Why your husband gets angry every time you talk about household labor equality
Anger is a tool of control, and a way of reinforcing patriarchal norms.
I’m off for the holiday, and publishing this piece a day early. Here’s one of the very first pieces I ever published to Substack. I’ve updated it and edited it considerably, and I hope you like it!
“I’m hearing that I’ve made you angry. Is that right?”
It’s the way a lot of exchanges with a certain kind of troll on social media begin for me. This sort of communication is not what we typically think of as trolling, but feminist writers often experience it—a sort of endless emoting and empathizing that can feel like gaslighting.
It went like this: a woman in an inequitable relationship took issue with my assertion that male laziness is deliberate. She spent days—literally days—arguing with me about why women shouldn’t leave these male partners, and how we should be “teaching women better communication skills.” Yes. If only women communicated better, I’m sure everything would be fine.
It was clear to me that this poor woman had spent years honing a woefully ineffective form of communication so that she could better gentle parent her husband, and she was now using that communication with me.
I wonder how many hours of her one and only life she has lost trying to communicate her way into something better. I wonder how much grief over the life that could have been she has had to swallow.
This is what we do to women when we tell them they must not hold men accountable.
Patriarchy depends on women who are complicit in their own oppression—and on the endless blaming of women for their own suffering. Most women don’t want to oppress other women or themselves, but they do want to believe that they can control their own lives. And that means they want to believe they can negotiate their way out of patriarchy with the right communication, being the right sort of woman, using the right buzzwords.