time, sleep, leisure, and joy so he can extract free labor.