Thank you - I've been waiting for an analysis that captures the flaws in the Fair Play system. Laura Danger and Crystal Britt (whom I have great respect for) have alluded to this in their podcast Time to Lean but I don't know that they've ever quite landed on it (they are also Fair Play facilitators - but they have also crucially identified that Fair Play can only work in partnerships where both parties value equity and egalitarianism. This, though, has often left me wondering, what percentage of partnerships does that actually include? My non-researched hunch is, not many).
Lundy Bancroft in his seminal work on abusive men (Why Does He Do That?) identifies that the difference between angry men and abusive men has nothing to do with how they feel and everything to do with how they think - what beliefs were instilled in them in childhood. Men who abuse partners or children at some level believe it is okay to be violent. I suspect the "inability" for patriarchal partners to "see" the "invisible" labour women are performing in the home has everything to do with an underlying belief that this is acceptable to them based on what they were raised to believe - even if they may at the same time proclaim to be feminists. Due to the patriarchal culture we live in, I'm not sure how any people socialized as men escape this kind of thinking and value system - perhaps they do not, and only get to escape it through critical self reflection and active unlearning.
Thanks - I just went back and read it (I'm new here). So good. Yeah I'm wondering if there is a strategy at work by Rodsky and others that seems premised on a notion that we need to approach men in such a gentle and affirming way in order to get them onside or something?? It just feels like we've all agreed that we need to coax men into change with kid gloves; with lots of validation and pats on the back for incremental changes, so as not to rock the boat or wound their egos, lest they abandon ship altogether and move allegiances to the Jordan Peterson camp (which, I guess is a real threat, sigh). I also think the apolitical approach of Fair Play probably aligns nicely with its celebrity and corporate sponsors - but I digress.
Anyway. Your analysis is spot on - where are the measurable outcomes of Fair Play? And who is Fair Play really for if it does not confront the root of the issue which is the indoctrination of patriarchal values?
Research the founder Eve Rodesky & who her husband is. I’m having a hard time believing their story to this path is accurate. They’re millionaires, so it’s unlikely that she didn’t have someone paid and outsourced, taking out the trash for them everyday. I especially doubt it was her husband when she decided it needed to be done daily (story in the documentary).
Her husband is somehow invested in Reese Witherspoons book club too. I’m guessing Reese is one of the main promoters of Fair Play. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on any of this and just being jaded.
This is going to be like metoo. Nothing will change until enough women tell their stories over and over and again and we decide as a culture that these patriarchal marriages are abusive to women and women deserve better.
And it's particularly validating about how he doesn't really care about the well-being of everyone in the house. That's part of what holds up the foundation of these chore-based prisons. That the kids need to be cared for and ultimately, he doesn't care. Though he would get the vapors if he was directly accused of that (even though it's true).
An anecdote that underscores this, and while the details might vary for other women, I'm sure they can all relate:
We had just returned from a trip visiting my parents (which of course he resented). When we returned home, we had zero food in the house of course and needed groceries. So I said that I would run to the store and get some. Eager to punish me for "making" him visit my parents and also for not contributing a paycheck (I had to quit my job a few months earlier because they were abusive and also doing illegal things), he took the debit and the credit card away from me and told me that he didn't know how I would buy food because *he* didn't have any money.
He didn't say, "let's look at our funds and come up with a plan for groceries."
He said, "I don't know how you are going to buy anything without money." He had a very cruel smile on his face. His kids were hungry, we had no food in the house, and he literally didn't care. He just didn't care.
So I scrambled to solve this problem on my own. My dad started a savings account for our kids a few years earlier, and put my name on it, and the account existed in a credit union in another state. My husband knew that my dad had started this account, but we didn't really talk about it because to me, that was money for the kids for when they get older, and I didn't want to touch it. But it was the only money I had access to that he didn't control, so I went to my and my husband's credit union (which just conveniently happens to have a branch inside of a grocery store), and transferred some money from my kids' savings account that my dad had given them and put enough into my checking account that I could buy groceries for them. So I came home with groceries and made food for all of us and not a moment too soon because the kids had been starving (husband was playing video games while I was doing all of this).
When he saw me come home with groceries, he was FURIOUS. He wasn't appreciative, he was just furious and raging. Later when the kids had gone to bed, I made the mistake of going into another room by myself (I make it a point to never be by myself because it's easier for him to verbally attack me when the kids aren't around). He slammed into the room and told me he was furious with me because I had been "holding out on him" by having a "secret stash" of money that he was also entitled to, and I was "keeping it to myself" rather than giving it over to him.
It was scary. But I explained to him where the money came from, and that he knew about that account, and it wasn't mine or some "secret stash". It was money that my dad had given to our kids over the years.
And then he threatened me with an implied threat about what would happen if I didn't provide some steady stream of money to him. Obviously, he meant to imply that my kids would go hungry or something because he is not above doing that to them as a weapon against me. He doesn't care about their welfare, and he knows that I will always do whatever I am physically able to do in order to take care of them. So he doesn't have to care about their well being, and he doesn't. It's more important to him to use the fact that I care about them being able to eat against me. To the point where he was physically enraged that I had managed to feed our children while he tried to withold food from them to teach me a lesson.
That's how important it is to these men to hold on to their precious patriarchal tyranny.
Safe physically, but I quite quit until the kids are old enough to age out of custody. Because what’s worse than being in the same house is the idea that they’d be with him without me there to protect them from this behavior (which is the situation my sister is in). I protect them on a daily basis from his berating and withholding, etc. Plus, I can’t afford a place right now, and he can’t afford to subsidize two places.
I was pretty angry the first time I read Fair Play, so your post is validating, as well as those who have also commented here. Fair Play is so incredibly flawed - and it starts with assuming that you are dealing with a partner who is emotionally mature, dedicated to self-growth, and is self-aware.
Could we work on making men who maintain household labor inequality not only unfuckable, but also *unhireable/unpromotable*?
I understand that this comes with a lot of collateral damage, since this would financially impact the families of abusive men, but it seems like an important part of changing the value proposition of stealing your partner's labor.
I know that for myself and many of my peers, if there is a male coworker/peer that we know is not pulling his weight with his children and/or his partner, or has a general history of pulling patriarchal BS, we do not nominate him for awards, we do not greenlight his job application, we do not write recommendations when he applies for other jobs, etc. The flip side: men who are good parents, partners, and allies get the most generous peer reviews possible. I don't see this as petty-- men who are dead weight at home are usually dead weight at work whenever they can be. However, I don't know that many men are really aware of this, and it's too risky for us to be transparent about what we're doing.
Absolutely. The number of men who claim to need to leave work early to pick up a sick kid or take a kid to a dentist appt is far higher than those who actually do. It’s funny how I rarely see fathers at the doctor appt at 2:30pm (I work in healthcare and when I take my own kids to their appts, there’s not a father in sight).
There's a Chinese expression that my mom uses: he's got a biscuit hanging on his neck （大饼挂脖子）. It's an idiom based on a story about a mother with a lazy child. The mother has to be away for some reason, so she bakes a giant biscuit and hangs it on her child's neck so that the child will have food while she is gone. The child is so lazy they starve to death because they can't be bothered to eat the biscuit that is literally hanging around their neck.
Sooo, funny that you mention Fair Play, because I came across it while I was desperately trying to figure out some way to make the workload more equal, to make my relationship better. I was thinking about divorce on a daily basis then. It popped up as a recommendation in one of my mom groups. So then I spend the time to look it up on Amazon, read the reviews, and I buy the card deck. I'm all excited about it, and I tell my husband about it. "Sounds good," he says. The card deck arrives.
We never do it.
It comes up in another fight. I ask him, why didn't we do the Fair Play thing? "Oh, but that's *your* thing." See, I dropped the ball because I didn't physically sit his little butt down and take the cards out and schedule this activity for him when we got it.
(And I am kind of ashamed to admit... we still haven't. It's been like 9 months. And I feel the longer it drags out, the less I am able to bring it up again.)
So, yes, men are definitely idiot children with biscuits hanging from their necks.
That’s what I felt like when I filed for divorce and he was so devastated by the news that he had to take off work...just like he was so devastated by the HIS decision to move out of the family home because (1) my teen refused to come home as long as dad was in the house and (2) my teen did this after my STBX blamed my teen for our argument. I literally told my STBX a year and half earlier that I (& the children) were moving to be near my mother and he could stay or go but I was leaving & (2) said obviously if I’m to this point, we need couples therapy. Then when I put down the offer on the home he asked where we stood. I said “we obviously need marital therapy”. And I brought it up again 6 months later (after having moved) and even gave him the business card of someone and said that he could call them or find someone else. He never called. He asked to do marital therapy when I told him a divorce attorney would be contacting him to serve divorce papers.
I recently asked him if he told one his best friends who I’ve known well too about the divorce . (He lived with us briefly. He’s probably one of the few that has seen our marriage more up close behind closed doors. I helped get him a job where I worked). My STBX said “he said yeah that happens” and I said “what does that mean?” He said well 50% of marriages result in divorce as if this is just the way it is and nothing can be done about it. 🤦🏻♀️
Would love a follow-up on what does work, because "nothing works" is the starting point in coming to grips with this problem & finding that none of the "solutions" work just keeps us in a cycle of frustration.
Sorry I'm a glass half full person. So I'm interpreting this as 'doing a better job vetting potential romantic interests' is the only thing that works? Because the end goal for me is a household where I can actually rely on another person & "ending the relationship" works at getting rid of the problem entirely, but not solving the inequity.
But ending the relationship makes sense, because ofc we can't change other people. Just wish I knew how to catch the signs earlier I guess. Maybe only men with single mothers & lots of sisters. This makes me horrified for people who have children under these inequitable conditions, bc even after you split, the inequities likely persist in coparenting. Feels like jumping from one burning building into another!
Thank you - I've been waiting for an analysis that captures the flaws in the Fair Play system. Laura Danger and Crystal Britt (whom I have great respect for) have alluded to this in their podcast Time to Lean but I don't know that they've ever quite landed on it (they are also Fair Play facilitators - but they have also crucially identified that Fair Play can only work in partnerships where both parties value equity and egalitarianism. This, though, has often left me wondering, what percentage of partnerships does that actually include? My non-researched hunch is, not many).
Lundy Bancroft in his seminal work on abusive men (Why Does He Do That?) identifies that the difference between angry men and abusive men has nothing to do with how they feel and everything to do with how they think - what beliefs were instilled in them in childhood. Men who abuse partners or children at some level believe it is okay to be violent. I suspect the "inability" for patriarchal partners to "see" the "invisible" labour women are performing in the home has everything to do with an underlying belief that this is acceptable to them based on what they were raised to believe - even if they may at the same time proclaim to be feminists. Due to the patriarchal culture we live in, I'm not sure how any people socialized as men escape this kind of thinking and value system - perhaps they do not, and only get to escape it through critical self reflection and active unlearning.
I actually covered the flaws in Fair Play in more detail here: https://zawn.substack.com/p/why-the-fair-play-book-doesnt-fix
Ugh, I'm so tired of it all.
Thanks - I just went back and read it (I'm new here). So good. Yeah I'm wondering if there is a strategy at work by Rodsky and others that seems premised on a notion that we need to approach men in such a gentle and affirming way in order to get them onside or something?? It just feels like we've all agreed that we need to coax men into change with kid gloves; with lots of validation and pats on the back for incremental changes, so as not to rock the boat or wound their egos, lest they abandon ship altogether and move allegiances to the Jordan Peterson camp (which, I guess is a real threat, sigh). I also think the apolitical approach of Fair Play probably aligns nicely with its celebrity and corporate sponsors - but I digress.
Anyway. Your analysis is spot on - where are the measurable outcomes of Fair Play? And who is Fair Play really for if it does not confront the root of the issue which is the indoctrination of patriarchal values?
Thanks for the great work you're doing!
Research the founder Eve Rodesky & who her husband is. I’m having a hard time believing their story to this path is accurate. They’re millionaires, so it’s unlikely that she didn’t have someone paid and outsourced, taking out the trash for them everyday. I especially doubt it was her husband when she decided it needed to be done daily (story in the documentary).
Her husband is somehow invested in Reese Witherspoons book club too. I’m guessing Reese is one of the main promoters of Fair Play. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on any of this and just being jaded.
Thank you!
This is going to be like metoo. Nothing will change until enough women tell their stories over and over and again and we decide as a culture that these patriarchal marriages are abusive to women and women deserve better.
And it's particularly validating about how he doesn't really care about the well-being of everyone in the house. That's part of what holds up the foundation of these chore-based prisons. That the kids need to be cared for and ultimately, he doesn't care. Though he would get the vapors if he was directly accused of that (even though it's true).
An anecdote that underscores this, and while the details might vary for other women, I'm sure they can all relate:
We had just returned from a trip visiting my parents (which of course he resented). When we returned home, we had zero food in the house of course and needed groceries. So I said that I would run to the store and get some. Eager to punish me for "making" him visit my parents and also for not contributing a paycheck (I had to quit my job a few months earlier because they were abusive and also doing illegal things), he took the debit and the credit card away from me and told me that he didn't know how I would buy food because *he* didn't have any money.
He didn't say, "let's look at our funds and come up with a plan for groceries."
He said, "I don't know how you are going to buy anything without money." He had a very cruel smile on his face. His kids were hungry, we had no food in the house, and he literally didn't care. He just didn't care.
So I scrambled to solve this problem on my own. My dad started a savings account for our kids a few years earlier, and put my name on it, and the account existed in a credit union in another state. My husband knew that my dad had started this account, but we didn't really talk about it because to me, that was money for the kids for when they get older, and I didn't want to touch it. But it was the only money I had access to that he didn't control, so I went to my and my husband's credit union (which just conveniently happens to have a branch inside of a grocery store), and transferred some money from my kids' savings account that my dad had given them and put enough into my checking account that I could buy groceries for them. So I came home with groceries and made food for all of us and not a moment too soon because the kids had been starving (husband was playing video games while I was doing all of this).
When he saw me come home with groceries, he was FURIOUS. He wasn't appreciative, he was just furious and raging. Later when the kids had gone to bed, I made the mistake of going into another room by myself (I make it a point to never be by myself because it's easier for him to verbally attack me when the kids aren't around). He slammed into the room and told me he was furious with me because I had been "holding out on him" by having a "secret stash" of money that he was also entitled to, and I was "keeping it to myself" rather than giving it over to him.
It was scary. But I explained to him where the money came from, and that he knew about that account, and it wasn't mine or some "secret stash". It was money that my dad had given to our kids over the years.
And then he threatened me with an implied threat about what would happen if I didn't provide some steady stream of money to him. Obviously, he meant to imply that my kids would go hungry or something because he is not above doing that to them as a weapon against me. He doesn't care about their welfare, and he knows that I will always do whatever I am physically able to do in order to take care of them. So he doesn't have to care about their well being, and he doesn't. It's more important to him to use the fact that I care about them being able to eat against me. To the point where he was physically enraged that I had managed to feed our children while he tried to withold food from them to teach me a lesson.
That's how important it is to these men to hold on to their precious patriarchal tyranny.
What a horror story. I'm so sorry.
Are you safe? Have you and the kids gotten out of that abusive situation?
Safe physically, but I quite quit until the kids are old enough to age out of custody. Because what’s worse than being in the same house is the idea that they’d be with him without me there to protect them from this behavior (which is the situation my sister is in). I protect them on a daily basis from his berating and withholding, etc. Plus, I can’t afford a place right now, and he can’t afford to subsidize two places.
That’s horrible. It seems like your dad may have had an intuition about him
I was pretty angry the first time I read Fair Play, so your post is validating, as well as those who have also commented here. Fair Play is so incredibly flawed - and it starts with assuming that you are dealing with a partner who is emotionally mature, dedicated to self-growth, and is self-aware.
Could we work on making men who maintain household labor inequality not only unfuckable, but also *unhireable/unpromotable*?
I understand that this comes with a lot of collateral damage, since this would financially impact the families of abusive men, but it seems like an important part of changing the value proposition of stealing your partner's labor.
I know that for myself and many of my peers, if there is a male coworker/peer that we know is not pulling his weight with his children and/or his partner, or has a general history of pulling patriarchal BS, we do not nominate him for awards, we do not greenlight his job application, we do not write recommendations when he applies for other jobs, etc. The flip side: men who are good parents, partners, and allies get the most generous peer reviews possible. I don't see this as petty-- men who are dead weight at home are usually dead weight at work whenever they can be. However, I don't know that many men are really aware of this, and it's too risky for us to be transparent about what we're doing.
Absolutely. The number of men who claim to need to leave work early to pick up a sick kid or take a kid to a dentist appt is far higher than those who actually do. It’s funny how I rarely see fathers at the doctor appt at 2:30pm (I work in healthcare and when I take my own kids to their appts, there’s not a father in sight).
There's a Chinese expression that my mom uses: he's got a biscuit hanging on his neck （大饼挂脖子）. It's an idiom based on a story about a mother with a lazy child. The mother has to be away for some reason, so she bakes a giant biscuit and hangs it on her child's neck so that the child will have food while she is gone. The child is so lazy they starve to death because they can't be bothered to eat the biscuit that is literally hanging around their neck.
Sooo, funny that you mention Fair Play, because I came across it while I was desperately trying to figure out some way to make the workload more equal, to make my relationship better. I was thinking about divorce on a daily basis then. It popped up as a recommendation in one of my mom groups. So then I spend the time to look it up on Amazon, read the reviews, and I buy the card deck. I'm all excited about it, and I tell my husband about it. "Sounds good," he says. The card deck arrives.
We never do it.
It comes up in another fight. I ask him, why didn't we do the Fair Play thing? "Oh, but that's *your* thing." See, I dropped the ball because I didn't physically sit his little butt down and take the cards out and schedule this activity for him when we got it.
(And I am kind of ashamed to admit... we still haven't. It's been like 9 months. And I feel the longer it drags out, the less I am able to bring it up again.)
So, yes, men are definitely idiot children with biscuits hanging from their necks.
That’s what I felt like when I filed for divorce and he was so devastated by the news that he had to take off work...just like he was so devastated by the HIS decision to move out of the family home because (1) my teen refused to come home as long as dad was in the house and (2) my teen did this after my STBX blamed my teen for our argument. I literally told my STBX a year and half earlier that I (& the children) were moving to be near my mother and he could stay or go but I was leaving & (2) said obviously if I’m to this point, we need couples therapy. Then when I put down the offer on the home he asked where we stood. I said “we obviously need marital therapy”. And I brought it up again 6 months later (after having moved) and even gave him the business card of someone and said that he could call them or find someone else. He never called. He asked to do marital therapy when I told him a divorce attorney would be contacting him to serve divorce papers.
I recently asked him if he told one his best friends who I’ve known well too about the divorce . (He lived with us briefly. He’s probably one of the few that has seen our marriage more up close behind closed doors. I helped get him a job where I worked). My STBX said “he said yeah that happens” and I said “what does that mean?” He said well 50% of marriages result in divorce as if this is just the way it is and nothing can be done about it. 🤦🏻♀️
Would love a follow-up on what does work, because "nothing works" is the starting point in coming to grips with this problem & finding that none of the "solutions" work just keeps us in a cycle of frustration.
Ending the relationship is the only thing that works. Just like with other forms of abuse
Sorry I'm a glass half full person. So I'm interpreting this as 'doing a better job vetting potential romantic interests' is the only thing that works? Because the end goal for me is a household where I can actually rely on another person & "ending the relationship" works at getting rid of the problem entirely, but not solving the inequity.
But ending the relationship makes sense, because ofc we can't change other people. Just wish I knew how to catch the signs earlier I guess. Maybe only men with single mothers & lots of sisters. This makes me horrified for people who have children under these inequitable conditions, bc even after you split, the inequities likely persist in coparenting. Feels like jumping from one burning building into another!