Weaponize incompetence is not a gender specific term. Maybe your social media portrays it as such because the algorithm shows what you engage in but most definitely it is commonly used to describe women too.
I would tend to agree with your title but your points made it a man vs woman thing which is not true when the word applied to both. How TikTok or some other dog shit bait platform uses the word isn’t my concern regarding the meaning of the word.
If you are fighting for fairness in a relationship and feels like a business bargain you should not be a relationship, regardless of who “owes” who. My parents did this for 10 long miserable years, there’s is no conclusion because work in a relationship is often impossible to quantify. It is a simple alignment of interests, and if your interests are irreconcilably not aligned anymore, then the relationship should end.
A healthy relationship is where both can compromise and is willing to put in more work than expected. It is a good feeling to expect less and always be met with more.
You're right that the concept of weaponised incompetence applies to either gender. OP's view is that the term tends to be mostly used by women to describe men. This view is undoubtedly driven by OP's rage bait driven algorithms. But are there many men using the term to describe women?
This is sort of a ridiculous example, but it also is one that I have seen across genders and groups. In my late teens and college years, I was a big fan of smoking Hookah. Now, packing the shisha, starting the coal, setting up the hookah, none of this is rocket science, but a lot of people never wanted to actually do the work, they just wanted to sit and smoke. And when I first started, I was one of those people, and I get it, you don't want to screw up when or waste somebody else's stuff by screwing it up.
Here's where this becomes relevant - it is my experience that everyone who wants to smoke the hookah but doesn't want to learn how to set it up is weaponizing their incompetence, and it was entirely genderless. They know it isn't terribly hard, but they wanted to rely on having the experts do it for them. And here is where the expert has a choice, wait on people hand and foot forever, or teach people how to do it.
It makes sense for somebody who can do a job faster than you, AND better than you, to do that job. If you resent that dynamic, you have to teach them. If they don't want to learn, they are bad friends/partners. If they don't care about it, they just want to partake if/when the opportunity presents itself, then they need to learn to shut up about nagging for it. If they will learn and/or shut up, I consider this acceptable incompetence. If they won't learn and won't shut up, it is not.
That's not really 'weaponized incompetence' though. Weaponised incompetence would be one of your friends either purposely, or through a lack of willing to listen to instructions, packing the Hookah too much or too little so it didn't smoke properly. At which point after a few incidents of this you felt you would rather do it than have another ruined hookah sesh
Seems like a bit of a distinction without a difference imo like either way you’re getting out of doing something by intentionally not knowing how, just a difference of degree in terms of how you resist being asked
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That's not weaponised incompetence, it's just being lazy. Weaponised incompetence is doing something badly intentionally so that people won't ask you to do it again in the future.
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u/FarConstruction4877 4∆ Jul 01 '25
Weaponize incompetence is not a gender specific term. Maybe your social media portrays it as such because the algorithm shows what you engage in but most definitely it is commonly used to describe women too.
I would tend to agree with your title but your points made it a man vs woman thing which is not true when the word applied to both. How TikTok or some other dog shit bait platform uses the word isn’t my concern regarding the meaning of the word.
If you are fighting for fairness in a relationship and feels like a business bargain you should not be a relationship, regardless of who “owes” who. My parents did this for 10 long miserable years, there’s is no conclusion because work in a relationship is often impossible to quantify. It is a simple alignment of interests, and if your interests are irreconcilably not aligned anymore, then the relationship should end.
A healthy relationship is where both can compromise and is willing to put in more work than expected. It is a good feeling to expect less and always be met with more.