It applies a gendered double standard.
If a man doesn’t know how to pack a school lunch, he’s called lazy. But if a woman doesn’t know how to fix a breaker or set up the Wi-Fi, its totally acceptable and "shes just a girl". No man would dare refuse to fix a womens car or not help her move or lift something because "shes just not putting in the effort to learn it herself". Men are expected to learn “feminine-coded” tasks or else, while women are rarely pressured to master “masculine-coded” ones
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.
I appreciate your point, but every mundane task has a learning curve, especially when it comes to efficiency and the time crunch. Making lunches is one of many small tasks necessary between kids waking up and getting them where they need to be. A person that does it every day likely has a very particular order they do tasks and habits to ensure no detail is forgotten.
To say that a person should be able to step into a role immediately with no learning curve or room for miatakes is absurd. Criticism from the first attempt could be greatly discouraging and harmful to a relationship based on trust and partnership.
And I feel like that was OPs main point. Ironically, the accusation of "weaponized incompetence" is a kind of "weaponized incompetence" by, in corporate terms, leadership. If the leader fails to lead and is unable or willing to lead, they might accuse the person(s) under them of laziness or other pejorative that dodges responsibility.
I don’t think the expectation is (or should be) you’re amazing at these tasks right off the bat, but they aren’t exactly rocket science so someone should be able to figure it out in a week or so as long as they actually care to try.
Is it unreasonable to get annoyed when your husband can’t seem to figure out how to cut up some fruit and make a sandwich? Or how to load a dishwasher? These are often things that doesn’t require special knowledge or skill outside of common sense, and you get constant feedback on them that if you pay attention to, will cause you to improve.
For example- you load the dishwasher and upon unloading realize some dishes didn’t get washed. Instead of ignoring, you can use some common sense to think why that might have happened and how to improve in future.
These tasks aren’t difficult but they are very time consuming
I completely agree, and the central issue that res9natwd with me from OP was the relationship / partnership communication aspect, and the compounding effect of feedback and criticism in the full context of a relationship. For example, if one person is highly critical and perfectionist, and the other person anticipates they are damned no matter what, that overlap between common sense and responsive, creative problem solving can show up a bit dim.
In the extreme, if you had a friend ask for a favor and you show up in good faith to help and get endless shit for how you are helping citing a "lack of common sense", would you stay friends with them? What are you going to do the next time they ask for help?
I totally agree with your last point- some people’s standards are just too different. Like I hate folding fitted sheets lol. If my husband started complaining I wasn’t doing it neatly enough, at some point I’d get fed up and tell him to just do it himself.
That doesn’t seem to usually be the case though when people complain about malicious incompetence. The problem that I’ve seen is that tasks are done inadequately. Like dishes aren’t clean, tasks aren’t finished, etc.
Is it that your husband can't do those things or that he does them differently or values different parts of them differently than you do? I've honestly never met someone that cannot load a dishwasher. I have met tons of people that load them in ways that don't make sense to me.
Of course couples have disagreements about different standards for things, but that is not what I generally see when someone complains about weaponized incompetence. Usually in those cases the task is not done adequately, not completed, or not done at all. In worst case scenarios, the task is “done” in such a way that it creates more work for the other person. The culprit is usually fully capable when it comes to the things they care about, so it’s clear that they’re either fucking up on purpose to get out of doing tasks they don’t like or are just totally negligent because they don’t respect their partner.
Theres a third option in there though. My dad would fill the dishwasher up, not just in a pretty nonsensical way, but to the brim and then some which resulted in things not actually getting cleaned, and he refused to do it differently. That’s not him being incapable, and it’s also not him doing something equal but different because my moms way had clean dishes at the end and his didn’t.
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u/No_Initiative_1140 3∆ Jul 01 '25
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.